Traditional political science models lean heavily on rational choice. We assume actors weigh costs and benefits, calculate utility, and act accordingly. But real human behavior—especially in high-stakes arenas like warfare and polarized policymaking—often defies pure economic logic. People die for abstract ideas. Nations stumble into ruin over pride and identity.
Marika Landau-Wells noticed this mismatch early. Before arriving as an MIT doctoral candidate in security studies, she spent time in the private sector at Disney and Bain, watching expensive decisions get made. Basic cognitive heuristics and biases explained those choices far better than clean mathematical models did — and as we explore in Why Cognitive Biases Are Evolutionary Tools, Not Flaws, those shortcuts are not simple defects in reasoning. Later, during her master's at the London School of Economics, she questioned rationalist arguments about civil wars. If economic models struggled to predict corporate behavior, they stood zero chance against the raw emotional stakes of armed conflict. She decided to educate herself on the cognitive side, diving into psychology and neuroscience to find tools missing from traditional political science toolkits.
The Blind Spot in Political Disagreement
Political conflict rarely stems from people being outright malicious. More often, it stems from a profound cognitive limitation: we suck at imagining why opponents believe what they do.
Landau-Wells focuses squarely on this intersection of cognition and conflict. When two sides clash over policy, whether the debate involves nuclear arsenals or large-scale immigration, they usually talk right past each other. Without mental models of the opposing perspective, policy deadlocks drag on indefinitely, and diplomatic failures escalate into real violence. Rationalist frameworks treat these deadlocks as mere informational gaps that can be solved with extra data. In reality, they are structural limitations of human perspective-taking. Until we grasp how the brain processes opposing political philosophies, political science will remain blind to the actual mechanisms driving polarization.
Threat Perception and Political Behavior
Threat perception drives an enormous share of political behavior. When the human brain senses danger, ancient neural circuitry kicks in, prioritizing immediate group survival over nuanced policy analysis.
Take the fierce debates surrounding border walls and immigration in the United States and Europe. It is easy, and intellectually lazy, to write off people who support physical barriers as simply less informed or less intelligent. Landau-Wells argues against that dismissive shortcut. Instead, she looks at how threat-and-response logic operates in the human mind. People perceive threats to their safety, culture, and economic stability, and their political preferences flow downstream from those visceral reactions. Understanding the mechanics of threat perception doesn't mean endorsing every policy outcome, but it explains why simplistic mockery never convinces anyone to change their stance.
Social Contaminants and Hierarchical Thinking
Humans are hierarchical animals. That baseline social reality isn't going away anytime soon. But how we treat individuals stationed at the bottom of those perceived hierarchies is entirely a matter of social agreement and cultural framing.
Language matters immensely here. When political rhetoric labels specific groups as "vermin" or "social contaminants," it triggers contaminant heuristics that implicitly justify brutal, exclusionary policies, a dynamic examined in detail in The Label That Ends the Conversation: AI Impact on Human Psychology and the Weaponization of Labels. If societies can develop greater self-awareness around how these mental shortcuts operate, we might avoid the catastrophic consequences that follow. Dehumanization is a cognitive tool as much as a moral failure, and recognizing its mechanics is the first step toward dismantling the normalization of cruelty in public life.
Marrying fMRI Studies with Political Science
Most political scientists stick to familiar tools: national archives, public opinion surveys, and historical case studies. Landau-Wells refuses to stay in that methodological box. Her doctoral research combines national archives, survey experiments, public health data, and fMRI brain-imaging studies.
That breadth reflects her interdisciplinary training and her active involvement with the Neuroscience and Social Conflict Initiative, a collaborative effort with Beyond Conflict, a Boston-based non-governmental organization dedicated to applying cognitive science to real-world conflict resolution. By examining political preferences through neuroscientific and psychological lenses, she hopes to unpack the hidden machinery behind our most intractable public debates. Her long-term goal includes bringing this cognitive-science-informed point of view to international intervention evaluations for organizations like the World Bank.
Worldbuilding and Policy Assumptions
Beyond her technical research, Landau-Wells spent time taking creative writing courses at MIT, winning a prize from the Atlantic Council for a short story titled "Remote Operations." That background in fantasy worldbuilding, constructing alternative geographies, laws of physics, and histories, shifted how she approaches public policy and teaching.
Students often arrive in classrooms viewing political structures as immutable laws of nature, akin to gravity. Worldbuilding exposes how many supposed constants are merely working assumptions. By teaching students to interrogate their underlying premises, she helps dismantle the rigid certainties that turn ordinary policy disagreements into existential zero-sum games. If we want better outcomes in foreign policy and domestic governance, we have to start by understanding the architecture of our own heads, a task that also benefits from understanding how people actually weigh misinformation and analysis, as covered in Why Analytical Thinking Wins the Misinformation War, and a Two-Question Fix That Works Anywhere.
