Defection Denial

One of the themes the DHA project has explored over the past two years is how cooperation emerges in multilateral negotiating environments. One of the challenges in informal social exchange in these situations involves judging others and deciding who is trustworthy and who’s not – in game theory terms this would mean discerning the difference between a cooperator and a defector. We would expect known defectors to be punished for their infractions. But recent research suggests this is not how humans normally react in everyday situations. Instead, we tend to overlook or “forgive” the wrongs others commit.

In fact, as University of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough told the New York Times recently:

“The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures… We really do want to be moral people, but the fact is that we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggle out of speeding tickets, and to forgive others for doing the same.”

One recent study used a simple investment game, where two people decide whether or not (and how much) to contribute to a shared investment pool, to explore this phenomenon. In this version of the game, one player could “cut off” their opponent if they believed his/her contributions were too low. The study revealed that once players were in a pattern of mutual trust based on repeated adequate donations to the investment pool, it became harder to punish future infractions. Some players would tolerate four to five selfish moves by a “trusted” opponent before cutting them off whereas they would tolerate only one infraction from a stranger. The researchers interpreted this result to be rooted in denial – players believed “trusted” opponents had to be making errors, not simply trying to maximize their personal gains.

Simulating this result through many generations on a computer revealed that this denial strategy was critical to the stability and evolutionary fitness of the overall group. In other words, overlooking or forgiving defection was an important survival strategy. This corresponds with Karl Sigmund and Martin Nowak’s findings of their evolutionary computer tournament, run in 1991. The most successful strategy was generous tit-for-tat (GTFT). GTFT is a “nice” strategy meaning it was never the first to defect, even if defection was its opponent’s first move. GTFT also randomly cooperated once for approximately every three defections against it. In this simulation, as it seems in real-life, it pays to let bygones be bygones.

Psychologists suggest that denial could be important in protecting us against unbearable news and that this ability is critical to forming (and maintaining) close relationships. Moral violations are glossed over as “stumbles or lapses in competence,” making the original violation more bearable. Since people oftentimes aren’t as trustworthy as we assume them to be, this attitude allows us to overlook potentially devastating defections in everyday life and carry on as normal, nurturing close relationships despite a few wrongs here and there.


Ashley Thornton

References
Photo retrieved from flickr.com.
“Denial Makes the World go Round,” New York Times, 20 November 2007.

Fooled by randomness?

One interesting and useful aspect of working in a think-tank like UNIDIR is that I often get the opportunity to talk with diplomats about their work and can sometimes observe them doing it. In return, diplomats can - and do - give feedback on the sorts of ideas and suggestions we can offer as researchers on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action (DHA) project.

In multilateral diplomacy, like many other walks of life, there seems to be a bit of a generation gap or, perhaps more accurately, a "rank" gap. Younger, less-senior diplomats are fascinating to listen to in this regard, as their collective sense of the weaknesses of their institutional structures and ways of working, and problems with collective approaches is sometimes much more acute than the ambassadors. I imagine it may be because ambassadors are more sheltered from some of the less sexy drudgery of multilateral meetings and perhaps even feel they have more a stake in the traditions that characterize their "community of practice".

Whatever the reason, I had a productive time today talking with young officials on the United Nations Disarmament Fellows programme. (Well, young is relative - many are older than me.) These junior to mid-level diplomats come from a wide variety of countries from Pakistan to Switzerland to Fiji and bring with them a diverse range of outlooks.

Conscious that they've been lectured to a lot in recent weeks about the nuts-and-bolts of "disarmament machinery", I thought I'd take a different tack. Recently I began reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's remarkable book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which I think should be required reading for every policy maker. (Taleb is also author of an earlier book, Fooled by Randomness.)

There's an old saying that what you don't know can't hurt you. It's quite a stupid expression really, since the things we don't know really can hurt us (think about the 1929 and 1987 stock-market crashes, which hurt plenty of people. Or the 2004 Asian tsunami).

Taleb argued in his book that the things that can hurt us most are the things we think we do know, but actually don't. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, if there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", the problem is that some of the latter are unknown precisely because we think we know them but don't. Taleb noted that nobody, for instance, predicted the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union's empire in 1989. Soviet-watchers were convinced the communist regime would remain in power for years longer, if not decades. The fall of the Berlin Wall surprised everyone.

