The Ultimate Attribution Error

In his excellent blog, Glenn Greenwald made the following point about media coverage of the massacre of Afghan civilians by an American soldier:

Here's a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U. S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he “saw his buddy's leg blown off the day before the massacre,” etc.

Here's a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful terrorists.

Greenwald also points out that when the media try to understand possible causes of the bad actions of American soldiers, we don't confuse them with excuses for their actions. But when anyone suggests that Afghans who commit crimes may be responding to the illegal and increasingly violent occupation of their country, they are immediately accused of attempting to justify or defend terrorism.

This illustrates what social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew called the ultimate attribution error. Attribution refers to the process of identifying the causes of events. Humans are known to make a number of systematic errors when assigning causality. The ultimate attribution error refers to a systematic bias in the way we analyze the behavior of ingroups vs. outgroups, or friends vs. enemies. Good and successful actions by ingroup members are attributed to their stable internal dispositions, such as ability or motivation. But our own and our friends' bad or unsuccessful behavior is seen as a temporary product of a difficult situation or environment.

When analyzing the behavior of an outgroup, especially a disliked one, this tendency is reversed. Their bad behavior is seen as a product of their evil nature, while their good behavior is a product of a temporary, favorable, external situation. (Think of the tendency of prejudiced whites to attribute black success to affirmative action.) Needless to say, any unfavorable stereotypes we have of outgroup members will be maintained by these attributions, even in the face of behavior that might appear to contradict them.

Greenwald's point reminded me of a pair of related studies by Michael Morris and Kaiping Peng. In the first, they analyzed newspaper accounts in the New York Times and the Chinese-language World Journal of two mass murders that occurred in the United States, one committed by a Chinese man and the other by an American man. Each unit, or clause, that gave an explanation for the crime was classified according to whether it referred to a permanent disposition of the actor or a temporary situational influence.

The Times article showed the ultimate attribution error. American reporters attributed more causality to situational factors when describing the American murderer than the Chinese murderer. On the other hand, more dispositional traits were attributed to the Chinese than to the American killer. The Chinese-language newspaper did not show this bias.

The second study was an experiment. Chinese and American participants were given an article about either the American or the Chinese murderer to read. The articles were balanced in that they referred to an equal number of personal and situational causes of the crime. Afterwards, the participants were asked to rate the importance of the personal and situational explanations mentioned to in the article. As predicted, the American participants gave more weight to dispositional factors when rating the Chinese than the American murderer, and more weight to situational factors when rating the American than the Chinese killer. The Chinese participants did not show this bias.

This is a relatively conservative test of the ultimate attribution error, since there was no particular reason to think the American participants were hostile to individual Chinese citizens. In this study, the Chinese are an outgroup rather than an enemy. You would expect the contrast to be greater when we are at war with the outgroup.

The study shows that the ultimate attribution error occurs both in our individual judgments and in the mass media, but it doesn't address the chicken vs. egg problem. Do the media influence our judgments, do they pander to what they know are our preferences, or both?

Finally, you'll notice that in this study the ultimate attribution error is uniquely characteristic of Americans. I hope to discuss how and why Americans' attributions differ from those of most of the rest of the world's people in a future post.

Deja Vu

We've heard it so many times before.

As everyone knows by now, a 38-year-old staff sergeant in the Army went on a rampage the other night, breaking into the homes of villagers in Kandahar province and methodically killing 16 civilians, 3 women, 4 men and 9 children. Afterwards, he piled up some of the bodies and tried to burn them. Here's a report.

The alleged murderer was on his fourth tour in the Middle East, having previously been sent to Iraq three times. Ironically, his mission was to train Afghan troops in order to bring “stability” to the region. Here's some background on the perpetrator.

The Afghans want him to be tried in their courts and executed. We all know that will not happen. The accused will be brought back to the U. S. and tried in a military court. In all likelihood, he will be found guilty but mentally ill, and will waste the rest of his life away in an institution. As a consolation prize, the families—if there any of them left—will get “compensation."  I believe the free market value of an Afghan life is $1500.

