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.

Let’s polish up the crystal ball

The World Future Society recently released the Outlook 2008 Report as part of the November-December 2007 issue of its magazine “The Futurist”.

This report includes some 70 forecasts covering developments and breakthroughs in technology, energy and the environment, international relations and society in general.

Among the thinkers who have contributed to “The Futurist” magazine in the past years are current climate change activist (and just-announced Nobel Peace prize co-winner) Al Gore, former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

So, what should we expect in the coming years? Here are the top 10 forecasts of the Outlook 2008 Report, some of which are directly relevant to human security and multilateral disarmament diplomacy:

1. “The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025”, as a result of globalization and technology innovations.

2. “Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.” Smart fabrics – such as colour-changing or perfume emitting textiles –, digital wallets and computer shoes are just a few examples of the new technologies that will radically transform the textile industry.

3. “The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both will replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.” According to Luttwak, terrorist attacks are a relatively minor threat to the United States that Soviet missile capabilities.

4. “Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.”

5. “The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. The twenty-first century could witness a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction.”

6. “Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century.”

7. “World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.”

8. “The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080”. The predictions indicate a 38cm increase of sea level by 2080. If this is the case, the number of Africans affected by floods is estimated to grow from 1 million to 70 millions.

9. “Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale assault on the Arctic”. According to Brigham, the control over arctic natural resources will be a major political challenge in the next decades.

10. “More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities”. Because of the ever-increasing complexity of the world, artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in decision-making processes.

Of course, “The Futurist’s” predictions could well be proved wrong. That’s the problem with prediction – hence we’re not getting around in jet cars or rocket-powered backpacks despite assertions that it would be the case by today a few decades ago. Conversely, few saw the Internet or the iPod coming.

Humans often make their predictions based on current evidence and past experiences. If there’s one thing we’re learning in an increasingly interdependent world it’s that plenty of social phenomena are non-linear and inherently unpredictable. In complex systems – and complex social systems in particular –, actions sometimes have unintended consequences.

So, while forecasts like those in “The Futurist” are stimulating, I’m sure we’re in for some even more way-out surprises it didn’t predict – both good and bad.


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

The top ten forecasts from the Outlook 2008 report by the World Future Society are available online.

Putting ourselves in the shoes of our enemies

Academics, it might be argued, have the luxury of thinking outside the box in a way that isn’t open to diplomats and policy-makers. Instead, the latter have to apply worst-case thinking because there are no guarantees about the current and future intentions of potential adversaries. But ‘playing it safe’ in this way ignores the possibility that others might be arming out of fear and not malevolence. And if both sides are arming out of fear and mistrust, the result could be a vicious circle of power and security competition no one wanted.


The fundamental problem, as the British historian Herbert Butterfield pointed out over half a century ago, is that diplomats “may vividly feel the terrible fear that [they] have of the other party, but [they] cannot enter into the [others] counter-fear, or even understand why [they] should be particularly nervous”. He added that it’s ‘never possible for you to realise or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have’. This is the security dilemma, a key research area of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies (DDMI) at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

The security dilemma confronts all groups in a condition of anarchy (defined as the absence of a central authority) and it arises from the existential condition of uncertainty that characterises all human relations. Analysing these kinds of situation was a major focus of international relations theory during the Cold War. Far from belonging to a bygone era, however, security dilemmas require further careful study because they’re still prevalent – and very dangerous – today.

Recognising this, the DDMI held a workshop in Aberystwyth on 4 May focusing on the ‘Nuclear Security Dilemma in Northeast Asia’, gathering together a diverse bunch of diplomats, academics, and researchers. One contributor to the workshop argued that what motivated North Korea in its nuclear ambitions is ‘fear – fear of the United States, fear of China, and fear of Japan’. Others maintained that North Korea has nothing to worry about because it knows the United States and South Korea would never attack it.

But the DPRK has not been so easily reassured. Building upon Butterfield’s core contention, three decades ago Robert Jervis highlighted the psychological dynamics that blind policy-makers to recognizing how their ‘own actions could be seen as menacing and the concomitant belief that the other’s hostility can only be explained by its aggressiveness’ (see the references below). The danger is that if the White House believes the DPRK knows that the United States is not a threat, Pyongyang’s arming must indicate aggressive intent. Other possible interpretations of North Korea’s motivations abound, underlining the challenges involved in seeing security dilemmas and the full range of responses clearly.

The negative consequences of groups and individuals failing to enter into the counter-fear of others is exacerbated if decision-makers operate with benign self-images that blind them to how their actions and behaviour might be seen as threatening by others. What’s more, the converse of a benign self-image is the attribution of a malign image to the character and actions of adversaries. Ken Booth and I call this ‘ideological fundamentalism’ in our forthcoming book on the security dilemma. Governments operating with such a mindset are blinded to the possibility that the other side might have legitimate grievances and security interests.

