Isaac Asimov and Game Theory

One of Isaac Asimov's most well-know set of books is the foundation series which he started writing in the early 1950's, with the books Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.

I finished rereading all three of these recently and I ran across the following scene toward the end of Second Foundation.

Toran Darell and Pelleas Anthor are discussing whether Darell should go to the planet Trantor where his daughter has fled. He decides against going, even though he really wants to because he is worried that by following his first impluses he may be playing into the hands of the Second Foundation, a group of psychologists that are manipulating galactic history.

Darell speaks first in the excerpt below.

"I would rather present them with an improbable reaction. I will stay here, despite the fact that I yearn very desperately to leave. No! Because I yearn very desperately to leave."

The younger man smiled sourly. "You don't know your own mind as well as they might. Suppose that -- knowing you -- they might count on what you think, merely think, is the improbable reaction, simply by knowing in advance what your line of reasoning would be."

"In that case, there is no escape. For if I follow the reasoning you have just outlined and go to Trantor, they may have foreseen that, too. There is an endless cycle of double-double-double-double-crosses. No matter how far I follow that cycle, I can only either go or stay. The intricate act of luring my daughter halfway across the Galaxy cannot be meant to make me stay where I am, since I would most certainly have stayed if they had done nothing. It can only be to make me move, and so I will stay."

pp. 214-215 in the Bantam paperpack edition, November 1991

Asimov published Second Foundation in 1953. John Nash's pioneering work establishing the foundations of game theory was published between 1950 and 1953. Was Asimov aware of Nash's work or did he come up with this all on his own? The premise behind the books is that future history is knowable by predictions from what Asimov calls "psychohistory", a mathematical science that relys on the mass behavior of large groups of people in much the same way that physics relies on the mass behavior of large numbers of fundamental particles. I wonder if Asimov was talking with economists at the time and if he may have been exposed to the relatively new ideas behind game theory. On the other hand, Asimov was a really, really bright fellow and it is not at all unlikely that these are his original ideas. He certainly has the right intuitiuon.