Confirmation Bias
By Stephen F. Eisenman
December 21, 202:
Information Clearing House
-- The
NYTimes’ recent series of articles
exposing the civilian cost of the U.S. wars
in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan should prompt
public fury. Hundreds of pages of previously
unpublished Pentagon documents refute claims
by military planners and politicians that
air strikes against Taliban and Isis
fighters have been conducted with concern
for the protection of civilians. In fact,
hundreds if not thousands more civilian
deaths have occurred than previously
acknowledged. Compounding these omissions
and evasions is the fact that even in the
rare cases when mistakes were acknowledged,
little or no investigation followed. No U.S.
civilian or military officials have been
punished, reprimanded, or even re-trained in
response to these myriad casualties, a large
percentage of which were children. And
almost no compensation has been paid to the
families of victims, or to survivors forced
to live with disabling injuries.
But essential as the reporting is, it
nevertheless sits uneasily with me. In fact,
I’m infuriated by it, in particular its
focus on “confirmation bias”: The
psychological tendency, as Times
reporters summarize it, “to search for and
interpret information in a way that confirms
a pre-existing belief.” Examples highlighted
in the articles include the mistaken belief
that “people streaming toward a fresh
bombing site…are ISIS fighters, not civilian
rescuers,” or that “men on motorcycles” are
fighters in formation, not just random men
on motorcycles. In another example cited by
the Times, intelligence reports of
an alleged car bomber driving a
“darkly-colored heavily armored vehicle”
were used by an “air support coordinator” to
justify destroying an unarmored blue car and
a white van following it. Seven people were
killed, all of them civilians instructed by
Isis to flee the area. One of the dead was
an infant child on his mother’s lap. That’s
not “confirmation bias,” that’s
manslaughter.
In Florida (where I live), manslaughter
(stat. §782.07) is defined as: “The killing
of a human being by the act, procurement, or
culpable negligence of another, without
lawful justification.” There are usually
under 100 cases per year of negligent
manslaughter in Florida. They involve
vehicular negligence, negligent handling of
a weapon by an adult, children playing with
guns and “34 other negligent killings.”
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Under federal law (62 stat.756):
“Manslaughter is the unlawful killing
of a human being without malice. It is
of two kinds:
Voluntary—Upon a sudden quarrel or
heat of passion. Involuntary—In the
commission of an unlawful act not
amounting to a felony, or in the
commission in an unlawful manner, or
without due caution and circumspection,
of a lawful act which might produce
death.”
Murder and manslaughter in the U.S. are
usually charged in state, not federal
courts. The exceptions include cases in
which a federal official is killed, when the
crime occurs on federal land, or during the
commission of a bank robbery.
Under the Uniform Code of Military
Justice, the crime (article 119) of
manslaughter is defined in a similar way:
1. Any person subject to this chapter
who, with an intent to kill or inflict
great bodily harm, unlawfully kills a
human being in the heat of sudden
passion caused by adequate provocation
is guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
2. Any person subject to this chapter
who, without an intent to kill or
inflict great bodily harm, unlawfully
kills a human being—
3. by culpable negligence; or (2)
while perpetrating or attempting to
perpetrate an offense…is guilty of
involuntary manslaughter and shall be
punished as a court-martial may direct.
Manslaughter is not a specifically
designated offense under international law.
But there are clearly defined “war crimes”
that correspond to manslaughter as defined
above. They are described under Article
Eight of the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court and include:
(iv) Intentionally launching an
attack in the knowledge that such attack
will cause incidental loss of life or
injury to civilians or damage to
civilian objects.
(v) Attacking or bombarding, by
whatever means, towns, villages,
dwellings or buildings which are
undefended, and which are not military
objectives.
(The U.S., along with with China,
Iraq, Israel, Libya, India, Qatar, and
Yemen, is not a party to the Rome
statute, though it does sometimes
cooperate with the Court.)
