7257937 kahneman and renshon why hawks win

8/8/2019 7257937 Kahneman and Renshon Why Hawks Win

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WHYHAWKSWINWhj are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind.

People have dozens of decision-makingbiases,and almost allfavor conflictrather han concession.A look at wh the toughgujs win more than theyshould. I By D a n i e l K a h n e m a n an d J o n a t h a n Renshon

ational leaders get all sorts of advicein times of tension and conflict. Butoften the competing counsel can bebroken down into two basic cate-

gories. On one side are the hawks: They tend tofavor coercive action, are more willing to use mili-tary force, and are more likely to doubt the value ofoffering concessions. When they look at adversariesoverseas, they often see unremittingly hostile regimeswho only understand the language of force. On theother side are the doves, skeptical about the useful-ness of force and more inclined to contemplate polit-ical solutions. Where hawks see little in their adver-saries but hostility, doves often point to subtleopenings for dialogue.

DanielKahneman is a Nobel laureate n economicsan dEugeneHigginsprofessorof psychologyan d professorof publicaffairsat PrincetonUniversity'sWoodrow WilsonSchoolof PublicandInternational Affairs. Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral tudentin the Departmentof Governmentat Harvard Universityandauthor of Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Pre-vention (Westport: Praeger SecurityInternational,2006).

As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, onehopes that the decision makers will hear their argu-ments on the merits and weigh them judiciouslybefore choosing a course of action. Don't count onit. Modern psychology suggests that policymakerscome to the debate predisposed to believe theirhawkish advisors more than the doves. There arenumerous reasons for the burden of persuasion thatdoves carry, and some of them have nothing to dowith politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor

ofhawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fab-ric of the human mind.

Social and cognitive psychologists have identi-fied a number of predictable errors (psychologistscall them biases) in the ways that humans judge sit-uations and evaluate risks. Biases have been docu-mented both in the laboratory and in the real world,mostly in situations that have no connection to inter-national politics. For example, people are prone toexaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of usbelieve that our driving

skills are better than average.In situations of potential conflict, the same opti-mistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive



Wh y Hawks Win

Hawkish advisors are not necessarily wi

they are likely to be more persuasive thdeserve to be.

to make necessary concessions in negotiations. Inshort, these biases have the effect of making warsmore likely to begin and more difficult to end.

None of this means that hawks are alwayswrong. One need only recall the debates betweenBritish hawks and doves before World War Ii to

remember that doves can easily find themselves onthe wrong side of history. More generally, there aresome strong arguments for deliberately instituting ahawkish bias. It is perfectly reasonable, for example,to demand far more than a 50-50 chance of beingright before we accept the promises of a dangerousadversary. The biases that we have examined, how-ever, operate over and beyond such rules of prudenceand are not the product of thoughtful consideration.Our conclusion is not that hawkish advisors arenecessarily wrong, only that they are likely to be

more persuasive than they deserve to be.

VISION PROBLEMS

Several well-known laboratory demonstrations haveexamined the way people assess their adversary'sintelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, aswell as the way they view their own position. Theresults are sobering. Even when people are aware ofthe context and possible constraints on anotherparty's behavior, they often do not factor it in when

assessing the other side's motives. Yet, people stillassume that outside observers grasp the constraints

to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of theoutcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often sharedby leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to pro-duce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

In fact, when we constructed a list of the biasesuncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we werestartled

by what we found: All the biases in our list favorhawks. These psychological impulses-only a few ofwhich we discuss here-incline national leaders toexaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to mis-judge how adversaries perceive them, to be overlysanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant

on their ow n behavior.With armies on high alert, it'san instinct that leaders can ill afford to ignore.

Imagine, for example, that you have been placedin a room and asked to watch a series of studentspeeches on the policies of Venezuelan leader HugoChavez. You've been told in advance that the students

were assigned the task of either attacking or sup-porting Chdivez and had no choice in the matter.Now, suppose that you are then asked to assess thepolitical leanings of these students. Shrewd observers,of course, would factor in the context and adjust theirassessments accordingly. A student who gave an

enthusiastic pro-Chavez speech wasmerely doing what she was told,not revealing anything about her

rong,but true attitudes. In fact, many exper-iments suggest that people would

an they overwhelmingly rate the pro-Chavezspeakers as more leftist. Even whenalerted to context that should affecttheir judgment, people tend toignore it. Instead, they attribute the

behavior they see to the person's nature, character, orpersistent motives. This bias is so robust and commonthat social psychologists have given it a lofty title:They call it the fundamental attribution error.

