Lecture 10 - War, propaganda, and the psychology of atrocities

Question 1

What are the costs of war?

7

Answer 1

Fatalities
Injuries
Psychological trauma
Ongoing health problems in population
A sense of moral debasement
Destruction of infrastructure
Plants seed for future conflict

Question 2

According to Pinker, what is his stance on aggression and motives?

Answer 2

1. Predation – violence for resources
2. Dominance – violence to acquire social status, elicit
   submission
3. Sadism
4. Revenge/Justice – violence against previous
   transgressions; deterrent effect - violence against
   future transgressions
5. Ideology – “legitimate” violence for own or others’
   good (imperialism, religious wars). exporting an
   ideology

Question 3

List the material functions of war

7

Answer 3

To gain territory

To accumulate wealth

To rid territory of an ethnic or religious rival

To protect global economy

To fuel a component of the economy

To “export” one’s own ideological and/or religious
values

To “save” others
- torturing people the save them from themselves (the
infidels)

Question 4

What did Jeremy and colleagues suggest as reasons other than cost-benefit analysis for war?

Sacred values

Answer 4

Support for the decision to go to war is largely independent of likelihood of winning

When sacred values are at stake, people are less likely to want to compromise the more financial incentive they have

Sacred values and sacred objects light up parts of the brain associated with semantic rule retrieval … not utilitarian cost-benefit analyses.

If you offer material rewards for offering up something sacred to them, it makes it worse, and more likely to support violent rebellion against that gesture.

Question 5

List and describe the psychological functions of war?

Answer 5

(1) Provides meaning?
- While objectively negative events do not provide
anyone happiness, it creates a sense of community
and connectedness as they are involved in the
tragedy.
- For people directly engaged in war there
are psychological costs. But for citizens that are not
directly affected, but their countries are involved in
war, typically mental health problems are reduced,
and sometimes there is an increase in well-being
(as shown by spikes in well-being during wartimes)

(2) Some people love the drama attached to war. Is an
arena for extreme acts of bravery / macho / heroism

(3) Satisfies people’s need for conflict and domination?
(4) Helps build ingroup solidarity
(5) Causes people to rally around leader

Question 6

What is the relationship between war and ingroup solidarity?

Answer 6

When facing any extreme threat from the outside, there’s a tendency for people to “pull together” – this is a natural psychological reaction to threat from the outside, but in the case of war also has a strategic function in terms of defeating the enemy (“United we stand, divided we fall”).

In war, there is extreme pressure for internal critics to keep quiet.

Question 7

What did Ariyanto, Hornsey, & Gallois (2010) do?

Muslims/Christians/criticism and negativity towards comments

Answer 7

Muslim Indonesians were given a criticism of Muslims stemming from either another Muslim (an ingroup member) or a Christian (an outgroup member).

They read this criticism either after reading an article describing extreme Muslim-Christian conflict or after reading a control article (on soccer).

They found that in the ‘no prime conflict condition’ they saw the ISE, more negativity towards the comments when they came from Christians than when they came from Muslims.

However, when conflict was primed, Ps were much more negative towards ingroup critics. They are much more negative towards the Muslim critic after reading the Muslim-Christian conflict. Here we are seeing that increased negativity towards DISSENTERS.

They also showed that in the no prime condition outgroup members were de-valuated MORE than ingroup members (ISE). However, when conflict was primed ingroup critics were MORE de-valuated than outgroup critics.

Question 8

What is another relationship between war and ingroup solidarity?

Answer 8

Some would argue that this provides a constant incentive for leaders to keep their people on a war footing, because it boosts their support, and provides a ready-made excuse to vilify political opponents and dissenters as “traitors”.

Problem with this is:
(a) inhibits civil liberties and freedom of expression
(b) a degree of dissent and internal criticism is often
necessary in order to make good decisions (see
research on “groupthink”).

Question 9

What are the antecedents of groupthink?