Taleb's book was a useful entry point for exploring with these 20 or so younger diplomats two broad themes, drawing from a wide range of literature, the DHA project's research and this blog (type 'Thornton' into the search-box for some entries):

- Cognitive features hardwired into all human beings constrain the way in which we can perceive the world, and thus affect our decision making.

- A second problem is that the world isn't a smooth, linear narrative. That is, the world doesn't conform with our expectations, although we may fool ourselves into thinking so. That's because, as human beings, we have brains that are very good at re-shaping our expectations in hindsight without even realizing it, of confirming our beliefs without evidence, and intuitively leading us to the wrong answers when careful thought would serve us much better. We're not well-adapted to cope with complexity, which can be counter-intuitive.

It resulted in an interesting discussion and a good level of engagement. Perhaps the diplomats were just being polite, but I got the impression they regard these issues as real, and worthy of more attention in multilateral diplomacy than they currently get. They seem concerned that "business as usual" isn't working, and we need better ways of cooperating in the face of international uncertainty. I suspect Nassim Nicholas Taleb would agree.


John Borrie


References

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's web page is here.

Photo courtesy of Thomas Nash.

Understanding psychological biases to improve decision-making

Many of us have used the terms “hawk” and “dove” to refer to the different ways politicians view the world. Those with hawkish tendencies are supposed to be more likely to prefer to use military force against a perceived threat and to steer clear of offering concessions to adversaries. Doves, on the other hand, prefer to avoid using force in favor of finding non-violent solutions, if possible.

Some psychology research suggests that humans may be predisposed to favor hawkish arguments because of our susceptibility to certain biases. In their article “Why Hawks Win,” Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon discussed some of these biases in an effort to explain the observed human tendency to prefer conflict over concession.

Kahneman and Renshon argue that the overconfidence bias - the same bias that leads about 80% of all drivers to believe their driving skills are above average - “makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war.” Experimental research has also shown that people show excessive optimism about success in future endeavors and that they have an illusion of control over future events. These three biases combined can significantly affect decision-making. The authors suggested that policymakers who viewed the 2003 Iraq war as a “cakewalk,” for example, were blinded by overconfidence, excessive optimism and an illusion of control.

In addition to a tendency to overestimate our chances of success in an armed conflict, policy makers tend to intuitively reject concessions offered by an adversary. This is known as reactive devaluation. One experiment asked pro-Israel Americans to examine a peace proposal. When the proposal was attributed to Palestinians it was judged as biased in favor of Palestinians but when authorship was attributed to Israelis it was viewed as “evenhanded”. This can be a significant problem in negotiations, causing some to discount what was said because of who said it.

Kahneman and Renshon also described the human aversion to cutting our losses. In one experiment that illustrates this phenomenon, researchers asked people to choose one of two options:

•Choice A: a guaranteed loss of $890; or
•Choice B: a 90% chance of losing of $1,000 and a 10% chance of losing nothing.

Most people chose the statistically inferior Choice B, accepting a potential loss in favor of a certain loss. Relating their findings to current events, Kahneman and Renshon wrote that, “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.”

This isn’t to suggest that using force in response to a threat is never correct. The article does suggest, however, that psychological biases can influence important policy decisions like going to war, leading us to prefer more aggressive solutions when these solutions may not, in reality, be the best ones. This is certainly worth knowing, and is one way the behavioural sciences are prompting political analysts and policy makers to review some of the assumptions they take for granted in decision-making.


Ashley Thornton


References

Daniel Kahneman & Jonathan Renshon. “Why Hawks Win.” Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2007, pgs. 34-38.

Photo “Red Tailed Hawk” taken by Patrick T. Power and uploaded from flickr.com.

The Power of Priming

The human subconscious, it turns out, is more active than we think. And it can be primed in remarkable ways by seemingly mundane objects, smells and sounds, as a recent New York Times article outlined.

The article reported, for instance, one recent study by Yale psychologists, which revealed that college students handed either a cup of hot or iced coffee on the way to class were influenced by the temperature of the beverage: when later asked to judge a person from a written description, those handed iced coffee rated them “much colder, less social and more selfish” than those handed hot coffee.

