The Folly of Fools (39 page)

The emergence of battles—conflict between massed warriors on each side—is much more recent, almost certainly connected to the large increases in the size of human societies about ten thousand years ago associated with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry. With these battles involving large numbers of soldiers, several new elements came into play. Relevant information was apt to be much more scarce, the outcome harder to predict, the opportunities for fooling the opponent greater, all of which are more congenial to self-deception. Overconfidence emerges as a key variable, a factor that by itself can create wholesale slaughter, especially when practiced on all sides (witness World War I).

Perhaps worst of all—from an evolutionary perspective—there is now lower negative biological feedback on those making bad decisions. You decide, hundreds die—but do you also die or even suffer? If you choose to attack an apparently isolated male chimp in a neighboring group and you miscalculate, you may lose your life. That is, natural selection acts directly back on any self-deception that helped produce the mistake. The same was probably often true of primitive warfare. Of course, it is sometimes true of those initiating large-scale wars: not only may your own country be invaded and your relatives slaughtered or suppressed, but you too may be killed—vide Adolf Hitler, whose thousand-year
Reich
ended with his own pathetic death by suicide in a concrete bunker only six years after he launched his disastrous wars. Still, in terms of natural selection, this was one, or a few men, who launched wars with aggregate costs of probably more than sixty million people killed.

Even minimal evolutionary feedback to leaders is not necessarily the case. The war on Vietnam was a disastrous miscalculation, violating a fundamental US Army doctrine: no land war in Asia. It cost more than fifty thousand US lives and well over a million in Vietnam, and another million in Cambodia and Laos, while bringing on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia with an additional million or so slaughtered. It also left behind an ecological disaster that to this day is producing, among other effects, horribly mutated and deformed children. It produced no known “strategic” benefit. But those who designed and propagated the war in the United States suffered no such adverse effects. Neither JFK’s advisers—“the best and the brightest”—nor LBJ and his, nor Nixon and Kissinger suffered, so far as we know, any adverse consequences to their inclusive fitness. In other words, there may well have been stronger selection against warlike stupidity and self-deception in chimpanzees than in ourselves where the decision-makers are far removed from the biological consequences of their decisions. Herbert Spencer summarized the general effect: “The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.”

The switch to large-scale battles and warfare that may stretch for weeks and even years has several important consequences for self-deception. Predicting the future is far more difficult than in a single cross-border chimpanzee raid, and there is opportunity for bluff on a large scale. One may bargain in bad faith. It may also be necessary to convince the home population or onlookers that the war is worth fighting or supporting—in any case, not opposing. These generate a whole host of new opportunities for deceit and self-deception. Recent wars, such as the 2003 US war on Iraq, for example, are more of this kind: not fooling your opponent but your own citizens and, if possible, the larger world.

SELF-DECEPTION ENCOURAGES WARFARE

Evolutionary logic suggests that self-deception is expected to be especially likely (as well as costly) in interactions with members of other groups. In interactions
with
group members, self-deception is inhibited by two forces. Partial overlap in self-interest gives greater weight to others’ opinions, and within-group feedback provides a partial corrective to personal self-deception. In interactions
between
groups, everyday processes of self-enhancement are uninhibited by negative feedback from others or by concern for their welfare, while derogation of the outsider’s moral worth, physical strength, and bravery is likewise unchecked by direct feedback or shared self-interest. These factors result in systematic faulty mechanisms of assessment, in turn making aggression more likely and contests more costly (without any average gain). Processes of group self-deception only make matters worse. Within each group, individuals are often mis-oriented in the same direction, easily reinforcing one another, while absence of contrary views is taken as confirming evidence (even silence being misinterpreted as support).

When you and an opponent who are fairly equally matched face off in an escalating fight, each has to decide how long to persist—given that if one is going to lose anyway, it is better to lose early and thereby lower the costs. There seem to be several reasons why in an even match, a positive illusion that exaggerates your own competitive abilities and chance of prevailing may reduce your chance of losing (along with the cost of battle). The positive illusion increases self-confidence and, therefore, apparent competitive ability and motivation. It decreases signals indicating fear and other emotions that would undermine the effectiveness of any threats. It therefore increases the chance that the opponent will view you as unbeatable and will give in outright (or be so scared that he fights poorly). The positive illusion may actually make you more effective mentally, because it reduces cognitive load by making you focus on positive strategies that may work instead of the full range (although there is, of course, a risk in inattention to the downside). In short, positive illusions may be important in a fight, because we partly commit more resources to it. On the other hand, we will suffer less ability to read our opponent and fail to respond appropriately to negative information.

Sports would provide a useful parallel, but there has been precious little useful study of self-deception in sports. It would be interesting to have data from sports. Are more fearful individuals worse at sports, since to be good at competition it helps to think you are going to win, which is easier the less fearful you are about losing? The only evidence I know of comes from swimming. Individuals who are more likely in a choice situation to concentrate on negative rather than neutral stimuli do worse, while those who concentrate on positive over neutral do not do any better.

It is a striking fact that almost every category of self-deception we have described in this book is conducive to aggressive wars. Modern war is conducted against an out-group by powerful people who have an exaggerated opinion of themselves and their degree of morality, are overconfident, often have an illusion of control, enjoy taking risks, and are almost always male. Let us briefly review these biases.

