The inflated self-worth of Western states makes theme particularly prone to
blame their failures on external factors
This week, my graduate students will be discussing the effects of cognitive
biases on foreign policy decision making. Previously, I wrote
about misperception. Today, I want to address a related cognitive bias – the
Fundamental Attribution Error – which has a similarly negative effect on policy
making.
The Fundamental Attribution Error describes our tendency to attribute our
own practical and moral failures to external factors while attributing other
people’s failures to their personal character. Conversely, we attribute our
successes and good deeds to our own character, and others’ successes to some
external factor.
If we succeed, it is because we are skillful, and if we do good, it is
because we are good people. If we do something wrong, it is because something
outside our control, and which we could not have predicted, intervened to
prevent our otherwise sensible and good plan from succeeding.
By contrast, if others succeed, it is because they are lucky, and if they
fail, it is because they are incompetent or evil.
For instance, once it became clear that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq
had gone disastrously wrong, its supporters did not acknowledge their
aggressive instincts, bad judgment, or any other internal characteristic, but
rather blamed external factors for their mistake:
- ‘Saddam lied about weapons of mass destruction, and so it was perfectly reasonable for us to be mistaken about them’;
- ‘Nobody could have known that those in charge of the operation would have been so incompetent’;
- 'Iraq turned out to be in a much worse state than we could possibly have predicted’; and so on.
By contrast, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, we attributed its actions to
the evil character of Saddam Hussein. We dismissed as irrelevant external
factors which might help to explain Saddam’s actions, such as misinterpreting
American signals about what was permissible, or genuine grievances about
Kuwait’s behaviour.
The Fundamental Attribution Error accentuates the misperceptions I wrote
about in my earlier post. It also prevents people from reconsidering faulty
policies. When a new Ukrainian government took over in February 2014, it
believed that it would bring an era of prosperity to Ukraine.
Instead, its seizure of power brought war. But the Fundamental Attribution
Error meant that its members could not attribute the tragedy which struck their
nation to their own errors. Rather, they had to attribute it to something
external – Russia.
Everything which went wrong was Russia’s (and particularly Putin’s) fault. That mode of thinking precluded any analysis of their own mistakes, and encouraged them to press on with the very policies which had produced war.
Unfortunately, liberal democracies which claim to pursue ‘values-based’
foreign policies may be especially liable to the Fundamental Attribution Error
due to their high sense of their own righteousness.
When their policies fail, and particularly when they fail in a manner which
is costly in terms of human life, such democracies are confronted with severe
cognitive dissonance because of the contrast between the negative consequences
of their actions and their view of themselves as ‘good’.
The Fundamental Attribution Error provides a way of eliminating this
dissonance. During his 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush promised a
‘humble foreign policy’. He never delivered on that promise, but the idea
remains a very sound one.
Source: Russia
Insider 04-02-2015