In another study, students were asked to play an investment game with an unseen player. The students were placed at either a long table with a black briefcase and leather folder or a backpack left at the end of the table. The results revealed that students played differently when the briefcase and folder as opposed to the backpack were on the table. According to the researchers, the briefcase and leather folder primed the students to be stingier with their money, drawing on unconscious associations with “business-related associations and expectations.”

In yet another experiment, students were placed in a cubicle in one of two rooms and asked to fill out a questionnaire. After filling in the questionnaire, the students were given a crumbly snack. Unbeknownst to them, the researchers had placed a bucket of water with a hint of citrus cleaner in one room but not the other. Sure enough, the students in the room with the faint odor of cleaning solution cleaned up the remnants of their snack three times more than the control students.

The moral of the story, for me, is that we’re always trying to determine how we should behave in any given situation. But we may not be cognizant of all the factors influencing our perceptions, with the “conscious” brain taking directions from our subconscious that we didn’t even realize were issued.

It begs an interesting question for me, working in the 80 year old splendour of the UN Palais des Nations (formerly the seat of the defunct inter-war League of Nations). How might a room like the Council Chamber in Geneva, the scene of over a decade of floundering Conference on Disarmament (CD) meetings, prime diplomats for a new session of work? As you can see from the photo I’ve included with this posting, the Council Chamber’s drab green and gold murals tell the tale of human suffering and toil. Heavy green curtains make sure not a sliver of daylight peeks through and the Chamber’s walls bring to life murals like “The Conquerors,” “The Conquered” and “The Death of Freedom” (which themselves are a little on the surreal side). And the Council Chamber sometimes feels more like a museum than a working disarmament body, such is the reverential hush of CD meetings there, as interventions are delivered and translated through elderly surgical plastic wired earpieces to formally attired diplomats.

A legacy of deadlock sends one message to disarmament diplomats. But perhaps murals that portray human struggle, in the drabbest of drab colors with no natural light, send another. It just might put diplomats in the wrong frame of mind. Of course, I’m not making the claim that simply changing the room would be the difference between success and failure in the CD. But it might be a start.


Ashley Thornton


References

Benedict Carey, Who’s Minding the Mind, The New York Times, 31 July 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31subl.
html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=8a58897f89c79289&ex=118620000
0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1186053879-G5OMwHDV76z/9oDeP7jvGA

This photo is part of a mural, “The Solidarity of Peoples (The Lesson at Salamanca),” by José María Sert in the Conference on Disarmament chamber, Geneva. Taken by Mel and John Kots, retrieved from flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/melanieandjohn/127443220/

Does Terrorism Work?

Over the last few months, I’ve been researching cognitive biases and how they influence our decision-making. I looked at the confirmation bias, which is the human tendency to seek out and process information that confirms our preexisting beliefs. I also examined the self-serving attributional bias; when we blame unfavorable outcomes on external causes but take credit for positive ones. A recent article I read talked about a different bias: correspondent inference theory.

Correspondent inference theory is the human tendency “to infer the motives – and also the disposition – of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors.” Paying attention to what those around you are doing makes “evolutionary sense” – most of the time, it pays to infer as quickly as possible the intentions of those around you.

But it doesn’t work all the time in building an accurate picture of what’s going on.

A recent paper, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work” by Max Abrahms, draws attention to how responses to terrorism are influenced by correspondent inference theory. First, let’s look at a lighthearted example to shed light on this.

In the 1985 movie comedy The Man with One Red Shoe (which, by the way, is a remake of the French film The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe), the CIA believes that a random civilian (Tom Hanks) is a spy so they set about investigating his life to prove it.

In one scene, CIA operatives tear Hanks’ flat apart to try and find anything that would establish he is a spy, like disconnecting pipes in the bathroom to see if anything is hidden inside. As they rush to piece everything back together, they inadvertently connect the toilet pipe to the sink. When Hanks returns home, he repeatedly flushes the toilet trying to figure out why water comes out the sink spout. CIA officers, listening to this via the bugs they’ve planted, infer that he’s flushing evidence down the toilet. By misinterpreting what Hanks is doing, the CIA needlessly send an officer into the sewer to find this “evidence”.

More seriously, Abrahms’ paper draws attention to the fact that it is sometimes assumed that the goal of terrorist activities is to kill innocent people and so instill fear or economic instability in a population. These assertions, according to Abrahms’ analysis of the policy objectives of 28 terrorist groups, aren’t necessarily correct.