The general bias to consider oneself superior to others is obviously congenial to waging war, where these positive traits include strength, endurance, fighting ability, and so on. Both sexes display this bias. Derogating others is especially dangerous if it both incites your aggression and prevents you from seeing the power and tenacity of the resistance your aggression is likely to engender. Overestimating your own morality is a critical bias since it naturally leads you to overemphasize the strength of your own position and to underemphasize that of your opponents. After all, when you invade your neighbor’s country, there is already a prima facie case in favor of the neighbor and an expectation of a “home field” advantage (see page 255).

All of the above feed into overconfidence, one of our deeper and deadlier delusions where fatal aggression is concerned. Men seem especially prone to overconfidence, as we have seen already in financial trading, where they trade too often and lose more money compared to women (see Chapter 8). It is likely that a much longer history of being evaluated for degree of confidence, both in male/male interactions and in courtship of females, has led to greater degrees of overconfidence supported by deeper structures of self-deception.

A related variable is thrill seeking. A tendency toward thrill seeking can be measured by choice of risky driving, risky sports, drugs, and gambling. Measured this way, men are much more prone to thrill seeking than are women. Of course, wars can be very thrilling, at least at the beginning. It is also easy to imagine that an illusion of control gives greater impetus toward war. If you think you can control events favorably after initiating an (often surprise) attack on your neighbor, you are more likely to do so.

War is waged by the powerful. They decide and typically send others to die. Being put in a position of power—made to feel powerful—reduces one’s orientation to the viewpoint of others, their welfare, and their emotions (see Chapter 1). So warlike decisions will be helped along by the biases that power induces. Except for some civil wars, typically wars are fought by an in-group against an out-group. (Even in civil wars, in-groups and out-groups can be, and are, quickly formed.) As we have seen, few distinctions are as powerful in our psychological lives as that between in-group and out-group, with the latter easily inviting derogation, dehumanization, and overt attack, with the aim of elimination or subjugation. This must have begun long before human warfare, in intergroup violence in our chimpanzee (and more distant) past. But warfare presumably intensified the negative consequences and connotations of being an out-group member.

An additional sex difference is highly pertinent. There are several lines of evidence to suggest that men are likely to be less compassionate toward others than are women. They are less likely to read emotions correctly from facial expressions (the sex difference persists even when the time given per expression is only one-fifth of a second). They are less likely to remember emotional information and relate it to the emotional reaction of others. And there is evidence that men are much less likely than women to show compassion toward others who are perceived to have acted unfairly against them. For example, women treated either fairly or unfairly by a partner in an artificial economic game show similar evidence of compassion toward the two when either is being given an electric shock. By contrast, men show no neurophysiological evidence of compassion toward the unfair person when that individual is subjected to electric shocks. Indeed, they show pleasure in inflicting pain. This predicts a male bias toward self-deception whenever it can be based on perceived unfairness. Moralistic outrage in men is expected to be especially heartless and easy to manipulate—toward war, for example.

False historical narratives also contribute. An honest narrative might force people to make reparations for past crimes and to confront more directly their continuing effects. A false one permits a continual policy of denial, counterattack, and expansion at others’ expense.

DEROGATION OF OTHERS → FATAL OVERCONFIDENCE

The derogation of the abilities—never mind moral value—of others can have immediate, dangerous consequences when contemplating war, especially if the other people are assumed to lack fighting ability or motivation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, for example, it has been shown that planning for the US war on Vietnam in the 1960s was rational and calibrated on almost every point except one—the United States underestimated the discipline of its opponents and their willingness to absorb punishment.

This mistake is especially striking, since there is a near-universal rule in animal behavior (including that of humans) of a “home field” advantage: the lizard wins in his or her own territory against an opponent he or she would lose to in the opponent’s territory. Motivation is stronger to protect what you have than to seize what you don’t. Why would one ever assume that the locals cared less about your invasion of their land than you do? But nationalist and/or racist conceptions tempt us to exactly this position. Home-field advantage is true of sports teams in front of their own fans—where they show both a boost in testosterone not enjoyed when playing on the road, as well as a greater chance of winning. Anything that tends to increase fan effect (such as domed stadiums) tends to increase home-field advantage. But much of the effect may be due to the referees who show an increasing bias toward the home team with the same factors. Incidentally, in baseball there is something called “home-field clutch.” In the World Series, the home team wins more often during the first six games, but if the playoff goes to a final, seventh game, win or lose, home teams lose more often than outside teams. Apparently the pressure is just too much.

Regarding self-deception and war, it is easy to forget that a human holocaust such as World War I, which lasted a full four years with twenty million dead in the fighting alone, was launched in a festive, holiday spirit, partly grounded in nationalistic and racist views of the opponents. All sides were convinced that the war would be short, they would win, and victory would bring benefits, none of which (excepting victory for a few) turned out to be true. There was dancing in the streets throughout Europe and men rushed to recruiting offices, lest the war end before they could enjoy the fun. In August 1914, hundreds of thousands of people in Paris and Berlin celebrated the outbreak of the war. Only three months later, 300,000 French and Germans were dead, with a further 600,000 injured—and the war still had four years to run. When the first (enthusiastic) British infantry arrived in France in October, they started losing five hundred men a day until three weeks later, scarcely an eighth of the original soldiers remained. Thus does fantasy collide with reality.

Each expected to best the other one. The Germans believed the French were not prepared for a fight, while the French expected a quick victory, and a British officer predicted that Germany would be “easy prey” for the British and the French. Austria and Russia both expected to beat each other. Russian officers believed they would reach Berlin within two months. Turks got caught up in the frenzy and imagined that after victory in the Caucasus, they might very well march through Afghanistan into India. There were exceptions, of course—midlevel German military officers were in no way convinced of quick or even ultimate victory, but no one paid them any mind.