Like many other anti-war types, I’ve joined the lament about the apparent lack of accountability for pundits who got it grievously wrong about Iraq. The familiar form of this complaint is that one ought generally to replace people who’ve been demonstrably poor at something with people who seem to be better at it. And that, in turn, has provoked folks like Megan McArdle to wonder whether it’s really clear that war opponents actually had more generally reliable epistemic machinery or just lucked out on this one. That someone made a mint playing lotto numbers from a fortune cookie doesn’t entail that they ought to be your financial advisor, after all.
But it strikes me there’s an entirely distinct reason for thinking a shakeup in the pundit class might be helpful: cognitive dissonance. Sociologist Leon Feistinger, who coined the term, had studied the puzzling behavior of a benign-seeming UFO cult. This group was relatively quiet and complacent, eschewing proselytizing, until their leader and prophets prediction of a sci-fi rapture, in which the faithful would be beamed up on a certain date, failed to come true. At that point they began a fervent outreach program, desperate to salvage their own past commitment, and the self-respect they’d now bound up with it, in the face of this new countervailing evidence.
For a more grim example, consider that psych 101 staple, the Milgram experiment, in which unwitting subjects were prepared to deliver increasingly powerful and dangerous electric shocks to actors posing as volunteers in a study of learning and punishment. It was crucial, Milgram concluded, that the subjects were instructed to proceed by tiny increments, from quite mild (fake) shocks to ostensibly lethal ones.
In part, of course, this is because it makes it more difficult to say that this is the point at which one must call a halt to things, even though it’s only a little further than the previous step. But there’s a slightly more subtle secondary effect that depends on looking backward rather than forward. For if I decide it would be wrong to push this switch, I have to reconsider whether I haven’t already acted wrongly by pushing the previous one, only slightly weaker. I might be blameworthy for not having stopped earlier. And the further I go, the greater the blame I’d have to accept if I decide it’s wrong to continue.
If you’ve ever found yourself suddenly, irrationally angry and resentful toward someone you’ve treated poorly, then you’re familiar with this phenomenon. If we’d have to reproach ourselves for mistreating someone who didn’t deserve it, we’ll often try very hard to convince ourselves they must have deserved it.
The cross-application to punditry should be obvious enough. Assume away the warping influence of ideology to the maximum extent possible, and stipulate that everyone occupying a perch at every major opinion rag or televised gabfest did their level best to assess the wisdom, necessity, and probable outcome of invading Iraq on the basis of the available intelligence. What happens as evidence mounts that the whole enterprise was and is an ill-conceived clusterfuck?
Well, if you’re an ordinary citizen who was largely taking his cues from others, you can probably change your mind and decide, without too much dissonance, that it’s time to stop hurling bodies at a doomed endeavor. And the swing in the general population’s opinion on the war has indeed been pretty dramatic.
For the pundit class, the stakes are higher. If providing foreign policy analysis is your bailiwick, you can’t easily appeal to the excuse that you were misled by others. And the more strongly you pushed the war in advance, or the greater your influence was, the more you’re apt to discover that changing your mind means accepting your share of the responsibility for what’s turned out to be a massive, futile waste of life. Moreover, as with Milgram’s switches, there’s a feedback effect: The further you go without changing your stance, the stronger the pressure to go further still, both because the body count keeps rising and because it becomes more plausible that you should have known better sooner.
Perversely, then, the pundit class, though presumably more attentive to new data, will be slower to be swayed by it than the general public. Worse, the more prominent and influential a pundit is, if this account is right, the greater will be her motivation to dig in her heels. So never mind accountability for bad predictions, maybe this is just an argument for establishing blanket term-limits op-ed columnists. Until Andrew Rosenthal calls with an offer, anyway. At that point, I expect self-interest will trump and cognitive dissonance I might feel about reversing course.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Dave W. // May 24, 2007 at 8:09 am
The McArdle thing is good practice for when the 9-11 coverups start coming out and the Truthers want some cred & power. You can already get a foretaste of the McArdle-ite respo:
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the Truthers, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that the particular coverups that have been exposed.
