Cognitive biases and the framing of the Hamas-on-Israel war
The way that people conceptualize the war, and how it could be ended, is impacted by a number of well-known cognitive biases. Unfortunately, they all operate to Hamas's advantage.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail And to a cognitive psychologist who taught a course about false or weird beliefs for more than 20 years, signs of the effects of cognitive biases on people’s judgments are everywhere – even in the ways in which people talk about the war by Hamas against Israel. In this posting I’ll discuss some of the ways different cognitive biases may affect judgments about the war and some take-away lessons about ways of framing the war narrative that might mitigate some of the Hamas advantage.
But first – a caveat/disclaimer:
I am not contending that the cognitive biases I’ll discuss here can account for anything beyond a very small percentage of the variance in how different people view this conflict. Religion, ethnicity, the influence of peers, the degree to which one has adopted the vile and morally bankrupt “oppressor - oppressed” ideology that dominates discussions on elite university campuses (a perspective that condemns members of an “oppressor” group for even the slightest of unintentional slights, while forgiving members of an “oppressed” group for even the most heinous and barbaric of violent actions) – these factors clearly account for most of the individual differences in judgments about the war, and an understanding of cognitive biases likely adds only a very modest amount to our understanding of why people believe what they believe about the war.
So – with that in mind – some thoughts about cognitive biases and the framing of the Hamas war narrative.
Availability
When people are asked how many unarmed African Americans in the U.S. are killed by police each year, most people wildly overestimate the real number – for the fairly obvious reason that when police do kill an unarmed African American victim, the event receives a huge amount of media attention, and as a result, examples of such events come easily and quickly to most people’s minds when they are asked to estimate the total number. This process of basing a judgment of any kind on the ease with which instances of a relevant type of event come to mind is called the Availability Heuristic.
Availability itself is affected by a number of factors, including the frequency of presentation of information about particular kinds of events, the visual vividness of those presentations, and the emotional impact of the presentations; in general, the more frequently, vividly, and emotionally impactful the presentation, the more easily instances will come to mind and the greater will be their impact on our judgments.
How might Availability affect judgments about the Hamas war on Israel? Over the past almost three months since Hamas broke the existing ceasefire and attacked Israel, media reports have been dominated by extraordinarily vivid and emotionally impactful video footage of the decimation of areas of Gaza by Israeli missiles and by images of injured Palestinian women, children and babies. In contrast, the few images of Hamas atrocities that were presented soon after Oct. 7 have faded from most people’s memories, while vivid images of suffering by Palestinians is being shown day after day after day. As a result, it is not surprising that it is images of the suffering of Palestinians that most easily come to mind when people think about the war, biasing judgments about the war toward sympathy with Palestinians and condemnation of Israel.
What can Israel, and those supportive of the world’s sole Jewish state, do to counteract the naturally biasing effects of availability on people’s judgments about the war? In this case – probably not very much. The Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that started the war was temporally limited while there are new images of the suffering of Palestinians to be shown by the media every day. Hamas is also quite masterful at making particularly emotionally impactful images available to be used by the media reporting on the war, while the media has shied away from showing many of the images of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 – in part, ironically, because some of the images are simply too emotionally disturbing to actually be shown on television. But the more that Israel can do to direct media attention onto the plight of the hostages, and the more that personal reports of the horrors of Oct. 7 can be provided to the media, the more that the pro-Hamas biasing produced by “availability” may be somewhat mitigated. It would also help, of course, if the media were honest about the constraints placed on their reports by Hamas itself, and on the bias of some of their reporters in the field (some of whom have actually been found to be complicit in the attacks by Hamas).
Cognitive Mutability
A host of different types of judgments that people make about events – particularly causal judgments and, in the case of negative events, judgments of blame – are based in part on our ability to engage in counterfactual thinking, that is, on our ability to imagine events either changing or as having occurred in a manner different from the way in which events actually played out. So, for example, when thinking about the Hamas war on Israel, causal and blame judgments will be affected by the likelihood that we reflect on the counterfactual state of affairs in which the war (or some elements of the war) did not take place, and when thinking about how the war may end, we necessarily also think about what could change the current situation into a different, or currently counterfactual, one.
Imagining a counterfactual reality requires mentally changing one or more aspects of the sequence of events that has actually occurred, and the process of focusing on particular aspects of the situation when doing so depends in part on the “cognitive mutability” of those different elements of the situation. Psychologists who have studied counterfactual thinking (and cognitive mutability of different aspects of events) have identified a number of cognitive biases that affect which aspects of a situation we are most likely to cognitively change (or “mutate”) – resulting in biases in our causal and blame judgments.
Temporal Order Bias
In general, when people think about how a situation could be different from what is actually occurring, they tend to focus more on changes to more recent contributors to the current situation than on less recent elements of the situation. In essence, the less recent contributors to the current situation are mentally treated as the default context upon which a more recent action or event operated. To take a very simple example, during a shootout in soccer (football) in which each team takes 5 shots, if the score after the first four shots is 3-3 and then the final player on one team scores while the final player on the other does not, people are likely to focus on the final players’ actions as the most significant causes of the ultimate outcome, while the 3-3 score that existed when the final players took their shots is thought of as the unmodifiable default context that set the stage for the final shots.
