How 'Confirmation Bias' Can Lead To War - Global - The Atlantic

8/22/14, 11:39 PM How 'Conrmation Bias' Can Lead to War - Global - The Atlantic
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How 'Confirmation Bias' Can
Lead to War
By Robert Wright
Last week Commentary reported that Iranian President Ahmadinejad had been
"bragging about the slaughter of five Israeli tourists" in Bulgaria and that this
bragging "contradicted" the Iranian government's denials of involvement in the
Bulgarian bus bombing.
Commentary had gotten this information from The Times of Israel, which
reported that Ahmadinejad had "gloated publicly on Thursday over the deaths of
Israelis in a terror bombing in Bulgaria, and hinted that Iran was responsible for
the attack." The Times of Israel in turn attributed this information to a report in
Hebrew on Israel's Channel 2.
Somewhere in this Persian-to-Hebrew-
to-English translation, something got
lost--or added. Iran may or may not be
behind the Bulgarian bombing, but
there's no reference to the bombing in
Ahmadinejad's speech, and a close
appraisal of the speech makes it highly
unlikely that Ahmadinejad meant to
allude to the bombing.
Nima Shirazi, the blogger who first
raised doubts about the Israeli
interpretation of Ahmadinejad's
remarks, calls the distortion
"propaganda." But what seems to me
more likely--and, in a way, more
unsettling--is that the distortion wasn't
intentional, but rather was the result of an essentially unconscious warping that
comes naturally to humans.
Specifically, I'm betting that the culprit was "confirmation bias," the tendency of
people to see evidence consistent with their pre-existing beliefs (sometimes when
it isn't even there) and to ignore or minimize evidence inconsistent with their
beliefs. Confirmation bias is at work every day, in Israel and Iran and the United
States, often in ways that make war more likely. What follows is the dissection of a
single, cautionary case of natural self-deception.
Let's start with the report in the Times of Israel, an English-language website
based in Jerusalem. Gabe Fisher of the Times wrote:
Speaking hours after Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had
publicly blamed the bombing Wednesday at Bulgaria's Burgas airport on
"Hezbollah, directed by Iran," Ahmadinejad described the attack as "a
response" to Israeli "blows against Iran."
That's inaccurate, since Ahmadinejad didn't "describe" the attack--or mention it at
all--in his speech. But Fisher may not have known that, since he seems to have
never seen a complete transcript of Ahmadinejad's speech. The only source he
cited was a report on Israel's Channel 2, whose on-air correspondent said that
Ahmadinejad "couldn't have provided a clearer announcement than this" of
Iranian involvement in the bombing. Maybe Fisher mistook this confident surmise
about Ahmadinejad's subtext for a description of Ahmadinejad's text.
A more subtle but perhaps more consequential distortion was a shift in tense that
took place in the course of translating Ahmadinejad's remarks. Here is the way
Fisher rendered, in English, Channel 2's Hebrew version of the remarks:
"The bitter enemies of the Iranian people and the Islamic Revolution have
recruited most of their forces in order to harm us," he said in a speech
reported by Israel's Channel 2 TV (Hebrew). "They have indeed succeeded in
inflicting blows upon us more than once, but have been rewarded with a far
stronger response."
The phrase "have been rewarded with a far stronger response" makes it sound like
Ahmadinejad is referring to something in the past--like, say, a bus bombing in
Bulgaria that happened the day before. But it turns out that, in the original
Persian, this part of the speech didn't refer to the past. Here is the direct Persian-
to-English translation provided by Shirazi, which renders the remarks in the
future tense: "And if they deliver a blow they will receive a blow [and] usually the
blow they receive will be heavier than the blow they have delivered." And, for good
measure, here is a second Persian-to-English translation, provided (via email) by
Bahman Kalbasi, a BBC correspondent who is a native Persian speaker: "And if
anytime they harm us, we will harm them back. And usually the harm we cause is
greater than the harm they cause."
It's conceivable that
Ahmadinejad's actual remarks,
though ostensibly focused on
the future, could be a cryptic
reference to the bus bombing.