Many terrorist groups have avowed strategic goals. For example, Abrahms notes that al-Qaeda’s goals have been consistent (like ending American support of Israel and eliminating U.S. interference in Saudi Arabia). These goals, however, haven’t been achieved. In fact, Abrahms claimed overall that, out of the 42 policy objectives for these 28 groups, only 7 percent were achieved. The rest of the policy objectives were not achieved.

What was the deciding factor between objectives that were achieved and those that failed? Abrahms’ data revealed that the target of the terrorist attacks was important. Groups that attacked military and diplomatic targets more than civilians were more effective in achieving their ends. Out of the 19 groups that primarily targeted civilians, there were 28 policy objectives between them. Twenty-five of these objectives were not achieved, and only limited progress was made toward achieving three.

Abrahms’ explanation for this effect rests on correspondent inference theory. High numbers of civilian casualties from terrorism lead citizens and governments alike to infer that the aim of terrorist groups is to kill innocent civilians and disrupt their way of life. This inferred “maximalist” agenda makes them more steadfast in their resolve not to negotiate with terrorists. As a result, the stated goals of the terrorist groups tend to go unmet.

Terrorism against civilians, it seems, isn’t a very effective tactic and, if Abrahms is correct, is even counter-productive if its aim is to compel governments to change their policies to meet the terrorists’ goals. Unfortunately, such terrorism goes on nonetheless.


Ashley Thornton


References

Wired Magazine, “The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail”. 12 July 2007: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/
securitymatters/2007/07/securitymatters_0712

Max Abrahms, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work.” International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006).
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2006.31.2.42

Photo by "shoothead" retrieved from Flickr.com.

Cognitive Dissonance: Don’t Mention the War…

The way we perceive our world can have a significant impact on our decision-making and the way we interact with others. A recent Washington Post article reported on a psychological experiment carried out by Roy Baumeister that revealed one way our perceptions can influence how we view others.

In the experiment, Baumeister asked participants to describe a situation in which they hurt someone else and a situation when they were personally hurt. They were also asked to describe how much pain these incidents caused another (or caused them) and whether their unkindness (or the unkindness directed at them) was justified.

Come time to find out, when participants were on the receiving end of an unkind act (like a betrayal or a lie), they felt the act was “inexplicable, senseless and immoral” and that the pain caused by the act lasted a long time. (Surprise, surprise.) When these same participants were asked about the time they hurt someone else, however, they viewed their actions as “justified” and that they caused only brief pain.

This phenomenon, known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance, plays a major role in our professional and personal lives. It means that when we inflict pain on another person (or group of people) we recognize this is not the right thing to do. We also believe that we’re a good person deep-down, which is in direct conflict with our behavior. Thus our brains downplay the harm we’ve caused.

Alternatively, when we’re on the receiving end of a wrongdoing, we often can’t imagine seeing the situation from the perspective of the person that caused us harm. Who empathizes with a “wrongdoer”? In this case, it’s much easier to focus on the immoral and nasty nature of the acts against us.

An interesting aspect of these dissonant feelings, and how we subsequently behave, is that the process happens in our subconscious. Shankar Vedantum, a Washington Post columnist, observed that a perfect example of cognitive dissonance at work is the way Republicans and Democrats who supported the war in Iraq are now justifying it. Many Republicans refuse to believe there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (someone must have run off with them) and some Democrats seem to simply forget they supported the invasion at all.

According to one researcher, “[This] is the way memory works and the way the brain works. We ignore, forget or dismiss information that suggests we might be wrong. We rewrite our memories to confirm what we believe.” In this case, subconscious, dissonant feelings are influencing policymakers’ behavior and the decisions they’re making (or not making) in the present.

Like everyone else, disarmament diplomats also experience cognitive dissonance in their work. Awareness of this phenomenon is important because valuable time can be wasted while playing the “blame game” and trying to best justify our mistakes.


Ashley Thornton


References

Shankar Vedantam, “Bush: Naturally, Never Wrong”, Washington Post (9 July 2007), available online here.

Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, May 2007: Harcourt, 304 pages.