In the case of judgments about the Hamas-on-Israel war, when people think about how there might currently be a situation without fighting, there is a tendency for people to think more about how Israel could stop its current attacks rather than on Hamas having never started the war to begin with. Of course, there is no way to frame the situation such that the Israeli response does not occur after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. However, one way of presenting a narrative that places more of a focus on the Hamas attacks rather than the Israeli response would be to consistently talk about the ceasefire situation that was in place on Oct. 6 as the starting context within which all future actions have occurred. Doing so would place more attention on the Hamas attacks as the actions that started the war rather than as having established a “default” situation, and would also help in directing discussions of how a new ceasefire could occur on the need for Hamas to release all hostages, thereby returning the situation to what it was on Oct. 6 rather than Oct. 7. Nonetheless, as was the case with “availability”, the nature of the conflict is such that the temporal order bias operates quite naturally to the advantage of Hamas.
- Omission Bias: Greater cognitive mutability of actions vs inactions
In general, when people think about how a situation could be different, they focus more on the possibility of changing or undoing an action rather than on adding an action that has not occurred. This bias affects not just our judgments of causality, but our experiencing of the emotion of regret as well; in general, people experience more regret after an action results in a negative outcome than when an inaction results in the same negative outcome, and a similar bias in the anticipation of regret can result in an unfortunate bias in decision-making. This bias, for example, has been found to be a contributor to vaccine hesitancy; the fear on the part of parents of causing harm to their child through the action of having their child vaccinated can be greater than their fear of causing harm through the inaction of not vaccinating their child – even when the objective statistical likelihood of harm is much greater in the case of a failure to vaccinate.
In the case of the Hamas-on-Israel war, this cognitive bias may help explain why, when people think about how the war could end, there is a clear tendency for people to focus on Israel ceasing its fighting (a change from action to inaction) rather than on Hamas releasing the hostages (which would involve a change from inaction – not releasing the hostages – to action). Jerry Coyne took note of this bias in one of his postings on his Why Evolution is True blog, writing: “What I do know is that Israel is determined to wipe out Hamas, and that the best thing for everyone would be for Hamas to surrender, lay down its weapons, and release the hostages. That would at least end the killing, and then cooler heads can figure out what to do. Those who call for a cease fire should be calling for Hamas to surrender, and I don’t understand why they don’t ask for that.”
Omission bias may help explain this bias in many people’s thinking about how the war could end. And in the case of judgments about what could end the war, omission bias unfortunately works together with another cognitive bias – controllability – to bias our focus toward thinking about what Israel could do to end the fighting rather than on what Hamas could do.
- Controllability
When engaging in counterfactual thinking (thinking about how a situation could be different from what is actually occurring), people also tend to focus on the degree to which they conceptualize an element of a situation as more or less controllable. It certainly makes sense, for example, to not focus on something that we judge to be beyond anyone’s control when reflecting on how a situation could be changed.
An intuitive understanding of the role of controllability in people’s judgments is clearly at play when Hamas apologists make statements like “Well, what do you expect when people have been oppressed for so long?” Essentially, what is being argued here is that the Hamas terrorists were not making a fully controllable decision when they decided to massacre Israelis; instead, it is being argued that the locus of control for them was completely external and they were merely reacting, in an almost automatic way, to the situation they found themselves in. The IDF, in contrast, is viewed by Hamas apologists as making active and controlled decisions. Accordingly, blame for the current war is placed, by these supporters of Hamas, on Israel, not on Hamas, and responsibility for ending the war is also focused on what Israel could do rather than on what Hamas could do.
The ridiculousness of this argument is the central focus of one of Tom Friedman’s recent NYT columns. Friedman notes that after Israel completely evacuated from Gaza in 2005, there was the potential for Gaza to develop into a peaceful and economically prosperous region. However, instead of choosing peace and prosperity, Hamas was voted into power and chose to focus on eliminating Israel and killing Jews rather than on the well-being of the inhabitants of Gaza. To claim that Hamas and the residents of Gaza are without agency is to infantilize them, and as have others, Friedman refers to the American college-student apologists for Hamas as useful idiots.
However, even those who are not supporters of Hamas can easily fall prey to the effects of controllability bias when thinking about how the war could be ended. For example, a few weeks ago, Stephanie Ruhl (on her show The 11th Hour on MSNBC) was discussing with Jonathon Greenblatt (director of the Anti-Defamation League) how the war might be ended. When Greenblatt mentioned Hamas releasing all the hostages and ceasing its firing of missiles at civilian targets in Israel, Ruhl was obviously surprised by his answer, and rather dismissively (and with a laugh) said “Well Hamas isn’t going to do that”, and then directed the conversation onto what Israel could do. Apparently, Ms. Ruhl accepts that Hamas cannot, or simply will not, change its behavior, whereas she perceives Israel as the one party to the situation with sufficient agency to be held responsible for ending the fighting.
