Psychologist DANIEL KAHNEMAN and political scientist JONANTHAN RENSHON deliver some deflating news from the human-cognition front on 13 October 2009, in the Foreign Policy essay ‘Why Hawks Win’. In policy circles the term hawk denotes a pundit for whom coercion is the standard prescription for dispute resolution, whereas a dove is one who tends to favour diplomatic solutions. It appears policymakers are naturally disposed to trust the counsel of their hawkish advisors more than that of the doves. The source of the hawkish advantage is cognitive bias: all of the systematic errors in human judgement and decision-making, Kahneman and Renshon submit, make hostilities more likely than concessions. The ‘fundamental attribution error’, for instance, one of the most empirically supported findings in psychological research, is the tendency to attribute our own wrongdoing to situational constraints, while viewing analogous actions by adversaries as the product of inherent evil. This bias comes with a corollary tendency to regard our own (noble) intentions as indisputably transparent to outsiders, including our adversaries, while denying the latter the benefit of the doubt. Another set of biases that appears to make the path to escalation inexorable has to do with what the authors call ‘excessive optimism’. Not only do we tend to overrate our own skills and abilities, we also suffer from the ‘illusion of control’, an excessive confidence in our ability to orchestrate events, which makes us discount the impact of randomness and outside factors. This is a core component of the pre-conflict ebullience in which leaders are especially receptive to promises of a swift and relatively costless victory. Conversely, when assessing the conduct of our adversaries, pessimism seems to be the reigning sentiment. ‘Reactive devaluation’ is the tendency to scoff at something simply because an adversary has offered it. These asymmetrical judgement patterns have a predictable effect on pre-conflict negotiations. And, once war is underway, the deep ‘aversion to cutting one’s losses’ — the tendency to favour a potential rather than a certain loss, even if the former far outweighs the latter — can prolong a conflict well beyond the point when it is reasonable to seek a settlement. Kahneman and Renshon are quick to point out that hawks are not necessarily wrong, and that history supplies several examples of dove blunders — Hitler-appeasement being perhaps the most embarrassing one. Nor is it irrational for us to adopt unusually stringent evidentiary standards when evaluating the intentions of an adversary. Their point, rather, is that during strategy debates our default cognitive settings grant hawks a head start, while yoking doves to a ‘burden of persuasion’.
Comments
No posts