Answer 9

Excessive cohesiveness

Insulation of group from outside

Lack of impartial leadership

Ideological homogeneity

High stress from external threat

Question 10

What are the symptoms of groupthink?

Answer 10

Feelings of invulnerability

Feelings of unanimity

Belief that group must be right

Information contrary to group’s position ignored or discredited

Dissidents pressured into conforming

Question 11

What is the Fortress myth?

Answer 11

The sense of invulnerability; the sense that this could not happen

Question 12

Wishful thinking and war

Answer 12

Temptation to back the conclusion that is MOST CONVENIENT FOR US; what we want to be real

Question 13

What did Bronfenbrenner (1961) find in relation to mirror images?

Answer 13

Bronfenbrenner (1961) travelled through the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, and found that Russians’ criticisms of Americans were strikingly similar to Americans’ criticisms of Russians.

Bronfenbrenner argued that, throughout history, major conflicts have been characterized by the SAME set of exaggerated and grotesque perceptions (“a mirror image in a twisted glass”)

ENEMIES THINK EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS OF EACH OTHER

Question 14

What did Bronfenbrenner find to be the 4 most common mirror image arguments?

Answer 14

1) They are the aggressors (We’re just defending ourselves)
2) Their government exploits and deludes their people

3) The mass of their people are not really sympathetic
to their regime

4) They can’t be trusted

Question 15

Peace plans - what did Maoz et al. (2002) do?

Peace plans are drafted through a lens of mistrust and paranoia?

Answer 15

They got Jews (who were aligned to Israel) and Arabs (who were aligned Palestine) to evaluate a peace plan that was attributed either to Israel or Palestine.

Positive scores means better for Israelis than Palestinians.

Negative scores means better for Palestinians than Israelis.

They found that both groups on the whole tend to think that the odds are stacked against them, REGARDLESS OF WHO IS ORGANISING THE PEACE PLAN, Jews think it gonna be more negative to Israel and Arabs think its gonna be more negative for Palestinians.

This was particular the case when the other group had drafted it.

They were all reading the same peace plan, just through a different lens

Question 16

List reasons for terrorism?

Answer 16

Lo-tech warfare … can be carried out by just a few individuals with limited resources

Can be highly destructive economically

Destabilizes the status quo

Can provoke over-reaction from more powerful enemy, thus winning over international sympathy / support

Can be effective in drawing attention to a cause (even though mostly negative)

Question 17

Terrorist messages and its effectiveness?

Answer 17

Young Australian participants were exposed to Osama bin Laden’s 2006 speech, urging Americans to ignore their President and to campaign for a truce in Iraq and Afghanistan. (pull out the war in AF

Ps rated the extent to which the article influenced their attitudes towards Iraq, Afghanistan and anti-terrorism efforts in general

-ve scores = agree much less after reading the article than before

+ve scores = agree much more after reading the article than before

After the reading the article, they found that support for anti-terrorism increased. So Ps were saying that ‘we need to do more to crush terrorism’. This that ‘back fired effect’.

However, in terms of the specific things bin Laden was talking about, Ps were more likely to say that we should withdraw from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Aggressive capitulation ==> amp up ur sense of aggression and negativity on this abstract non-sepcific level, but on specific things u capitulate

Question 18

List reasons for why people become terrorists?

Answer 18

Boredom / desire for adventure

Desire to use special skills (e.g., bomb making)

Social support / respect within enclaves (more likely to be the case for ethnic separatist groups such as IRA or ETA) (people’s extent to which they support terrorism is not correlated wit how much they pray, but it is correlated with how many religious events they went to)

A share in what may be a grandiose and noble social design

Genuine political and religious conviction (very typical of Western terrorists)

Often violent encounters with police / security forces motivate an already socially alienated individual to join a terrorist group

Question 19

What is the stance on terrorists and normality?

Answer 19

Terrorists are not crazy … “the outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality” (Crenshaw, 1981)

Question 20

According to Bandura, what are the 4 techniques of moral disengagement that a terrorist group can use to insulate itself from the human consequences of its actions?

