This entry is a subentry of Disciplinary Views Of War.
Psychology in the United States became a recognized discipline mainly through work during World War I with the War Department, which needed psychological tests to identify trainable recruits. Work to support American military efforts continued in subsequent decades, particularly during World War II, on such issues as personnel selection, combat training, psychological warfare, and therapy for war‐affected soldiers. After 1945, researchers increasingly analyzed the psychological origins of war. Psychological study of war has expanded recently in part because of the brutality and pervasiveness of ethnopolitical wars, which have powerful emotional dimensions.
Such studies of the origins of war and paths toward peace employ diverse methodologies. Although much research has focused on individual leaders and their decisions, questions have been raised about the accuracy of psychohistorical studies; the limits of retrospective case studies, interview methods, and content analyses of archival documents; the difficulties of extrapolating from laboratory studies and computer simulations to the real world; and the problems of separating individual actors from the multifaceted, institutional context in which they function. To move beyond individual analyses, psychologists have adopted more appropriate strategies of conducting actual field experiments and case studies of groups, or of measuring attitudes and group behavior in situations of armed conflict. Political psychologists have emphasized the need to embed psychological analysis in a multidisciplinary matrix.
Reflecting the “nature‐nurture” controversy that has pervaded psychology, research has examined whether human aggression and war are biologically determined or rooted in learning and political socialization. Studies suggest a universal tendency to separate the in group from the out group and to favor the former while derogating the latter. Some individual aggression and violence stems from genetic factors, although these interact extensively with experiential factors throughout life. Yet little evidence supports the universality of war, as nearly 20 percent of preindustrial societies neither fight wars nor engage in preparations for war.
Controversy exists over the extent to which destructive conflict arises through competition over scarce resources. Henri Tajfel established that destructive conflict also stems from social categorizations that order one's social world and define one's identity and place in society. Social identity theory posits that people strive for a positive identity and compare their in group with relevant out groups, creating status competition that animates conflict. The quest for positive social identity helps to fuel nationalism. These theories may be integrated into a more comprehensive framework, since groups compete both for positive identity and status and for scarce resources. Groups often compete for legitimacy, too, and violence may result when a group's identity needs go unmet. Morton Deutsch has integrated cognitive and social competition processes by establishing that conflicting groups often create a malignant social process characterized by excessive competition, cognitive rigidity, misjudgments and unwitting commitments, self‐fulfilling prophecies, and vicious, escalating spirals.
Socially constructed memories and perceptions also contribute to inter‐group tensions and war. Vamik Volkan noted that unjustly treated groups often enshrine their victimization in chosen traumas that are passed down through generations and that invite future conflict.
Misperceptions contribute to tensions and war. Although real divergences of interest and enmities fuel wars and arms races, biased perceptions often lead to exaggerated fear, hostility, and enmity. In Fearful Warriors, Ralph K. White established that strong fears on both sides during the Cold War created images that portrayed the other as thoroughly diabolical, aggressive, and untrustworthy. Enemy images encouraged the attribution of hostile motives for diverse behaviors, blocked empathy, dehumanized the other, enabled blaming and human rights abrogations, and provided a tool for politicians to stir public fears and rally support for sustained, high levels of military spending. This suggests that it is psychologically advantageous to have enemies, leading people to create enemies even where none exist in reality. When fear and dehumanization are particularly strong, groups may exclude their adversaries from the moral universe, thereby removing restraints that ordinarily limit atrocities. Still, some have criticized White for emphasizing perceptions over hard realities in a Hobbesian environment and for privileging fear over power as the dominant motive behind war.
Diverse processes can skew a leader's decision making particularly under conditions of high stress and uncertainty. Flawed decisions often reflect cognitive limitations, which lead people to use mental heuristics or shortcuts. For example, in the availability strategy, one judges a current situation by comparing it with a well‐established, readily available pattern in memory. Thus, leaders concerned over the appeasement of Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference and his escalating demands might interpret present crises in terms of that pattern, even if the new case does not actually apply. Because of memory limitations, human beings often function as “cognitive misers,” who oversimplify and draw lessons from history on a highly selective basis.
Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein have criticized nuclear deterrence policies by showing that leaders frequently make biased estimates of their adversary's strength, intent, and willingness to fight. However, Philip Tetlock noted that debates about nuclear deterrence are highly speculative since they typically rely on counterfactual arguments such as “What would have happened if event X had or had not occurred?” Much debate continues about whether psychological research is policy‐relevant and when it is legitimate for scientists to advocate particular policies.
The interplay of cognitive and small group processes was emphasized by Irving Janis, who showed how U.S. leaders sometimes succumbed to making flawed decisions (e.g., the Bay of Pigs invasion) due to groupthink—a group process in which there is an illusion of invulnerability, unquestioned belief in the group's morality, censorship of dissent, and premature quest for consensus, among other factors. Although Janis underestimated subtle political influences on decision makers' judgments, he identified significant, preventable sources of bad decisions.
Recently, significant growth has occurred in the nascent field of peace psychology, which seeks to prevent destructive conflict at all levels. Scholar‐practitioners such as Herbert Kelman have pioneered the use of problem‐solving workshops to advance the nonviolent resolution of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. Recognizing that victims often become perpetrators of violence, some psychologists have developed interventions for healing psychological wounds of war and for promoting collective forgiveness and reconciliation. Interested readers should consult Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.
[See also: Enemy, Views of the; Psychological Warfare.]
Bibliography
- Henri Tajfel and John Turner,
An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict , in W.G. Austin and S. Worchel, eds., The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 1979. - Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1982.
- Morton Deutsch, Preventing World War III: A Psychological Perspective,
Political Psychology ,3 (1983), pp. 3–31. - Ralph K. White, Fearful Warriors, 1984.
- Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence, 1985.
- Ralph K. White, ed., Psychology and the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1986.
- Steven Kull, Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers, 1988.
- Philip E. Tetlock, Charles B. McGuire, and Gregory Mitchell,
Psychological Perspectives on Nuclear Deterrence , Annual Review of Psychology, 1991. - Herbert H. Blumberg and
- Christopher C. French, Peace Abstracts of the Psychological and Behavioral Literature 1967–1990, 1992.
- Herbert H. Kelman,
The Interactive Problem‐Solving Approach , in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Managing Global Chaos, 1996, pp. 501–20. - Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines, 1997