The recent NYTimes articles
reported case after case of the U.S.
military launching strikes certain to cause
“loss of life or injury to civilians”;
attacks that arose from “culpable
negligence” or lack of “caution and
circumspection”; and which lacked “lawful
justification.” Under state, federal,
military, and international law, the
planners and perpetrators of these bombings
are guilty of involuntary manslaughter or
war crimes. Admittedly, I’m no attorney, and
the applicability of the plain language
found in these statutes would need to be
tested in court. But the New York
Times’ writers and editors are
certainly not psychologists and neither is
U.S. Central Command spokesman Capt. Bill
Urban, who agreed with reporters that
“confirmation bias is a real concern.”
The term confirmation bias was coined by
British cognitive psychologist Paul Cathcart
Wason in 1960 following a series of
experiments in deductive logic. He asked
participants to propose the simplest rule
underlying the triple, 2-4-6. Most of them,
according to his subsequent
publication, failed to do so, supposing
for example, that the rule concerned even
numbers, or increases by two. In fact, the
underlying principle was simply ascending
numbers (for example, 1, 14, 32)
demonstrating that the participants were
trying to confirm their initial
impression – thus, “confirmation bias.” And
from there, the concept took off. It has
been tested against theories of heuristics,
Bayesian probability, information
processing, cost-benefit analysis, and even
evolutionary psychology. It is used today to
explain fake news, vaccine hesitancy, stock
market behavior, and now in the NYTimes,
manslaughter or war crimes.
In fact, Mason’s original data showed
that a significant number of his
experimental subjects
quickly deduced the rule underlying his
triplet, and most of the rest figured it out
on a second try. Follow-up research has
tended to prove that most people are fully
capable of challenging their initial
beliefs; indeed, many are eager to do so,
especially when they are rewarded for it. In
other words, if a colonel tells a sergeant
he will be commended for stopping drone
strikes against innocent civilians, such
attacks will likely diminish, possibly even
end. Confirmation bias as such – a supposed
in-born psychological tendency to follow
first impressions – simply doesn’t exist.
Decision making is always context specific
and contingent on social, historical,
ideological, and institutional factors.
In some cases, confirmation bias is a
valuable heuristic. As cognitive
psychologists
Klayman and Ha argued, “positive” bias
can be a useful and indeed necessary
methodology to quickly arrive at a decision,
especially in an emergency. If a middle-aged
man suddenly grabs his left arm or clutches
his chest and collapses to the floor, it’s a
good idea for somebody to check his
breathing, hand him an aspirin, and call
911. In the absence of other information,
what else can we do except draw upon our
previous experience and understanding? But
positive bias can’t justify the actions of
U.S. military and civilian leaders in
Washington or drone operators at the
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. If they
were to deploy positive bias in decision
making, they would refrain from using drone
strikes at all! As the NYTimes
report indicated, there were literally
hundreds of Pentagon records of deadly
airstrikes on civilian populations in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.
Confirmation or positive bias, properly
applied by planners and drone operators,
would warn them they were about to commit a
war crime.
In fact, the evidence of war crimes and
manslaughter committed by the U.S. military
in the Middle East, Central America and
Southeast Asia is voluminous. In Vietnam,
some 600,000 civilians were killed by
American forces, mostly from air bombing.
U.S.
sanctions against Iraq from 1990-1999
killed about 500,000 children. The current
estimate of people in Afghanistan
malnourished as a result of U.S.
sanctions there is about 60%. According
to the Cost of War Project of the Watson
Institute at Brown University, total
civilian deaths from all the post-9/11
wars is about 300,000, not including deaths
from associated displacement and disease. In
other words, the killing of civilians during
the last two decades by drone strikes,
bombings and other acts of war is an
entirely predictable and indeed expected
consequence of the policies pursued. They
are not the product of confirmation bias –
quite the contrary. They are the result of
imperialism, indifference, and racist
aggression. They are conscious acts of
manslaughter, that is, war crimes deserving
of the most severe sanctions our justice
systems — state, national, military, and
international — can deliver.