That is one reason that it is good for “conspiracy theorists” to make their best guesses, for the benefit of their correspondents, on Google-cached media. At worst, our guesses about the exact coverups are wrong. However, if we are right in some specifics, then we can forestall the expected McArdle-ite response.
Me, I go on record with: Flight 93 shot down; anthrax intended as a false flag attack where perpetrator(s) purposely not found; and WTC7 was purposely demolished (the Rosie Theory). I mean, really, I have no idea what the exact coverups were. like everybody else, my evidentiary bases are shoddy. But, if my specific guesses are correct, my future cred will be less assailable when it is time to say, ever so nicely, “I told you so.”
McArdle says that nobody she spoke to predicted Iraq correctly. I distinctly remember in December 2002 (pre-hostilities, post-inevitability of same) telling my friends (many who didn’t want to hear it) that Iraq would end up like Vietnam. How much more specific is she looking for, or was I the only one saying this back then?
2 thoreau // May 24, 2007 at 9:02 am
There’s another factor with pundits who want to insist that those of us who were right from the start really just got lucky in our predictions: If we were right about this, and it’s because we actually had some insights rather than just rolling 20 on 1d20, what else were we right about? What else are we right about now? And what else are they wrong about?
This could lead to all sorts of unpleasant conclusions.
3 Kevin B. O'Reilly // May 24, 2007 at 9:44 am
The folks who opposed the first Gulf War were “wrong” inasmuch as it was a speedily resolved conflict with few lost American lives. But were we wrong to oppose the war? Would we have been wrong to oppose the Iraq war if it had gone swimmingly? The point is not whether any particular unnecessary intervention goes well or poorly. The point is that if you engage in enough unnecessary interventions over time one of them is bound to go horrifically and cause us more trouble than it’s worth.
BTW, a lot of hawkish pundits have changed their minds — Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, Joe Scarborough, many others. There is a difference, too, between saying that we should stay in Iraq now to prevent further calamity versus retrospectively agreeing it was a mistake to go in. As for the folks who haven’t changed their minds — Irving Kristol, etc. — why would we expect them to? From their perspective the war still makes sense. Just as from my perspective the war still would have not made sense even if we’d withdrawn on May 1, 2003, and Iraq magically instituted New Hampshire-on-the-Tigres style government.
4 Kevin B. O'Reilly // May 24, 2007 at 9:46 am
I meant to say Bill Kristol above.
5 Dave W. // May 24, 2007 at 9:55 am
The folks who opposed the first Gulf War were “wrong” inasmuch as it was a speedily resolved conflict with few lost American lives.
Maybe. I had my doubts about the first Gulf War in that I harbored some suspicion that Iraq’s gripes with Kuwait were genuine to some degree, and that this good faith dispute was being used as pretext for the US to go in and take over the Iraqi government and let preferred companies extract the Iraqi oil on favorable terms. My feelings were decidedly mixed, though, and a big part of me felt that it is okay for the US to come to the aid of a country that is actually being invaded — that that is a pretty good causus belli.
I decided to sit back and see how the war went. I was glad the US didn’t depose Saddam Hussein then. It suggested to me that the war really was about the Kuwait invasion, and was not a pretext for an oil grab. The fact that the conflict was speedily resolved, with few lives lost on either side, was a lot of what told me that the Gulf War was not an oil grab. And that made me feel good about my country. Seriously.
6 matthew hogan // May 24, 2007 at 9:09 pm
It may be more simple: pundits please a base audience. If that base hasn’t changed they won’t. Except for a few more honest, brave, independently-incomed leaders among them.
7 Barry // May 29, 2007 at 10:42 am
Megan was a bit dodgy in that article. For example, if one checked the attitudes of the American people, the results were:
Strongly support the first Gulf War
Strongly support invading Afghanistan
Strongly oppose initiating the invasion of Iraq
(wording because ~1/3 of the American people switched *once the war was started*).
IIRC, the pundit class, as presented on TV was:
Strongly support all three wars.
In addition, there were a few senior military people who opposed Desert Storm, but nothing like the number who opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Even more in addition, the Secretary of Defense for Desert Storm (Cheney) did *not* basically tell his generals to stuff their planning up their *asses.