Predictably, the corporate media are treating the event as more of a public relations disaster than a human tragedy. A New York Times headline read, “Civilian deaths imperil support for Afghan war.” And USA Today: “Killings threaten Afghan mission.” We're told that there will be an anti-American backlash, but as previously noted in this blog, it's hard to believe that support for the American occupation could have been any lower before this latest incident. But not to worry. Pentagon spokesman George Little said yesterday, “Despite what some people are saying out there, we are absolutely not changing our fundamental strategy in Afghanistan.” So there.

President Obama expressed his regrets, but this time he did not apologize. I guess he took too much of a tongue-lashing from the Elephant candidates when he apologized for the burning of the Korans. The President went on to say: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

But wait a minute. I don't know about people's “character,” but this is not an isolated event. American soldiers have gone on killing sprees before, sometimes cutting off fingers and other body parts as trophies. Civilians have been targeted by helicopter gunships and drone attacks. Night raids, where U. S. and NATO forces break into homes and attack people as they sleep, have been going on for 11 years. There have been as many as 40 raids per night, with the overall average being 10 per night. You bomb a bunch of children gathering firewood here. You incinerate a wedding party there. Pretty soon all of that adds up to a really pissed off population.

As for our “respect” for the people of Afghanistan, don't these words automatically elicit the image of American Marines urinating on their dead bodies?

These incidents are just another example of what a prolonged war of occupation does to the occupying troops. As with Vietnam and Iraq, this war has become an atrocity-producing environment. We've been fighting in Afghanistan for 11 years. Since you can't tell who the Taliban are, soldiers begin to see the entire population as the enemy. Over time, this perception has become more and more accurate, for obvious reasons. In order to justify what they are doing to the Afghan people, it is helpful for soldiers to see them as less than human. The extreme cultural differences between the occupiers and the occupied further encourages this racism. Do we have any right to be surprised by these atrocities?

President Obama has said that “all those responsible” will be brought to justice. If that's true, he might want to start by looking in the mirror. Then he might continue by arresting the people who sat or are sitting around the table in the war room at the White House. Biden and Clinton. Panetta and Petraeus. These people knew the consequences of their decisions. At the end of World War II, we insisted on holding commanders responsible for the actions of their troops.

I guess I'm expected to end a post like this by calling for a quick end to the occupation of Afghanistan. But we've said it so many times before.

Circle of Jerks

Let's start out by acknowledging the obvious.  When U. S. Marines urinated on the dead bodies of Afghan citizens, that was stupid. Really stupid.

The sight of pixilated penises brings back memories of Abu Ghraib. But I suspect this was a more spontaneous demonstration of contempt for the enemy. You'll recall that the Abu Ghraib atrocities were traced to explicit communications from commanding officers about how to interrogate prisoners, the paper trail eventually leading back to the White House. (For a thorough analysis of the situational forces influencing the Abu Ghraib defendants, I strongly recommend social psychologist Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect.)

Predictably, as soon as the golden shower video went viral, the Obama administration's propaganda machine went into full outrage mode. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was “deeply disturbed” by the incident. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressed “total dismay.” Not to be outdone, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable.” What hypocrites! Where's the outrage over more than ten years of U. S. occupation in which we have humiliated, terrorized, maimed and killed unknown but substantial numbers of Afghan civilians?

The administration also claimed the scandal would hurt our reputation with the Afghan people. But this claim assumes that, prior to the pissing contest, the Afghans had a high enough opinion of Americans to allow room for it to drop. Hasn't anyone at the White House heard of the floor effect?

Here's a promise to anyone reading this blog. If you happen someday to run across my dead body, you have my permission to pee on it as much as you want. I won't mind at all.

Let's hope the military isn't too hard on these guys.