Perception and Misperception in International Politics: New Edition

8 Perceptions of Centralization

Part III Common Misperceptions CHAPTER EIGHT Perceptions of Centralization U n it y and P l a n n in g A common misperception is to see the behavior of others as more cen­ tralized, planned, and coordinated than it is. This is a manifestation of the drive to squeeze complex and unrelated events into a coherent pat­ tern. As Francis Bacon put it: “the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.” And a recent study found that “People seem to be unable to accept the idea of a random situation. Instead, they try to read order into random data.”1 People want to be able to explain as much as possible of what goes on around them. To admit that a phe­ nomenon cannot be explained, or at least cannot be explained without adding numerous and complex exceptions to our beliefs, is both psycho­ logically uncomfortable and intellectually unsatisfying. We even resist explanations that involve several independent elements. This can be shown in three different areas. First, disjunctive concepts (i.e. those whose members exhibit one of several possible defining char­ acteristics) are hard to learn. Second, in explaining others’ behavior we minimize the number of causes that are operating by, for example, over­ estimating the degree to which this behavior can be explained by con­ sistent and powerful personality factors. Third, as Abelson has noted in his summary of an ingenious set of experiments, “individuals seeking an account of their own behavior seem to prefer unitary explanations to conjunctive explanations.” Thus if a man is told— wrongly— that his heart-beat rate increased when he saw a picture of a particular woman, he will rate her as more attractive than will someone who did not have this information. “The photograph viewers do not act as though they be­ lieve, This girl is really ordinary looking and my heart rate increase is due to something else.’ It is mentally much more economical to suppose 1 Quoted in Donald Campbell, “Systematic Error on the Part of Human Links in Communication Systems,” Information and Control 1 (1958), 363; Earl Hunt, Janet Marin, Philip Stone, Experiments in Induction (New York: Academic Press, 1966), p. 140 (similarly, Raymond Bauer notes that “the notion of ‘accident’ is alien to the enterprise of understanding. We feel impelled to give cognitive struc­ ture to all the data available to us.” “Problems of Perception and the Relations Between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 5 [September 1961], 225). that physiological and affective reactions are covariant.”2In these diverse contexts, as many events as possible are seen as linked to a minimum number of causes. As a result, most people are slow to perceive acci­ dents, unintended consequences, coincidences, and small causes leading to large effects. Instead coordinated actions, plans, and conspiracies are seen. This is a product not only of a psychological need but also of the law of Occam’s Razor— the preference for the most parsimonious explana­ tion of the data at hand. But while it is not naive or unreasonable to try to encompass most of another’s behavior under a very few rules, the more complete information available later usually shows that the be­ havior was the product of more numerous and complex forces than con­ temporary observers believed. And, more important from our stand­ point, the predictions that the highly oversimplified model yields are often misleading. The context of international politics shapes the content of the percep­ tions of unity and planning. An awareness of the implications of anarchy leads decision-makers to be alert for dangerous plots. If another’s be­ havior seems innocuous, they will look for a hidden and menacing sig­ nificance. They see not only plans, but sinister ones. Within society this perspective characterizes the paranoid. But since threats and plots are common in international relations, the perception that others are Machi­ avellian cannot be easily labeled pathological. It may have been extreme of Metternich, when he heard that the Russian ambassador had died, to ask “I wonder why he did that,” but the search for the devious plan be­ lieved to lurk behind even the most seemingly spontaneous behavior is neither uncommon nor totally unwarranted. 1 am not arguing that actors never carefully and skillfully orchestrate moves over a long period of time and a wide geographical area or claim­ ing that there is a simple way for...