Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (115 page)
The political scientist Dominic Johnson, working with Wrangham and others, conducted an experiment to test the idea that mutual overconfidence could lead to war.
94
They ran a moderately complicated war game in which pairs of participants pretended to be national leaders who had opportunities to negotiate with, threaten, or mount a costly attack on each other in competition for diamonds in a disputed border region. The winner of the contest was the player who had more money, if their nation survived at all, at the end of several rounds of play. The players interacted with each other by computer and could not see each other, so the men didn’t know whether they were playing with another man or with a woman, and vice versa. Before they began, participants were asked to predict how well they would do relative to everyone else playing the game. The experimenters got a nice Lake Wobegon Effect: a majority thought they would do better than average. Now, in any Lake Wobegon Effect, it’s possible that not many people really
are
self-deceived. Suppose 70 percent of people say they are better than average. Since half of any population really is above average, perhaps only 20 percent think too well of themselves. That was not the case in the war game. The more confident a player was, the
worse
he or she did. Confident players launched more unprovoked attacks, especially when playing each other, which triggered mutually destructive retaliation in subsequent rounds. It will come as no surprise to women that the overconfident and mutually destructive pairs of players were almost exclusively men.
94
They ran a moderately complicated war game in which pairs of participants pretended to be national leaders who had opportunities to negotiate with, threaten, or mount a costly attack on each other in competition for diamonds in a disputed border region. The winner of the contest was the player who had more money, if their nation survived at all, at the end of several rounds of play. The players interacted with each other by computer and could not see each other, so the men didn’t know whether they were playing with another man or with a woman, and vice versa. Before they began, participants were asked to predict how well they would do relative to everyone else playing the game. The experimenters got a nice Lake Wobegon Effect: a majority thought they would do better than average. Now, in any Lake Wobegon Effect, it’s possible that not many people really
are
self-deceived. Suppose 70 percent of people say they are better than average. Since half of any population really is above average, perhaps only 20 percent think too well of themselves. That was not the case in the war game. The more confident a player was, the
worse
he or she did. Confident players launched more unprovoked attacks, especially when playing each other, which triggered mutually destructive retaliation in subsequent rounds. It will come as no surprise to women that the overconfident and mutually destructive pairs of players were almost exclusively men.
To evaluate the overconfidence theory in the real world, it’s not enough to notice in hindsight that certain military leaders proved to be mistaken. It has to be shown that at the time of making a fateful decision, a leader had access to information that would have convinced a disinterested party that the venture would probably fail.
In
Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions
, Johnson vindicated Wrangham’s hypothesis by looking at the predictions made by leaders on the verge of war and showing that they were unrealistically optimistic and contradicted by information available to them at the time. In the weeks preceding World War I, for example, the leaders of England, France, and Russia on one side and of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire on the other all predicted that the war would be a rout and their victorious troops would be home by Christmas. Ecstatic crowds of young men on both sides poured out of their homes to enlist, not because they were altruists eager to die for their country but because they didn’t think they were going to die. They couldn’t all be right, and they weren’t. In Vietnam, three American administrations escalated the war despite ample intelligence telling them that victory at an acceptable cost was unlikely.
Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions
, Johnson vindicated Wrangham’s hypothesis by looking at the predictions made by leaders on the verge of war and showing that they were unrealistically optimistic and contradicted by information available to them at the time. In the weeks preceding World War I, for example, the leaders of England, France, and Russia on one side and of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire on the other all predicted that the war would be a rout and their victorious troops would be home by Christmas. Ecstatic crowds of young men on both sides poured out of their homes to enlist, not because they were altruists eager to die for their country but because they didn’t think they were going to die. They couldn’t all be right, and they weren’t. In Vietnam, three American administrations escalated the war despite ample intelligence telling them that victory at an acceptable cost was unlikely.
Destructive wars of attrition, Johnson points out, needn’t require that both sides be certain or even highly confident of prevailing. All it takes is that the subjective probabilities of the adversaries sum to a value greater than one. In modern conflicts, he notes, where the fog of war is particularly thick and the leadership removed from the facts on the ground, overconfidence can survive longer than it would have in the small-scale battles in which our positive illusions evolved. Another modern danger is that the leadership of nations is likely to go to men who are at the right tail of the distribution of confidence, well into the region of overconfidence.
Johnson expected that wars stoked by overconfidence should be less common in democracies, where the flow of information is more likely to expose the illusions of leaders to cold splashes of reality. But he found that it was the flow of information itself, rather than just the existence of a democratic system, that made the difference. Johnson published his book in 2004, and the choice of an image for the cover was a no-brainer: the famous 2003 photograph of a flight-suited George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier festooned with the banner “Mission Accomplished.” Overconfidence did not undermine the conduct of the Iraq War itself (other than for Saddam Hussein, of course), but it was fatal to the postwar goal of bringing stable democracy to Iraq, which the Bush administration catastrophically failed to plan for. The political scientist Karen Alter conducted an analysis
before
the war broke out showing that the Bush administration was unusually closed in its decision-making process.