The security dilemma facing governments with peaceful intent is whether to risk a trust-building move in a world where there can be no guarantees about the current and future intentions of others. Even if actors can enter into the counter-fear of others, they might be so fearful that acting on this will place them in a vulnerable position should their trust prove misplaced, that they feel unable to take such a risky leap of trust.

This situation seems to characterise the nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. Should we assume the worst about Pyongyang’s motives and intentions and prepare for a showdown before they become too strong? Or does such a path risk a terrible war - perhaps one in which nuclear weapons might be used? Given the costs and risks of such a conflict, surely the prudent course lies in trying to reassure rather than provoke the regime in Pyongyang.

Diplomats and policy-makers need to understand how their adversary might be acting out of fear (remembering that ambition is sometimes in play), including crucially, the role that their own actions may play in provoking that fear. This was the challenge thrown down by Butterfield, and it guides the DDMI’s new project on ‘Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds’. Our workshop on 4 May was the first in a series aimed at exploring with practitioners the possibilities of exercising empathy of this kind: it remains to be seen whether decision-makers in the United States and the DPRK can make the leaps of trust that might lead eventually to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.


This is a guest blog by Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler. Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler is Director of the DDMI. You can also read a piece by Disarmament Insight contributor John Borrie on the DDMI’s website by clicking here.


References

Bleiker, R. (2005) Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Booth, K. and N. J. Wheeler (forthcoming 2007) The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, Palgrave: Macmillan.

Butterfield, H. (1951) History and Human Relations, London: Collins, pp. 9-37.

Collins, A. (2000) The Security Dilemmas of Southeast Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glaser, C. L. (1990) Analysing Strategic Nuclear Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Johnston, A. I. (2004) ‘Beijing’s Security Behaviour in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power?’, in J. J. Suh, P. J. Katzenstein and A. Carlson (eds), Rethinking Security in East Asia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 34–97.

Kydd, A. H. (2005) Trust and Mistrust in International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suh, J. J. (2006) ‘Producing Security Dilemma out of Uncertainty: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis’, Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies, Cornell University, October 2006.

More about the DDMI’s work on trust-building, including a rapporteur’s report about its recent workshop, can be found here and here.

Photo retrieved from Flickr.

The West Wing

I argued in this blog's previous posting on 7 March that in multilateral negotiating situations, ‘nice but retaliatory’ strategies like Tit or Tat run into difficulty because it’s very difficult to discriminate against non-reciprocators (See "You scratch my back ...).

One reason for this is that groups are much more prone to defectors and free riders the larger they become. It’s hard to identify those we should retaliate against. A recurrent theme in The West Wing, an American television series about the life of a fictional U.S. President, is the difficulty, not so much in retaliating militarily against terrorist attacks, but in identifying and locating the perpetrators without killing lots of blameless civilians. Israeli military forces encounter this problem each time they retaliate against attacks by the many Palestinian factions and splinter groups pitted against their occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. In real life it’s hard to come up with strategies that strike the right balance between punishing defectors and maintaining effective cooperation. And it’s the problem in every multilateral negotiation in which some countries hitch their pet prerogatives to its coat tails, however marginal in relevance or unhelpful their riders prove to be.

The second problem is that multilateral negotiations aren’t iterative in the sense that, say, a game of Monopoly is, in which each player takes a consecutive turn repeatedly until the game is over. Negotiators almost always face uncertainty. They’re continually trying to assess not just their relationships, but the level and reasons for cooperation or defection between others at the same time. There are no neatly divided turns.

A third issue is that players aren’t equal in relative importance. Their defection or cooperation with us or, indeed, to each other, varies in significance. We may take a more (or less!) tolerant view of an ally defecting, for example, than of an adversary doing likewise. Moreover, how does one reliably tell between defections that are tactical (and perhaps stepping stones in the longer run to greater cooperation) from those that are profoundly bad for our interests?

It’s easy to see how misperception and errors can occur among negotiators, even if we set aside political will or a negotiation’s substance. The irony is that, at the same time, the rational intellectual difficulties created by uncertainty inherent in multilateral negotiations make the prospect of falling back on intuition more attractive. But intuitions may just compound matters if, say, you listen to your gut instinct to punish another negotiator or delegation and you’ve misread the situation.

All of this sounds difficult to overcome – and it is. It highlights the skill and experience necessary to negotiate effectively in multilateral situations. In other words, it’s what diplomats, the supposed experts in navigating this headache-inducing environment, are for.


John Borrie