Judgment of risk is key to decision-making under uncertainty. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously discovered, humans do so in a distinctive way that departs from mathematical rationalism. Specifically, they demonstrated experimentally that humans accept more risk when they feel themselves at risk of losing something than when they might gain. I report the first tests of Kahneman and Tversky's landmark 'prospect theory' with Large Language Models, including today's state of the art chain-of-thought 'reasoners'. In common with humans, I find that prospect theory often anticipates how these models approach risky decisions across a range of scenarios. I also demonstrate that context is key to explaining much of the variance in risk appetite. The 'frame' through which risk is apprehended appears to be embedded within the language of the scenarios tackled by the models. Specifically, I find that military scenarios generate far larger 'framing effects' than do civilian settings, ceteris paribus. My research suggests, therefore, that language models the world, capturing our human heuristics and biases. But also that these biases are uneven - the idea of a 'frame' is richer than simple gains and losses. Wittgenstein's notion of 'language games' explains the contingent, localised biases activated by these scenarios. Finally, I use my findings to reframe the ongoing debate about reasoning and memorisation in LLMs.

Open-source intelligence provides a stream of unstructured textual data that can inform assessments of territorial control. We present CONTACT, a framework for territorial control prediction using large language models (LLMs) and minimal supervision. We evaluate two approaches: SetFit, an embedding-based few-shot classifier, and a prompt tuning method applied to BLOOMZ-560m, a multilingual generative LLM. Our model is trained on a small hand-labeled dataset of news articles covering ISIS activity in Syria and Iraq, using prompt-conditioned extraction of control-relevant signals such as military operations, casualties, and location references. We show that the BLOOMZ-based model outperforms the SetFit baseline, and that prompt-based supervision improves generalization in low-resource settings. CONTACT demonstrates that LLMs fine-tuned using few-shot methods can reduce annotation burdens and support structured inference from open-ended OSINT streams. Our code is available at https://github.com/PaulKMandal/CONTACT/.

Territorial control is a key aspect shaping the dynamics of civil war. Despite its importance, we lack data on territorial control that are fine-grained enough to account for subnational spatio-temporal variation and that cover a large set of conflicts. To resolve this issue, we propose a theoretical model of the relationship between territorial control and tactical choice in civil war and outline how Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are suitable to capture theoretical intuitions and estimate levels of territorial control. We discuss challenges of using HMMs in this application and mitigation strategies for future work.