Given the effects of Omission Bias and Controllability Bias, how might the narrative of how the war could end be re-framed to focus more on Hamas? First, the holding of hostages could be described in action, rather than inaction, terms. When discussing the hostage situation, Hamas could be described as CHOOSING to hold onto the hostages (making the holding of the hostages an action rather than an inaction). One could also talk about Hamas needing to no longer hold onto the hostages rather than as releasing the hostages. In addition, when discussing responsibility for the war, and responsibility for ending the fighting, the focus could be on the controllable ACTIONS of Hamas on Oct. 7 – followed by the automatic – as in “there were no other options” – response by Israel. More generally, the more that Hamas is spoken of as the primary actor and decision-maker, while Israel is described as responding in a fully normal and almost automatic way, the more the narrative may operate to help people understand that Hamas is not without agency, and that Hamas has the power to end the fighting at any time by no longer holding the hostages and by ceasing their attacks on the IDF and on Israeli civilians.
Summary
It can be challenging to counter the natural advantages Hamas has when framing the narratives related to the Hamas-on-Israel war. Along with widespread antisemitism and the effects of the shallow and ultimately immoral “oppressor/oppressed” ideology, Hamas benefits from the effects of availability, temporal order bias, omission bias, and controllability bias in the framing of peoples’ thinking about the war. But there are ways of reframing the narrative to place more responsibility on Hamas for both starting the war and for doing what is necessary to end it – including always referring (quite properly) to the situation not as the Israel-Hamas war but as the Hamas war on Israel.
Dear Professor Guttentag,
I always read your posts with great interest. But I believe that in this case, as you observe in the beginning, the various biases you mention constitute a tragically small part of how the war is framed, and the hopes of "reframing the narrative" to clear it from such biases are vain, and only point to how smart we are in identifying how things should be in a perfect world.
The world is unfortunately far from perfect and seems, in this cycle, to be getting worse by strides.
Wars are fought on two levels: on the field, in battle, blood and destruction; outside the strict theatre of hostilities, through propaganda.
"Reframing the narrative" is a propaganda tool that the staunch supporters of Israel use and have been using all along; and it does very little difference as it preaches to the choir. The rest of communication is not interested in "reframing the narrative", because it is held captive by a worldwide view -- which spreads much wider than the West, for several reasons of national and cultural interests -- in which Israel is a proxy of the West and therefore guilty by association of all the old evils (common to humanity) with which the West is today singularly and uniquely identified.
I spent the last 3 months, for very personal reasons, studying more of the history of the XX century than I ever wanted to (my field is Medieval History). The tangle is so ugly at this point that one despairs it will ever be unravelled without a massive amount of death and destruction.
There is no amount of stategising on communications that the friends of Israel (Hebrews and not) can do to help -- and truly counterproductive to insist on the "war of Hamas on Israel", because the war of Hamas on Israel is just the last instance of the war of a certain section of the Arab world on Israel, which has been going on since the foundation of the state of Israel and has become a building block of a (not exclusive but today dominant) Arab identity natively connected to fundamentalist Islam.
When war breaks out on the ground with movements of troops, it is war between two sides. It is the Hamas-Israel war because those are the two sides that are fighting. WWII was the war of the Allies against the Axis powers -- and there is little doubt about who started it, but also little sense in calling it the "war of the Axis against the Allies".
And again, propaganda. Hamas has an advantage because it does not field regular troops, because it hides behind the civilian population, because it gathers its fighters in a network of tunnels that span miles and centre their hubs under public buildings. This causes the war, after the Israeli regular troops are on the ground, to be a war of whack-a-mole against a slippery enemy that hits and disappears, like in textbook guerrilla war, leaving the civilian population to bear the brunt. All worsened by the cramped up space.
And the burden of collateral damage becomes hard to bear, and there is no just war nor savvy propaganda that can lift it. We bombed parts of Germany flat in WW2 and we are still questioning about choices and the responsibility for 400000 civilian deaths -- it is not an easily solved moral problem. And today, we can choose to say that the Palestinians, as a population, deserve it (just as the enemies say that Israel, or even the Jews, as a population, deserve the war that has been waged on them for decades though with less horrid attacks than 10/7), because the Palestinians voted for Hamas, because they seem to support Hamas, because they have not risen up to bring down Hamas. But it is a choice, and a choice that not many can make and feel well with, if we have a modicum of human empathy beyond what your science calls the in-group.
So you see -- Israel itself is increasingly divided on this. Not because of having fallen victim to the oppressor-oppressed mentality (nobody can, I think, say that Ehud Olmert is woke) but because the human cost, on one side and the other, is becoming too high, without a clear hope of truly eradicating Hamas. That the whole world (for reasons of ideology, of regional and national interests, of alliances and silent conflicts) is wrapped in restraints that prevent it from putting pressure on Hamas and its allies, instead putting pressure exclusively on Israel, is horribly sad.
But it is Israel that will choose how to continue or end this war, as Israel remains the only democratic side in the conflict, whose population has actual agency. Truly, that is the only thing that matters.