Lanier forwarded me a great article in
Foreign Policy entitled
Why Hawks Win. It deals with our psychological biases and how they feed in to our conflict resolution processes, including our inability to separate behavior and motives in others and our assumption, nonetheless, that our own motives are clearly visible:
"Imagine, for example, that you have been placed in a room and asked to watch a series of student speeches on the policies of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You’ve been told in advance that the students were assigned the task of either attacking or supporting Chávez and had no choice in the matter. Now, suppose that you are then asked to assess the political leanings of these students. Shrewd observers, of course, would factor in the context and adjust their assessments accordingly. A student who gave an enthusiastic pro-Chávez speech was merely doing what she was told, not revealing anything about her true attitudes. In fact, many experiments suggest that people would overwhelmingly rate the pro-Chávez speakers as more leftist. Even when alerted to context that should affect their judgment, people tend to ignore it. Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person’s nature, character, or persistent motives. This bias is so robust and common that social psychologists have given it a lofty title: They call it the fundamental attribution error.
The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious. A policymaker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behavior by that country’s representatives. Some of that behavior may indeed be the result of deep hostility. But some of it is simply a response to the current situation as it is perceived by the other side. What is ironic is that individuals who attribute others’ behavior to deep hostility are quite likely to explain away their own behavior as a result of being “pushed into a corner” by an adversary. The tendency of both sides of a dispute to view themselves as reacting to the other’s provocative behavior is a familiar feature of marital quarrels, and it is found as well in international conflicts. During the run-up to World War I, the leaders of every one of the nations that would soon be at war perceived themselves as significantly less hostile than their adversaries.
When I read this passage, my mind jumped to the New York subway system. More than once I've seen someone step into the subway car and block passage for anyone else, and my reaction has always been the same: what is WITH him/her? The context itself is lost. Nonetheless, on our drive back from Vermont I had an altercation with a young woman over a door. She and her children were moving very slowly through the door at an inconsistent rate. I misestimated their speed, and practically tripped over her son. The woman immediately started tearing into me, and I became angry with her, assuming she must have realized how unpredictably she and her brood were moving and thus must understand that it was irrational to think I was thoughtlessly ploughing through them. After all, he practically tripped me by stopping so suddenly. Back in the car, I started to think that something was wrong about the whole situation, and now I can locate it. I expected her to recognize something in me--good intentions--that I refused to recognize in her.
Another article, published in the
New York Times in July, also refers to fundamental attribution error. We perceive our own actions as less hostile and less violent than those of others, and they view us in the same light.
So what's the evolutionary advantage, if any, to fundamental attribution error? What makes escalation appealing on the scale of millenia? Does it actually help survival? Or is it the neuroscience equivalent of an appendix?
Labels: iraq, journalism, psychology