The effect of this failure in conflict situations canbe pernicious. A policymaker or diplomat involvedin a tense exchange with a foreign government is like-ly to observe a great deal of hostile behavior bythat country's representatives. Some of that behav-ior may indeed be the result of deep hostility. Butsome of it is simply a response to the current situa-tion as it is perceived by the other side. What isironic is that individuals who attribute others' behav-ior to deep hostility are quite likely to explain awaytheir ow n behavior as a result of being "pushedinto a corner" by an adversary. The tendency ofboth sides of a dispute to view themselves as react-ing to the other's provocative behavior is a familiarfeature of marital quarrels, and it is found as well ininternational conflicts. During the run-up to WorldWar i, the leaders of every one of the nations thatwould soon be at war perceived themselves as sig-nificantly less hostile than their adversaries.

If people are often poorly equipped to explain thebehavior of their adversaries, they are also bad atunderstanding how they appear to others. This bias canmanifest itself at critical stages in international crises,when signals are rarely as clear as diplomats and gen-erals believe them to be. Consider the Korean War, justone example of how misperception and a failure to



appreciate an adversary's assessment of intentions

can lead to hawkish outcomes. In October 1950, as

coalition forces were moving rapidly up the Kore-

an Pceninsula, policymakers in Washington were

debating how far to advance and attempting to

predict China's response. U.S. Secretary of State

D)ean Acheson was convinced that "no possible

shred of evidence could have existed in the minds

of the Chinese Communists about the non-threat-

ening intentions of the forces of the United

Nations." Because

U.S. leaders knew

that their intentions

toward China were

no t hostile, theyassumed that the

Chinese knew this

as well. Washing-ton was, therefore,incapable of inter-

preting the Chinese

intervention as areaction to a threat.

Instead, the Amer-icans interpreted •

the Chinese reac-

tion as an expres-

sion of fundamen-

tal hostility towardthe United States.

Some historians

now believe thatChinese leadersmay in fact have seen advancing Allied forces as a

threat to their regime.

CARELESSLY O PTIMISTIC

Excessive optimism is one of the most significant

biases that psychologists have identified. Psycho-

logical research has shown that a large majority of

people believe themselves to be smarter, more attrac-

tive, and more talented than average, and they com-

monly overestimate their future success. People are

also prone to an "illusion of control": They consis-

tently exaggerate the amount of control they have

over outcomes that are important to them-even

when the outcomes are in fact random or deter-

mined by other forces. It is not difficult to see that

this error may have led American policymakers

astray as they laid the groundwork for the ongoing

war in Iraq.

Indeed, the optimistic bias and the illusion ofcontrol are particularly rampant in the run-up toconflict. A hawk's preference for military actionover diplomatic measures is often built upon theassumption that victory will come easily an dswiftly. Predictions that the Iraq war would be a

"cakewalk," offered up by some supporters ofthat conflict, are just the latest in a long string of

bad hawkish predictions. After all, Washingtonelites treated the first major battle of the Civil

War as a socialouting, so surewere they thatfederal troopswould rout rebelforces. GeneralNoel de Castelnau,

chief of staff for theFrench Army at theoutset of World

War i, declared,"Give me 700,000

S... men and I will con-quer Europe." Infact, almost everydecision makerinvolved in whatwould become the

S most destructivewar in history upto that point pre-dicted no t only vic-tory for his side,

bu t a relatively quick and easy victory.These delusionsand exaggerations cannot be explained away as aproduct of incomplete or incorrect information.Optimistic generals will be found, usually on bothsides, before the beginning of every military conflict.

