war: it’s hardwired
Contact: Jeff Marn, Media Relations Manager / ph: (202) 939-2242 / e- mail: jmarn@CarnegieEndowment.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, January 3, 2007; Washington, D.C. Foreign Policy January/February 2007
On Newsstands Now Why Hawks Win Brain Hard-Wired to Favor Hawkish Beliefs, Says Nobel Prize Winner
Also, Was Castro Good for Cuba? Why Rupert Murdoch Isn’t as Evil as
You Think;
Marching Orders for the New U.N. Boss; Why “Third World” Companies
Will Rule; and more…
When it comes to choosing between war and peace, natural biases make
world leaders more likely to favor the advice of hawkish advisors
over doves, writes Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman
in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
In the essay, “Why Hawks Win,” Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon reveal
that all the ingrained biases uncovered by 40 years of psychological
research favor hawks, making their arguments more persuasive than
they sometimes should be.
“These psychological impulses incline national leaders to exaggerate
the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries
perceive them, to be overly optimistic when hostilities start, and
extremely reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations,”
say the authors.
This preference for action over negotiation comes in large part
because people have a tendency to judge not what is said but who said
it. In one study, Israeli Jews judged an actual Israeli-authored
peace deal less favorably when they were told that it was a
Palestinian proposal.
Not only do these hawk biases make wars more likely, they also make
them more difficult to end because humans have a natural and deep-
seated aversion to cutting their losses, Kahneman and Renshon argue.
Instead, we prefer to avoid a certain loss in favor of a small chance
for success.
“When things are going badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting
one’s losses, often compounded by wishful thinking, is likely to
dominate the calculus of the losing side,” they write.
“U.S.policymakers faced this dilemma at many points in Vietnam and
today in Iraq.”
About the authors:
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate in economics and Eugene Higgins
professor of psychology and professor of public affairs at Princeton
University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs. Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral student in the Department of
Government at Harvard University and author of Why Leaders Choose
War: The Psychology of Prevention(Westport: Praeger Security
International, 2006).