Department of Human Behavior

I recently discovered this Washington Post column (thanks to Fallacy Files) called Department of Human Behavior by Shankar Vedantam. The column touches on many of the human psychological biases that can lead to errors in decision making. Here are a few examples of articles he has written about the Iraq war:

Disagree About Iraq? You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil

"Opponents of the war believe passionately that President Bush, his neoconservative allies and a complicit Congress deliberately misled the nation into war. Supporters of the president and the war concede that mistakes were made, especially on the question of whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but say this involved no attempt to hoodwink the nation."

"What is interesting about the clash from a psychological perspective is not that supporters and critics disagree, but that large numbers of people on both sides claim to know the motives of people who disagree with them. When was the last time you heard people say that those who disagree with them on the Iraq war are well-meaning, smart, informed and thoughtful?"

"Nearly three-quarters of the people who supported the war believed that Bush was thinking about self-defense when he launched the invasion of Iraq. By contrast, fewer than 2 in 5 Americans who opposed the war were willing to grant that Bush was thinking of self-defense. Fully 70 percent of the people who supported the war said Bush was aiming to do good; only 27 percent of people who opposed the war believed that the president's motives were about doing good."


Iraq and the Danger of Psychological Entrapment

"When you invest yourself in something, it is exceedingly difficult to discard your investment. What is devilish about entrapment is not just that it can result in ever greater losses, but that those losses get you ever more entrapped, because now you have even more invested."

"[Social psychologist Scott] Plous said his alarm bells went off when he realized that President Bush was explicitly using the language of entrapment in speeches to rally support for the war. "Retreating from Iraq would dishonor the service of our brave men and women who have sacrificed in that country and have given their lives in that country, which would mean their sacrifice would be in vain," the president said recently."

""Rational decision-making should not be driven primarily by recovery of past costs," Plous said. "If you can no longer justify it in terms of what it will bring in the future and what its realistic prospects are, that is a warning sign you may have become entrapped.""


Iraq War Naysayers May Have Hindsight Bias

"Liberals' assertion that they 'knew all along' that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias," agreed Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied the hindsight bias and how to overcome it. "This is not to say that they didn't always think that the war was a bad idea."

"Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in the field of hindsight bias, found that Americans who made estimates about their danger after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recalled having made much lower estimates of risk a year later, after their fears failed to materialize."

"Indeed, research by both Fischhoff and Arkes show that people can fight the hindsight bias only when they honestly and systematically try to explain how different outcomes are possible. Such self-doubt is the exact opposite of how modern politics works: In the age of the blogosphere, certitude is king."