When intuition isn’t enough

Negotiators rely on experience and “gut” feelings when carrying out their work, as many people do in their day-to-day interactions. But relying on our intuition can allow hidden biases to influence our decision-making, leading to flawed outcomes based on misjudgments.

Researchers Keith Stanovich and Richard F. West have outlined two types of thinking: System 1 thinking, which is based on intuition, and System 2 thinking, which is based on logic.

System 1 thought is characterized by fast, automatic decisions that can be influenced by our emotions. When we’re rushing, juggling a lot of information at one time or multi-tasking, we tend to fall back on System 1 thought. We also rely on System 1 thought when we experience “cognitive overload,” something that happens frequently in multilateral negotiations due to the complexity of the task.

System 2 thought is slower and more logical, requiring conscious effort to weigh options.

We can’t, of course, always engage in methodical System 2 thought because we don’t have time. And, many decisions don’t require this level of brainpower. Complex negotiations, however, often do. Max Bazerman and Deepak Malhotra, both from Harvard Business School, recommend four strategies to keep our intuition-based decision-making in balance with System 2 thought. First, they recommend making a “System 2 list” about once a month, identifying the most important meetings or negotiations that require intense thought. “Such negotiations might concern lots of money, complex issues, multiple parties, key strategic partners” etc.

The second strategy they recommend is to keep time limits to a minimum. When negotiating gets down to the wire, System 1 thinking tends to take over – potentially foiling solid work that was accomplished earlier. Building some extra time into the agenda might help minimize the negative consequences of time constraints.

Bazerman and Malhotra’s third suggestion is to design negotiations to ensure participants have the opportunity to “rethink or restrategize” at regular intervals during the proceedings. This creates space to deal with unexpected information and to organize well-reasoned responses.

It also helps to distribute materials that may generate comments well in advance of a meeting, allowing participants to collect their thoughts without time pressure. Finally, they suggest adopting an “outsider” lens when considering the issues to be negotiated: an objective view is critical to overcoming biases like the overconfidence bias that leads some to greatly overestimate their chances of success in a negotiation.

Although adapting these suggestions to multilateral negotiations will present new procedural issues for those involved – like increased cost to governments because of an extended meeting, for example – creative ways to implement these suggestions may emerge if we give them some careful, objective and long-term thought – System 2 thought, in other words.


Ashley Thornton


References

Posting based on a short article by Max Bazerman & Deepak Malhotra called “When Not to Trust Your Gut” published 31 July 2006 in Working Knowledge.

Photo from flickr.com at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shutterscript/439085317/.

Drawing a circle around cluster munitions

Last Friday, in our last Disarmament Insight post, Patrick Mc Carthy noted the launch of a report by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Handicap International (HI) entitled “Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities”. It follows Handicap International’s preliminary report about the socio-economic effects of cluster munitions, “Fatal Footprint: The Global Human Impact of Cluster Munitions,” released in early November 2006.

To briefly recap, “Fatal Footprint” identified 11,044 casualties (3,830 killed, 5,581 injured) directly related to cluster munition use in 23 countries and territories. 98% of these casualties were reportedly civilians. With 91% of such casualties occurring in countries with incomplete or zero data collection, it’s also highly likely that many casualties go unrecorded, HI noted.

Authorities in only three of the 23 countries and territories in HI’s report collected data on casualties while in conflict. Moreover, many victims in high-use areas like Afghanistan and Cambodia go unreported altogether, and many others caused by unexploded submunitions aren’t differentiated from those caused by other explosive remnants of war. A lack of information about specific casualties caused by cluster munitions during or after strikes – like who was involved and what they were doing – is an issue for any comprehensive effort at casualty data collection. HI estimated that only about 10% of casualty information was available in its November 2006 report.

In its more comprehensive “Circle of Impact” report released last week, HI “calls for a ban on cluster munitions and for assistance to civilians”. The total number of casualties it quoted as caused by cluster munitions rose to 13,306 (5,475 killed, 7,246 injured) in 25 countries and territories. The overall focus of the new report is on the civilian victims and the broader socio-economic challenges presented by cluster munition use during, and long after, conflict. Some country-specific recommendations of ways forward were offered, along with extensive data analysis.