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In a textbook illustration of the phenomenon of groupthink, the prewar policy team believed in its own infallibility and virtue, shut out contradictory assessments, enforced consensus, and self-censored private doubts.
96
before
the war broke out showing that the Bush administration was unusually closed in its decision-making process.
95
In a textbook illustration of the phenomenon of groupthink, the prewar policy team believed in its own infallibility and virtue, shut out contradictory assessments, enforced consensus, and self-censored private doubts.
96
Just before the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld observed,
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Johnson, following a remark by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, notes that Rumsfeld omitted a crucial fourth category, the unknown knowns—things that are known, or at least could be known, but are ignored or suppressed. It was the unknown knowns that allowed a moderate amount of instrumental violence (a few weeks of shock and awe) to unleash an open-ended exchange of every other kind of violence.
DOMINANCEThe colorful idioms
chest-thumping, having a chip on his shoulder, drawing a line in the sand, throwing down the gauntlet
, and
pissing contest
all denote an action that is inherently meaningless but provokes a contest for dominance. That is a sign that we are dealing with a category that is very different from predatory, practical, or instrumental violence. Even though nothing tangible is at stake in contests for dominance, they are among the deadliest forms of human quarrel. At one end of the magnitude scale, we have seen that many wars in the Ages of Dynasties, Sovereignty, and Nationalism were fought over nebulous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, the single largest motive for homicide is “altercations of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc.”
chest-thumping, having a chip on his shoulder, drawing a line in the sand, throwing down the gauntlet
, and
pissing contest
all denote an action that is inherently meaningless but provokes a contest for dominance. That is a sign that we are dealing with a category that is very different from predatory, practical, or instrumental violence. Even though nothing tangible is at stake in contests for dominance, they are among the deadliest forms of human quarrel. At one end of the magnitude scale, we have seen that many wars in the Ages of Dynasties, Sovereignty, and Nationalism were fought over nebulous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, the single largest motive for homicide is “altercations of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc.”
In their book on homicide, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson advise that “the participants in these ‘trivial altercations’ behave as if a great deal more is at issue than small change or access to a pool table, and their evaluations of what is at stake deserve our respectful consideration.”
97
Contests of dominance are not as ridiculous as they seem. In any zone of anarchy, an agent can protect its interests only by cultivating a reputation for a willingness and an ability to defend itself against depredations. Though this mettle can be demonstrated in retaliation after the fact, it’s better to flaunt it proactively, before any damage is done. To prove that one’s implicit threats are not hot air, it may be necessary to seek theaters in which one’s resolve and retaliatory capacity can be displayed: a way to broadcast the message “Don’t fuck with me.” Everyone has an interest in knowing the relative fighting abilities of the agents in their midst, because all parties have an interest in preempting any fight whose outcome is a foregone conclusion and that would needlessly bloody both fighters if carried out.
98
When the relative prowesses of the members of a community are stable and widely known, we call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies are based on more than brute strength. Since not even the baddest primate can win a fight of one against three, dominance depends on the ability to recruit allies—who, in turn, don’t choose their teammates at random but join up with the stronger and shrewder ones.
99
97
Contests of dominance are not as ridiculous as they seem. In any zone of anarchy, an agent can protect its interests only by cultivating a reputation for a willingness and an ability to defend itself against depredations. Though this mettle can be demonstrated in retaliation after the fact, it’s better to flaunt it proactively, before any damage is done. To prove that one’s implicit threats are not hot air, it may be necessary to seek theaters in which one’s resolve and retaliatory capacity can be displayed: a way to broadcast the message “Don’t fuck with me.” Everyone has an interest in knowing the relative fighting abilities of the agents in their midst, because all parties have an interest in preempting any fight whose outcome is a foregone conclusion and that would needlessly bloody both fighters if carried out.
98
When the relative prowesses of the members of a community are stable and widely known, we call it a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies are based on more than brute strength. Since not even the baddest primate can win a fight of one against three, dominance depends on the ability to recruit allies—who, in turn, don’t choose their teammates at random but join up with the stronger and shrewder ones.
99
The commodity that is immediately at stake in contests of dominance is information, and that feature differentiates dominance from predation in several ways. One is that while contests of dominance can escalate into lethal clashes, especially when the contestants are closely matched and intoxicated with positive illusions, most of the time (in humans and animals alike) they are settled with displays. The antagonists flaunt their strength, brandish their weapons, and play games of brinkmanship; the contest ends when one side backs down.
100
With predation, in contrast, the only point is to obtain an object of desire.
100
With predation, in contrast, the only point is to obtain an object of desire.
Another implication of the informational stakes in contests of dominance is that the violence is interwoven with exchanges of data. Reputation is a social construction that is built on what logicians call common knowledge. To avert a fight, a pair of rivals must not only know who is stronger, but each must know that the other knows, and must know that the other knows that he knows, and so on.
