IIASA, the Friends of IIASA, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences will host the inaugural Howard Raiffa Lecture, featuring Avril Haines, President-elect of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former United States Director of National Intelligence. The lecture is part of the launch of the Howard Raiffa Academy, a joint initiative of IIASA and the Friends of IIASA.
In her lecture titled, The Ethics of National Security Decisions: Lessons from the Social Sciences, Haines will examine how insights from decision science and related fields can help strengthen ethics programs in public institutions.
Most institutional ethical frameworks rest on the implicit assumption that officials, when confronted with an ethical choice, will reason their way to the correct answer if they have been adequately trained, clearly instructed, and appropriately incentivized. This rationalist model of moral decision-making is compelling, but it doesn’t take into account substantial research that makes clear such choices are driven at least as much by intuition, social context, and situational pressure as by deliberate reasoning. In fact, research has demonstrated that conscientious individuals are likely to behave in ways that violate their own stated values when placed in institutional structures that normalize or demand such behavior. Despite this, the application of behavioral science to public sector ethics remains limited. Haines will explore how this manifests itself in national security institutions and discuss what it might look like to more effectively integrate insights from various fields into an ethics program design.
About Howard Raiffa and the Academy
Howard Raiffa was one of the world's most influential thinkers in decision science, negotiation analysis, and game theory. He served as IIASA's founding Director from 1972, helping establish the Institute as a unique platform for scientific cooperation across Cold War divides. His experience at IIASA shifted his focus toward applying analytical methods to what he described as "the complex art and science of getting things done in the real world."
The Howard Raiffa Academy, anchored at IIASA, builds on this legacy. Shortly before his death in 2016, Raiffa entrusted his daughter, Judy Raiffa, with creating a program at IIASA that would help maximize the impact of the Institute's work on the world's most pressing challenges. The Academy is the culmination of a decade-long effort by Judy Raiffa and partners at Friends of IIASA to bring that vision to life.
© Avril Haines
About the speaker
Avril Haines is the President-elect of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a job she will be starting in the autumn. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford, a Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Previously, she served as the US Director of National Intelligence, where she led the US Intelligence Community and served as the President's principal intelligence adviser. She has held senior roles across government, including Principal Deputy National Security Advisor, Deputy Director of the CIA, and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council. She holds degrees in physics and law and serves on a number of boards, including the Atlantic Council's International Advisory Board, the Vodafone Foundation, and the Bletchley Park Trust.
Upcoming Events
Cape Town, South Africa
IIASA at the 2026 Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress
Brussels, Belgium
GRANULAR and RUSTIK to Hold Joint Final Conference in Brussels
NOVA School of Business and Economics (Carcavelos Campus, in Lisbon - Portugal)
Circular Economy Modelling Workshop
Dakar, Senegal
Unleashing Africa’s potential: The role of education
Carcavelos – Portugal
World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (WCERE)
University College Dublin (UCD)
Special Issue in Futures and July iEMSs Workshop
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Inaugural Howard Raiffa Lecture: The Ethics of National Security Decisions: Lessons from the Social Sciences
Helsinki, Finland
The transformative power of education
Segovia,Spain
Climate Change and Insurance Workshop 2026 (CCI26)
Barcelona, Spain
OEMC Final Global Workshop 2026
Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Training workshop: Demographic analysis with applications to aging, health, and education
Beijing, China
Overshoot Conference 2026
IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria