Making mistakes about our opponents' hostile intent

Excerpt from "Causes of War" by Levy and Thompson

I’m reading the book Causes of War by Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson. (Not to be confused with Blainey’s The Causes of War, which I wrote an earlier post about.)

I’ll share an excerpt from that book about the ways in which countries can make mistakes in thinking that an adversary is more hostile than it actually is. I thought it contained some interesting points that apply to group-versus-group polarization.

One line stood out to me as especially interesting: “…since we believe that our own actions are defensively motivated, and since we assume that the adversary understands that, we interpret the adversary's hostile behavior as evidence that it must be hostile.” [emphasis added]

Many people do seem to assume that people on the “other side” understand that their actions are defensive in nature. There can be a feeling like, “Surely they must know why we’re so scared of them; their acting like they don’t know is just an act; they’re gaslighting us; their act shows how malicious they are.” But clearly it’s a mistake to assume others see our perspective. Our narratives are so divergent it’s difficult for people outside our narrative to understand ours. The large chasm between the narrative of groups in conflict can be a conflict-amplifier, on its own. We seem increasingly alien to each other.

I’m reminded of the quote from Gabriel Lenz, who said “One of the main messages of this research is that Democrats shouldn’t give up on Republicans in a way that many of them have… Our surveys show that Republicans really support democracy and really want democracy to survive. They just need to be convinced that Democrats also support democracy.”

Liberals and conservatives who want a lowering of toxicity should see it as important to not assume that their opponents see what they see; they should make an effort to over-explain and be explicit about their concerns and fears and what they hope to accomplish — even as that may feel silly.

We should, in short, try to be more persuasive — even as our conflict can make us feel like persuasion is pointless.

The excerpt

This is the excerpt from “Causes of War”:

One explanation for the tendency to perceive apparently hostile actions by the adversary as reflecting its underlying hostile intentions is provided by the fundamental attribution theorem, a theory in social psychology that has received substantial support from the experimental evidence (Nisbett and Ross, 1980). The theory relates to the way people explain the behavior of others. Individuals have a tendency to interpret others' behavior, particularly behavior that they regard as undesirable, as reflecting dispositional factors rather than situational factors. If the adversary adopts hardline security policies, we tend to attribute those policies to the adversary's hostile intentions or evil character, not to a threatening environment (including our own actions) that might have induced such policies. One implication is that actors tend to underestimate the effects of the security dilemma. They minimize the extent to which apparently hostile behavior by the adversary might reflect a defensive reaction to the actor's own actions that the adversary perceives as threatening.

This tendency to overestimate the adversary's hostility by attributing its behavior to its evil intentions rather than to a threatening environment is compounded by actors' tendencies to explain their own behavior in terms of situational factors rather than dispositional factors, which is the "actor-observer discrepancy" (Nisbett and Ross, 1980). While we attribute the adversary's hardline strategies to his hostile intentions, we attribute our own hardline strategies to external threats and to the need to defend our-selves. Moreover, since we believe that our own actions are defensively motivated, and since we assume that the adversary understands that, we interpret the adversary's hostile behavior as evidence that it must be hostile. This leads to mutually reinforcing negative feedback and often to an escalating conflict spiral.

One important consequence of the fundamental attribution error is the tendency to perceive the adversary's regime as more centralized than it actually is, to underestimate the impact of domestic political and bureaucratic constraints on adversary leaders, and consequently to attribute too much intent to the adversary's actions (Jervis, 1976). A state may take an uncompromising position in order to pacify a domestic constituency, but its adversary tends to infer that the behavior reflects hostile intentions. Bureaucratic pressures may force a state to increase military spending, but the adversary tends to interpret the increased spending as part of a more coherent and hostile foreign policy on the adversary's part. This exaggeration of the hostility of adversary intentions can also contribute to a conflict spiral.

This set of judgments and responses was quite evident for both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Soviet officials attributed high levels of US defense spending to American ideological hostility to the Soviet Union (and to the capitalist foundations of that hostility), and US officials emphasized the role of communist ideology underlying Soviet behavior. Each downplayed the effects of its own actions and other external pressures on the actions of the other (Garthoff, 1985:903-7; Lebow and Stein, 1995).

These processes are often reinforced by a lack of empathy, or an inability to understand others' worldviews, definitions of their interests, threats to those interests, and possible strategies for neutralizing those threats (J. Stein, 1993:371). If opposing leaders have different worldviews, ideologies, cultures, or religions, they often interpret the same information differently, which increases the likelihood that a signal sent by one actor will be misinterpreted by the other. One important contributing cause of the escalation of the Korean War to a Sino-American war in 1950 was the failure of the United States to understand how threatening a US-backed capitalist regime in North Korea would be to the communist system in China.

That was an excerpt from the book “Causes of War” by Levy and Thompson.