101
Common knowledge may be undermined by a contrary opinion, and so contests of dominance are fought in arenas of public information. They may be sparked by an insult, particularly in cultures of honor, and in those that sanction formal dueling. The insult is treated like a physical injury or theft, and it sets off an urge for violent revenge (which can make the psychology of dominance blend into the psychology of revenge, discussed in the next section). Studies of American street violence have found that the young men who endorse a code of honor are the ones most likely to commit an act of serious violence in the following year.
102
They also have found that the presence of an audience doubles the likelihood that an argument between two men will escalate to violence.
103
101
Common knowledge may be undermined by a contrary opinion, and so contests of dominance are fought in arenas of public information. They may be sparked by an insult, particularly in cultures of honor, and in those that sanction formal dueling. The insult is treated like a physical injury or theft, and it sets off an urge for violent revenge (which can make the psychology of dominance blend into the psychology of revenge, discussed in the next section). Studies of American street violence have found that the young men who endorse a code of honor are the ones most likely to commit an act of serious violence in the following year.
102
They also have found that the presence of an audience doubles the likelihood that an argument between two men will escalate to violence.
103
When dominance is reckoned within a closed group, it is a zero-sum game: if someone’s rank goes up, another’s has to go down. Dominance tends to erupt in violence within small groups like gangs and isolated workplaces, where a person’s rank within the clique determines the entirety of his social worth. If people belong to many groups and can switch in and out of them, they are more likely to find one in which they are esteemed, and an insult or slight is less consequential.
104
104
Since the only commodity at stake in contests of dominance is information, once the point has been made about who’s the boss, the violence can come to an end without setting off rounds of vendetta. The primatologist Frans de Waal discovered that in most primate species, after two animals have fought, they will reconcile.
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They may touch hands, kiss, embrace, and in the case of bonobos, have sex. This makes one wonder why they bother to fight in the first place if they were just going to make up afterward, and why they make up afterward if they had reason to fight. The reason is that reconciliation occurs only among primates whose long-term interests are bound together. The ties that bind may be genetic relatedness, collective defense against predators, being in cahoots against a third party, or, in an experiment, getting fed only if they work together.
106
The overlap of interests is not perfect, so they still have reason to fight for dominance or retaliation within the group, but it is not zero, so they cannot afford to smack each other around indefinitely, let alone kill each other. Among primates whose interests are not bound up in any of these ways, adversaries are unforgiving, and violence is likelier to escalate. Chimpanzees, for example, reconcile after a fight within their community, but they never reconcile after a battle or raid with members of a different community.
107
As we shall see in the next chapter, reconciliation among humans is also governed by the perception of common interests.
105
They may touch hands, kiss, embrace, and in the case of bonobos, have sex. This makes one wonder why they bother to fight in the first place if they were just going to make up afterward, and why they make up afterward if they had reason to fight. The reason is that reconciliation occurs only among primates whose long-term interests are bound together. The ties that bind may be genetic relatedness, collective defense against predators, being in cahoots against a third party, or, in an experiment, getting fed only if they work together.
106
The overlap of interests is not perfect, so they still have reason to fight for dominance or retaliation within the group, but it is not zero, so they cannot afford to smack each other around indefinitely, let alone kill each other. Among primates whose interests are not bound up in any of these ways, adversaries are unforgiving, and violence is likelier to escalate. Chimpanzees, for example, reconcile after a fight within their community, but they never reconcile after a battle or raid with members of a different community.
107
As we shall see in the next chapter, reconciliation among humans is also governed by the perception of common interests.
The metaphor of competitive distance urination suggests that the gender with the equipment best suited to competing is the gender that is most likely to participate in contests of dominance. Though in many primate species, including humans, both sexes jockey for preeminence, usually against members of their own sex, it seems to loom larger in the minds of men than in the minds of women, taking on a mystical status as a priceless commodity worth almost any sacrifice. Surveys of personal values in men and women find that the men assign a lopsided value to professional status compared to all the other pleasures of life.
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They take greater risks, and they show more confidence and more overconfidence.
109
Most labor economists consider these sex differences to be a contributor to the gender gap in earnings and professional success.
110
108
They take greater risks, and they show more confidence and more overconfidence.
109
Most labor economists consider these sex differences to be a contributor to the gender gap in earnings and professional success.
110
And men are, of course, by far the more violent sex. Though the exact ratios vary, in every society it is the males more than the females who play-fight, bully, fight for real, carry weapons, enjoy violent entertainment, fantasize about killing, kill for real, rape, start wars, and fight in wars.
111
Not only is the direction of the sex difference universal, but the first domino is almost certainly biological. The difference is found in most other primates, emerges in toddlerhood, and may be seen in boys who (because of anomalous genitalia) are secretly raised as girls.
112
111
Not only is the direction of the sex difference universal, but the first domino is almost certainly biological. The difference is found in most other primates, emerges in toddlerhood, and may be seen in boys who (because of anomalous genitalia) are secretly raised as girls.
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