The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work

Although 2008 was a busy year on other fronts, we also completed the final publication of the current 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action' series, which is entitled The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work.

Although there have been recent stand-out achievements like the new 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), success has been hard to attain in recent years in other areas of multilateral disarmament and arms control work. Political problems exist, to be sure, but they're not the sole problem. Professional diplomatic or journalistic shorthand like "lack of political will" can take on the mantra of an explanation that obscures specific underlying problems - problems that also differ across processes. However, to quote Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2) in this regard:

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves ...

In our third volume, Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, we explored some of the potential obstacles that are worth considering with a view to improving negotiators' performance that aren't often noticed by many of those in the thick of disarmament work. For instance, obstacles to progress can be the unintended consequences of past practice, or they can stem from the complex challenges those involved must deal with.

It's also likely that aspects of multilateral disarmament practice compound cognitive challenges individuals face in managing their perceptions and interactions with others. This has been an abiding theme of some of the posts on the Disarmament Insight blog, as some readers know.

We were keen to examine some of these aspects in greater depth, and to try to give form to some of the disparate observations and insights we've gathered within the project over the last few years that weren't included in the first three DHA volumes or other published work we produced. And a key catalyst was a workshop we held as part of the Disarmament Insight symposium series in September 2007, when two of our speakers on the topic of complexity and arms control, Philip Ball and Paul Ormerod, discussed Scott Page's book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies.

Page's book contains a lot of useful generic insights about group prediction and problem solving - often in conditions of conflict, as well as cooperation - that prompted Ashley Thornton and I to consider how this might link up to some of the DHA project's research and observations about disarmament negotiating environments.

Drawing on the work of Page and many others from a range of disciplines, our little book makes the argument that while there is no way to ensure success in multilateral disarmament endeavours, practitioners can improve their chances by recognizing and harnessing cognitive diversity (or 'perspective diversity', in Page's parlance). This is effectively what humanitarian perspectives in disarmament processes such as the Ottawa process leading to the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the Oslo Process resulting in the CCM have shown.

And progress in multilateral disarmament needn't stop there. The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work discusses practical suggestions to help achieve this.

John Borrie

Body counting

The Atlantic Monthly online is running an interesting story in its April issue looking at the on-going - and increasingly nasty - debate over the grim question of how many Iraqis have died as a result of the March 2003 invasion.

Estimates of these deaths vary widely, from around 80,000 to as high as a million, according to the article. Estimates out there include a 2006 study in the Lancet, a British medical journal , research by the World Health organisation published in the New England Journal of Medicine and (not mentioned in the article) on-going documentation work by an independent research group based in the UK, Iraq Body Count.

Debate about methodologies and numbers is all useful in the name of thorough research (although it seems to have become personally rather bitter over Iraq). But whichever estimate proves to be nearest the mark, we should always remember the shattered human lives and the misery and insecurity behind the statistics - otherwise such concerns take on a tinge of ghoulishness. Even the lowest Iraq estimates demonstrate the civilian casualties are considerable, as they are in a number of other conflicts around the world not paid so much attention.

In addition, Megan McCardle, the Atlantic Monthly article's author, puts an interesting spin on the debate by introducing the notion of "anchoring effects" - well known thanks to cognitive scientists like Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, whose work on mental biases we've discussed before on this blog. Their empirical research, and that of others, has shown that human beings tend to fixate on numbers we've heard, even if they're arbitrary or wrong. These effects persist, even when the number has been discredited.

"We anchor most strongly on the first number we hear, particularly when it is shocking and precise—like, say, 601,027 violent deaths in Iraq. And even when such a number is presented only as a central estimate in a wide range of statistical possibilities (as the Lancet study’s figure was), we tend to ignore the range, focusing instead on the lovely, hard number in the middle. Human beings are terrible at dealing with uncertainty, and besides, headlines seldom highlight margins of error.

When information supports positions we already hold, we of course tend to accept it less critically; when the opposite is true, we can be quite good at shutting the information out. “Motivated reasoning” is a mighty force, as anyone who has argued politics in a bar at 2 a.m. can attest. Scientists have observed the process, using a functional MRI machine to peer into the brain while it processes political statements, and their report is unsurprising. When we are assessing neutral statements, activity is concentrated in the areas that control higher reasoning. But when we process statements with political valence, suddenly our emotional cortices light up as well. Indeed, some research indicates that the emotion precedes, and governs, the higher cognition—that logic is, literally, an afterthought.

But cognitive bias is not limited to partisans; we all anchor on the numbers we hear. The Lancet article’s central estimate exerts a gravitational pull on even its harshest critics, who seem to be mentally benchmarking their estimates by how much they differ from that 601,027. Others who are not motivated to disprove that number tend to orbit even closer."

Collecting data on conflict is difficult and, by necessity, rather imprecise, which is why in the domain of statistics methodology is so important. Relative margins of error can have huge impacts on data, as could the consequences of embedding spurious "facts" in the minds of the public and of policy-makers. Something we all have to bear in mind.


John Borrie

Picture by mattsmith569 retrieved from Flickr.com.

Gut Feelings

On the long flight back from New Zealand last week following the Wellington Conference on cluster munitions, I read Gerd Gigerenzer's recent book, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious.

The popular science and pop psychology shelves of book shops are packed with titles purporting to explain the mysteries of decision making, or how to get a leg up in business, love or just making friends and influencing people. Gigerenzer is notable, though, in the sense that he's Director of the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and was formerly a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He has academic credibility on these issues and, rather than offering advice, his book seeks to explain how human gut feeling operates and also describes some recent empirical research into how the human mind actually solves problems.

