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 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.

Date and venue

July 15, 2026
17:30 CEST
Johannessaal, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
1010 Vienna

More details and program

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