Answer 20

Moral justification (imagine self as saviour of a constituency threatened by great evil). The means justify the ends.

Displace responsibility onto leader (Nazis defense)

Minimize / ignore evidence of suffering of victims (e.g., time bombs)

Dehumanization (infidel, puppets) - ur not really killing humans, but puppets etc.

Question 21

Functions of Propaganda

Answer 21

Early propaganda was clumsy, but nowadays it has become more subtle.

Propaganda is often focused on the internal audience – designed to legitimize war, keep up morale, maintain focus on enemy, crush internal dissent.

Propaganda is used to dehumanize the enemy. Such “dehumanized” depictions help people replace the basic human repulsion that we experience at killing other humans with insensitivity.

Propaganda can also be directed at the enemy to try to undermine support for their regime.

Question 22

With regards to dehumanization what does Nick Haslam say?

Answer 22

Dehumanization can involve…
- denying human uniqueness (which typically involves
construing others as like animals or monsters), or

• denying human nature (which typically involves
  construing others as like robots or automatons).

Question 23

List images the enemy is portrayed as?

Answer 23

Animals
Monsters
Death
Greedy
Criminal
Desecrator of women, children
Evil: enemies typically see each other as being driven purely by evil, whereas our own side is being driven by some higher good.

Question 24

What are the psychoanalytic perspectives of dehumanisation?

Answer 24

We split ourselves off from unacceptable parts of our own psyche, and project them on to the “other”, which then becomes a target for extreme aggression.

This process is accentuated in times of war, where the self goes through a process of depersonalization, ego depletion, and a reduction in the ability to think rationally. This explain why perpetrators of atrocities, once separated from their groups, are often able to reflect on their past actions with shame and remorse.

Some also argue that a lack of caring for the dead helps preserve one’s sense of “aliveness”.

Question 25

What are the ways propaganda can be perpetuated?

Answer 25

Presenting only one point of view / Selective presentation of facts

Presenting two points of view but characterizing one side in a simplistic way (“straw man argument”)

Screening the publication of images

Telling lies / failing to present truths

Question 26

What is the hostile media bias and what did Vallone (1985) do to show this?

Answer 26

Hostile media bias (tendency for people to think the news is biased against their side) is a robust effect, having been shown regarding analysis of high-level conflict in Middle East and Serbia, political reporting in Australia, and reports of the abortion issue in the US.

Vallone (1985)
Showed pro-Arab and pro-Israeli students extracts from news reports on the Beirut massacre.

Although all participants viewed the same material, both groups reported that the footage was biased against their side and produced by people who were hostile to their group’s cause.

Question 27

What did Ariyanto (2008) do?

Answer 27

They showed Muslims and Christians in Indonesia a passage from a newspaper describing religious conflict.

+ve scores indicate bias against Christians

-ve scores indicate bias against Muslims

Christian Ps perceived that there was a bias against Christians in the passage whereas Muslims felt that the newspaper was biased against them.

Question 28

What are explanations for the hostile media bias?

A partisan is a “member of an organized body of fighters who attack or harass an enemy, especially within occupied territory; a guerrilla.”

Answer 28

1) Cognitive explanation:
Partisans selectively ATTEND to and recall items of news that reflect poorly on their OWN side and selectively IGNORE or forget items of news that reflect poorly on the OPPOSING side.

Vallone et al. (1985) found that whereas pro-Arab participants who witnessed standardized news footage reported that 42% of references to Israel were favourable, pro-Israeli participants reported that only 16% of references to Israel were favourable.

2) Prior beliefs explanation: Prior beliefs about bias might operate as a heuristic people use when exposed to media reports. If people believe that the media is generally biased against their side, then they need not closely scrutinize the footage they are exposed to for bias; they simply assume it must be there.
3) Different standards explanation: People carry around with them a host of biased perceptions regarding their own groups’ values and behaviours. Thus, when partisans are presented with an objective and balanced view of events, they feel resentful because the media coverage does not converge with their own biased perception of their group’s superiority.