How will Iranian President Hassan Rouhani respond to further negotiations? We’ll just have to see! (REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)
The
Republican majority in the U.S. Congress led by House Speaker John
Boehner, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
President Obama are engaged in a vital debate on how to deal with the
Iranian nuclear program: Should we threaten Iran with more sanctions,
supposedly the only thing that has brought it to the table? The
congressional majority and Netanyahu think so. The president argues that
we should try to reach an agreement before we undermine the negotiation
process with threats.
As a social scientist, I tried to come up
with an objective way to determine who is right, independent of all the
fears, suspicions, preconceptions, and lack of information that
inevitably cloud our judgment on such complex matters. So I designed an
experiment.
I tossed a pair of coins 50 times each. To avoid
pro-negotiation bias, I used American coins rather than coins from Iran
or any country that currently has diplomatic relations with Iran. I
scored two heads as conciliatory, one head and one tail as neutral, and
two tails as threatening. When the coins were threatening, I told them I
was cutting off their access to the international banking system. When
they were neutral, I reserved judgment. When the coins were
conciliatory, I agreed they could have 10,000 centrifuges.
Here are the results:
The
coins’ threatening behavior forced me to impose sanctions a total of 12
times. When I demonstrated strength and determination by imposing
sanctions, the coins came to the table 11 out of 12 times, 92 percent.
But the one time they resisted, another round of sanctions put them
under so much pressure that they had no choice but to comply.
The
coins’ pretense of reform tricked me into making a generous concession
10 times. But they misinterpreted my willingness to compromise as
weakness and reverted to aggressive behavior eight out of those 10
times! Twice their behavior seemed at least to remain neutral, but the
coins were not sincere. They soon went back to their old ways. Once I
had to re-impose sanctions immediately.
The fact that an
inanimate object behaving randomly produces results so similar to how
Boehner and Netanyahu perceive Iran’s actions should lead us to question
their inference that Iran responds only to pressure. Did the coin
respond only to pressure, or is something else at work?
One
Israeli-American has the answer: Professor Daniel Kahneman of Princeton
University, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his
studies of how people frame options and make decisions.
Kahneman
shows that a statistical phenomenon called “regression toward the mean”
systematically biases perceptions in favor of sanctions rather than
incentives as means to change behavior, even when no emotional issues
are involved, as with the coin. To put it simply, any extraordinary
event tends to become more ordinary the next time it occurs for no
reason other than chance. Episodes of very bad performance are usually
followed by more average and therefore better performance. Episodes of
excellent performance are also usually followed by more average and
therefore worse performance.
Kahneman illustrated this with an
incident that occurred when he was lecturing to flight instructors in
the Israeli Air Force. Based on his extensive research, including many
controlled experiments on how to change behavior, he argued that praise
is more effective than punishment. One of the instructors contradicted
him, saying that in his experience when he punished trainees for bad
performance, they improved, but when he praised them for good
performance, they became overconfident, and their performance
deteriorated. Israeli air force pilots, who might end up bombing Iran if
the negotiations fail, have more in common with Iran than one might
think. Iran and Israeli Air Force pilots both respond to sanctions and
incentives, but the random variations that also affect their behavior
tend to make us over-estimate the effect of sanctions and underestimate
the effect of incentives. Kahneman and his many collaborators have
compiled masses of experimental evidence documenting how regression
toward the mean biases judgment in favor of sanctions and against
incentives in a range of situations.
Of course my narrative about
the coins’ behavior, while far more riveting than a list of results of
coin tosses, infers intentions from behavior, though coins have no
intentions. But if Iran or any hostile entity behaved as the coin did,
many defense strategists would infer precisely those motivations from
behavior that could result from many other factors, even chance The
tendency to explain negative behavior as the result of hostile intention
rather than circumstance or other factors is called the “fundamental
attribution error.” This error also blinds actors in situations of
conflict to possibilities of cooperation.
The “illusion of
transparency,” another finding of Kahnemann’s confirmed by laboratory
experiments, reinforces the fundamental attribution error by discounting
how our actions are perceived as threatening by others. We view the
sanctions against Iran as a response to Iran’s hostile actions and
intentions. Hardliners in Iran view the sanctions as proof of our
hostile intent – our determination to overthrow or weaken the Islamic
Republic, regardless of its nuclear policies. Hence hardliners on both
sides see little reason to make concessions.
Most dangerous of
all is what Kahneman calls the “positive illusion”: “biased
overconfidence [that] raises the probability of violent conflict
occurring and of deadlock in negotiations (when the parties overestimate
their bargaining position or ability).” The belief that threatening
more sanctions will force Iran to concede its core interests depends on
precisely such an overestimation of our bargaining position. Our Iranian
negotiating partners have told us it will end the talks, and the
current political tensions in Tehran suggest they are not bluffing.
Even
worse, the positive illusion effect makes Netanyahu and Boehner
overconfident about the effectiveness of military strikes on Iran.
Military strikes will not destroy all Iran’s installations. They will
not destroy its knowledge, no matter how many Iranian scientists Israel
assassinates. Military action will, however, destroy the coalition we
have formed and assure that Iran will accelerate building its nuclear
capacity with international support, even if after some delay. Military
action would have consequences far worse that a weak deal or even
containment of a nuclear Iran. Only illusions about its success keep it
“on the table.”
Sanctions, along with many other external and
internal factors, probably contributed to the mood of the Iranian people
that made them vote overwhelmingly for President Rouhani and also made
it impossible for the establishment to deny him victory. Rouhani does
not argue that Iran has no choice but to give in to pressure: instead he
proposes a different vision of Iran’s relationship to the world, a
belief in the potential for cooperation. He faces a powerful
establishment that sees the U.S. with pretty much the same cognitive
biases through which Boehner and Netanyahu view Iran. That establishment
will interpret more threats as proof that the U.S. will not remove
sanctions whatever Iran does. It is in our interest to prove Rouhani
right by giving him the chance to prove the hardliners wrong. Otherwise,
we might as well settle matters of life and death by flipping coins.