If optimism is the order of the day when it comes

to assessing one's ow n chances in armed conflict, how-ever, gloom usually prevails when evaluating anotherside's concessions. Psychologically, we are receptive no tonly to hawks' arguments for war bu t also to their case

against negotiated solutions. The intuition that some-thing is worth less simply because the other side hasoffered it is referred to in academic circles as "reactivedevaluation." The very fact that a concession is offeredby somebody perceived as hostile undermines the con-tent of the proposal. What was said matters less thanwho said it. And so, for example, American policy-

makers would likely look very skeptically on any con-cessions made by the regime in Tehran. Some of that



Why Hawks Win ]

skepticismcould be the rational product of past expe-rience, but some of it may also result from uncon-scious-and no t necessarilyrational-devaluation.

Evidence suggests that this bias is a significantstumblingblock in negotiationsbetween adversaries.In one experiment, Israeli Jews evaluated an actual

Israeli-authoredpeace plan less favorablywhen it wasattributed to the Palestiniansthan when it was attrib-uted to their ow n government.Pro-IsraelAmericanssaw a hypotheticalpeace proposal as biased in favorof Palestinians when authorship was attributed toPalestinians, but as "evenhanded" when they weretold it was authored by Israelis.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING

It is apparent that hawksoften have the upper hand asdecision makers wrestle with questions of war andpeace. And those advantagesdo not disappearas soonas the first bullets have flown.As the strategiccalculusshifts to territory won or lost and casualties suffered,a new idiosyncrasyin human decisionmaking appears:our deep-seatedaversion to cutting our losses. Imag-ine, for example, the choice between:

Option A: A sure loss of $890Option B: A 90 percent chance to lose $1,000and a 10 percent chance to lose nothing.

In this situation, a large majority of decisionmak-ers will prefer the gamble in Option B,even though theother choice is statisticallysuperior. People prefer to

avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential loss, evenif they risk losingsignificantlymore. When things aregoing badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting one'losses, often compoundedby wishful thinking,is likely to dominate the calculus of the losing side. Thibrew of psychologicalfactors tends to cause conflictto endure long beyond the point where a reasonablobserver would see the outcome as a near certaintyMany other factors pull in the same direction, notablythe fact that for the leaders who have led their nationto the brink of defeat, the consequencesof giving upwill usually not be worse if the conflict is prolongedeven if they are worse for the citizens they lead.

U.S. policymakers faced this dilemma at manypoints in Vietnamand today in Iraq. To withdrawnowis to accept a sure loss, and that option is deeply unat-tractive.The option of hanging on will thereforebe rel-atively attractive, even if the chances of success aresmall and the cost of delaying failure is high.

Hawks, of course, can cite many moments inrecent history when adversaries actually wereunremittinglyhostile and when force produced thedesired result or should have been applied muchearlier. The clear evidence of a psychologicalbias infavor of aggressive outcomes cannot decide theperennialdebates between the hawks and the doves.It won't point the international community in aclear direction on Iran or North Korea. But under-standing the biases that most of us harbor can atleast help ensure that the hawks don't win morearguments than they should. [H

Want to Know More? ]

For an introduction to the study of biases in decision making, consult Rational Choice in an Uncer-tain World: Th e Psychology ofJudgment an d Decision Making (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,2001), by Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes, and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, 6th ed,(Hoboken: Wiley, 2006), by Max Bazerman.

For a more technical treatment, see Heuristics an d Biases: Th e Psychology of Intuitive Judgment(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and DanielKahneman, a rich collection of current research on psychological biases.

More than 30 years after its publication, Robert Jervis's Perception an d Misperception in Inter-national Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) remains an important summary of theimplications of psychology for global affairs. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek tries his hand at analyzing thepsychology behind the Iraq war in "Iraq's False Promises" (FOREIGNPOLICY,January/February 2004).

))For links to relevant Web sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensive index of relatedFOREIGN POLICY articles, go to www.ForeignPolicyscom.



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TITLE: Why Hawks WinSOURCE: Foreign Policy no158 Ja/F 2007PAGE(S): 34-8

WN: 0700103185008

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and itis reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article inviolation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:http://www.ceip.org/

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7257937 kahneman and renshon why hawks win

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