As a cognitive psychology major, I’m incredibly biased when I say that Roi Ben-Yehuda’s outline of the cognition behind Israel’s recent inflammatory rhetoric is fascinating. However, there’s no denying that history and psychology are irrevocably intertwined, and hopefully Ben-Yehuda and I can make the case that when it comes to diplomacy, a cognitive analysis of a nation’s state of mind preceding any military action is a very, very good idea.
In modern politics, people don’t think enough. Or rather, they don’t think about thinking enough. Could the debt ceiling debacle last summer have been avoided if the Republicans thought to themselves “well, every president in history who has asked for the debt ceiling to be raised has had his request granted and perhaps our nation’s financial future is more important than any political credo that we might gain as a result of our hard line stance on this issue”? Maybe not. But thinking through the ramifications of one’s actions – and the motivational factors driving these actions – fully and rationally would save everyone a lot of grief. Ben-Yehuda rightfully points out several cognitive assumptions and errors spurring the Israeli hawkish stand in the current moment. However, adopting his paradigm and evaluating wider political rhetoric would yield, in my opinion, similarly flawed logic masquerading as a call to action.
Speaking in absolutes is not a new phenomena. Neither, unfortunately, is not thinking through what might be motivating your hard-line stance. If politicians gave more care to how they were thinking, rather than the content of what they were thinking, political action might become a lot more careful. It may be that your conclusions are right, but the logical premises on which you are operating are fundamentally incorrect, which will result in you targeting the wrong bases of operation – in the case of Israel vs. Iran – it may be that Iran is intent on building a nuclear weapon that it will threaten to use against Israel. However, what Ben-Yehuda points out – that Israeli politicians may be failing to consider that Iran is a relatively poorer country attempting to suppress internal strife, and possessing a government whose political sovereignty is not quite yet absolute – may also be true. And Iran’s rhetoric might be as cognitively flawed and full of logical inconsistencies as Israel’s.