HI’s reports are cautious steps toward building a clear picture of what the effects of cluster munitions really are. It builds on useful work already done by other actors like the International Committee of the Red Cross, Landmine Action UK, Human Rights Watch and, indeed, UNIDIR. But as HI would be the first to admit, this picture is still very incomplete.

HI’s press-pack distributed to journalists in Geneva last week to accompany its “Circle of Impact” report noted its launch “just one week before states gather in Lima, Peru (23-25 May), to discuss a draft text of a treaty to ban cluster munitions and create a framework for cooperation and assistance to survivors and communities affected by this weapon by 2008”.

In public, HI and other NGOs are highly optimistic about the progress the Lima meeting will make in negotiating a treaty text to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. This needs to be taken with a grain of salt: while Peru, as chair of that meeting, has distributed a discussion paper containing a sample text of what a future instrument might look like, it seems unlikely that governments will have time to briefly discuss more than the broad themes of an agreement in just three days. More likely, negotiators won’t get down to textual brass tacks until later this year, either in Oslo in early December as the next chapter in the unfolding story of the “Oslo Process”, or (much less likely) in the context of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Whatever the caveats necessary on “Circle of Impact” because of the limits of data gathering, the report’s real significance is in its timing. Emerging only days before the Lima meeting, HI’s work reinforces the message about the seriousness of the hazard created by cluster munitions – something that humanitarian practitioners have been trying to get through to the international community for a while.

The “Circle of Impact” press release also notes that already such concerns have “resulted in at least 55 countries… taking initiatives towards a prohibition on cluster munitions.” This strikes me as premature. A lot is going to hinge on negotiators eventually defining what a cluster munition that causes “unacceptable harm” to civilians is in the terminology of the February 2006 Oslo Declaration (see previous posts). That’s ultimately a political question, despite legal and technical dimensions, and will need considerable skill to settle. Meanwhile, as the Lima meeting begins, some states participating recognise humanitarian concerns about cluster munitions and are willing to respond, but nevertheless view them as useful elements of their military arsenals. They don’t seem willing to give up cluster munitions with explosive submunitions entirely, at least not yet.

Watch this space for updates about work in Lima.


Ashley Thornton


References

The final report, Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities, and the HI Press Release are available here.

Photo of a B-1B Lancer unleashing cluster munitions (retrieved from Wikipedia).

What do gangsters and cowbirds have in common?

Apparently more than one might think! In a recent Washington Post article, I read about some research done by an avian ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. The researcher, Jeffrey Hoover, noticed that female cowbirds leave their eggs in the nests of other birds. These eggs and, eventually, the hatchlings were taken care of by the “host” birds.

Out of curiosity, the researchers removed some cowbird eggs from the nests of the other birds. Strangely, these nests were subsequently destroyed. Come to find out, the female cowbirds were keeping an eye on the nests where they placed their eggs and, if anything happened to them, they would destroy the nest in retaliation. The “host” birds raised the “foreign” hatchlings because this ensured some of their own chicks would survive – otherwise, “mobster” cowbirds killed all the chicks.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, says that the difference between humans and cowbirds is that the cowbirds aren’t thinking through their nest-trashing strategy. Gangsters like Laurence Fishburne as “Bumpy Johnson” in the movie Hoodlum certainly do: “You've been warned. Get ready for your final thrill. It's curtains, Dutch. The jig is up.”

It’s hard to know whether cowbirds think “the jig is up” before they destroy the nest of another bird or not. Nevertheless, this is an interesting example of how human behavior is not fundamentally different from animal behavior. In fact, De Waal argues that much of human behavior may have been hard-wired into us through evolution. That some behavior is “built-in” helps to explain how certain “intuitive” (and not necessarily effective) behaviors like tit-for-tat are used the world over and influence many aspects of social interaction and perception. If, as some behavioral researchers now think, we’re hard-wired to use intuitive (and potentially inefficient) strategies like tit-for-tat, we need to make an extra effort to get beyond our constraints and pursue more effective ways to interact – something relevant to thinking about negotiating.


Ashley Thornton


References

Vedantam, Shankar. “Behavior May Suggest We’re Not Only Human.” Washington Post, March 19, 2007, via Washington Post online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/.

Photos by Pete Baer show three speckled cowbird eggs in the nest of a red-winged blackbird and the same nest after the blackbird eggs were pushed out. Retrieved from www.flickr.com.