On Newsstands Now Why Hawks Win Brain Hard-Wired to Favor Hawkish Beliefs, Says Nobel Prize Winner
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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).