Gigerenzer has a knack (no doubt thanks in part to a good editor) for explaining constraints on how human beings see the world in cognitive terms in a way that's easy to follow and punctuated by entertaining examples.

Some of my colleagues - particularly social scientists for some reason - sniff at 'popular' science books or lectures. This mystifies me. Of course, one can't expect a book aimed at a general audience to always be as precise or technically nuanced as a scientific journal article or a volume of research - although the best writers often manage it. But in an increasingly specialised age, in which knowledge is often highly compartmentalized, it's unreasonable to expect readers to have a deep background or advanced education in all domains of research. As long as the writing is accurate, and not just interesting, books like Gigerenzer's are a means for literate people to keep themselves abreast of developments outside their domains of expertise in more depth than can be achieved by a newspaper article or television documentary. Otherwise, we end up as people knowing a lot about very little.

And good popular writing on scientific research often encourages useful cross-fertilization of ideas, even among so-called experts. Many developments have occurred as serendipitous connections in the web of knowledge. Cross-fertilization of ideas is so important we made it a mantra of our Disarmament Insight workshops in 2007, bringing in outside experts from fields like economics and economic modelling, physics and even primatology to work with disarmament diplomats and prompt them to make new connections.

Gigerenzer's book is a neat introduction to a field of research that strongly suggests we need a new way of seeing the way the mind works that recognizes we are often not rational optimizers. As he said in a recent interview for Edge (The Third Culture):

"Human rationality cannot be understood, I argue, by the ideals of omniscience and optimization. In an uncertain world, there is no optimal solution known for most interesting and urgent problems. When human behavior fails to meet these Olympian expectations, many psychologists conclude that the mind is doomed to irrationality. These are the two dominant views today, and neither extreme of hyper-rationality or irrationality captures the essence of human reasoning. My aim is not so much to criticize the status quo, but rather to provide a viable alternative."

Gigerenzer's book should be of interest to multilateral disarmament practitioners because it's a light introduction to problems of intuition and decision-making they face in the complex environments in which they operate.

For instance, many of the heuristics or cognitive rules-of-thumb we use in everyday life are "fast-and-frugal" - depending on very simple unconscious rules that are often products of our adapted minds. We use these in the way we frame problems (and their solutions) and in our social interactions, usually without thinking about it.

Acknowledging and mapping these rules-of-thumb has led, for example, to improvements in medical diagnostics for coronary care unit allocation - by devising protocols that leverage the intuition of doctors and specialist nurses, rather than baffling them with complex calculations that, empirically, are no more effective.

Gigerenzer also notes that in some institutional settings, when our intuitive rules-of-thumb are at cross-purposes with due process (he draws on various studies to look at magistrates' rulings in the English legal bail system as an example) a gap can emerge between what practitioners do, and what they think they're doing.

Similar arguments could be made in looking at some multilateral disarmament and arms control processes - something we described as "cognitive ergonomics" in our third volume of research. It's hard to achieve good outcomes in dysfunctional environments, especially if those working in such environments don't know any different. Which just proves the value of cross-fertilization of the kind Gigerenzer's short book offers.

John Borrie

Photo of Gerd Gigerenzer courtesy of Edge.org.

See Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, London: Allen Lane: 2007.

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.

Putting Predictions to the Test

As part of it's work, UNIDIR's Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project is currently working on a publication looking at some constraints on multilateral negotiations, and how some of these might be overcome or at least potentially mitigated.

One conundrum for policy makers in general is that it's very difficult to accurately predict outcomes of complex political and economic processes, and this has implications for their work. Multilateral practitioners are no exception.

Meanwhile, it's often very difficult to get a handle on how good "expert" political judgment is. But not impossible. A recent book by Philip E. Tetlock, an American psychologist, has revealed through a careful decade-long study that people who make prediction their business - people who appear as experts on television, for instance, or who are quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses - are, on average, no better than the rest of us.

Tetlock's research team asked various specialists to judge the likelihood of a number of political, economic and military events occurring within a specific timeframe (about five years ahead). Close to 300 specialists offered outcomes representing a total number of around 27,000 predictions. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed in his book, The Black Swan:

"His study revealed an expert problem: there was no difference in results whether one had a PhD or undergraduate degree. Well-published professors had no advantage over journalists. The only regularity Tetlock found was the negative effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none."

Ouch. But Tetlock's study didn't end there. His focus wasn't so much to show the real level of competence of experts, but to investigate how they spun their stories. Tetlock discovered various cognitive mechanisms of generating ex post explanation - mostly in the form of belief defence, or self-esteem protection.

Prominent were phenomena that psychologists call motivational biases, something Ashley Thornton has explored in previous posts on this blog. These include the self-serving attributional bias (the human tendency to blame unfavourable outcomes on external causes but take credit for favourable outcomes) and the confirmation bias (we tend to seek out and process information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs).

The New Yorker put it succinctly: "The experts' trouble in Tetlock's study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong."

Food for thought. More about Tetlock's work in future posts.


John Borrie


References

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005).

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, Random House, 2007).

To read a neat introduction to Tetlock's work in a review of his book in the 5 December 2005 edition of The New Yorker click here.

Picture by F33 retrieved from Flickr.

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.

"Cognitive Ergonomics"?

In 10 minutes of off-the-cuff concluding remarks from our 25 May Disarmament Insight symposium on ‘Human Security, Human Nature and Trust-building in Negotiations’, John Borrie talked about what he calls “cognitive ergonomics” and the relevance of the concept in thinking about the structures and procedures in multilateral negotiations.

Not to mention Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Formula One and World Rally Car racing ...

You can hear the podcast by clicking here.

Cognitive ergonomics is also discussed in his introduction to the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project's third volume of work, which you can access by clicking on the book with the pink cover at left.

Enjoy!

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.