But the shift in grammatical
focus that happened in translation--the shift from future to past--rendered such
an interpretation much more plausible. So how did this happen? Was the change
made by Channel 2, in the Persian-to-Hebrew phase, or by the Times of Israel, in
the Hebrew-to-English phase?
I consulted with Kevin Osterloh, an historian at the Miami University (Ohio) who
is an expert on Hebrew. He said that Channel 2's on-air correspondent, in
rendering Ahmadinejad's remarks in Hebrew, had put them in the present tense,
saying, roughly, "We are sustaining specific blows from the enemy, but... we are
also successfully landing blows of our own; sometimes the blows which we land
are even more forceful than their blows." Osterloh said this needn't be considered
a dramatic departure from the future tense; you might think of it as "present
progressive-ish," he said, because "one can use the present tense in a general way
to mean 'the way that we are wont to do things,' etc., and this nuance in fact makes
more sense within the context of a threat."
OK, so Channel 2's on-air correspondent didn't do the lion's share of the tense
shifting. However, the Channel 2 website also ran a printed excerpt from
Ahmadinejad's speech, also in Hebrew, which did clearly change the tense of the
remarks, moving the action into the past. It's this version of the remarks that the
Times of Israel apparently translated from Hebrew to English, and that appeared
in Gabe Fisher's story. (Osterloh independently translated the Hebrew to English
and came up with a translation closely corresponding to Fisher's. Thus where
Fisher wrote that Iran's enemies "have been rewarded with a far stronger
response," Osterloh wrote that Iran's enemies "have earned in response a much
more forceful counter-blow.")
Did Fisher listen to the Channel 2 broadcast, in which the translation is closer to
accurate? Or did he just take the text from the Channel 2 website without clicking
on the video player? I don't know. (I've emailed The Times of Israel, asking that
this question be relayed to Fisher, whose coordinates I can't find. No reply yet.)
But it would certainly be consistent with human nature--and an example of
confirmation bias--to encounter both translations and, rather than wonder at the
discrepancy and investigate it, go with the version more consistent with your pre-
existing beliefs. To facilitate this choice, a rationale for doubting the accuracy of
the less convenient translation might bubble up unbidden from your unconscious
mind.
If this was indeed a case of
confirmation bias, that doesn't
mean that Fisher himself
harbors dark suspicions about
Ahmadinejad. In his capacity as
a journalist he has a vested
interest in Ahmadinejad's
remarks being newsworthy. So it would be natural for him to enter the "research"
process with a working hypothesis that he's emotionally attached to. Hence a form
of confirmation bias that confronts all journalists, and I don't think any of us can
honestly claim we always surmount it. Certainly I can't.
Note how this journalistic tendency can pave the way for war. When you've got
Israeli readers who will click on stories about Ahmadinejad's "gloating," and
American readers who will do the same, and Iranian readers who will click on
stories about the malicious intent of America and Israel, then the natural workings
of journalism will reinforce and amplify preexisting incendiary beliefs (though in
Iran, of course, the press is less free and more subject to government influence,
which brings problems of its own). So confirmation bias enters the system at two
points. It motivates some readers to click on certain kinds of stories, and it
encourages journalists to produce those kinds of stories even if they're misleading-
-and journalists don't even have to be bothered by conscious awareness of how
they've abetted untruth!
Tense isn't the only thing that got garbled in translation. In Israel, as the Times
reported, Ahmadinejad's reference to "harm" from its enemies was taken to refer
to the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, which has been widely attributed to
Israel. This conveniently reinforced the belief that when Ahmadinejad alluded to
Iranian retaliation, he was talking about the Bulgarian bombing. After all, there
had already been speculation that, if the bombing was sponsored by Iran, this was
probably retaliation for the murder of Iranian scientists.
But in fact Ahmadinejad doesn't mention the assassination of nuclear scientists.
And Kalbasi says that if you look at the context of the quote--including an
immediately preceding reference to the economic power of Iran's enemies--it
seems very likely that Ahmadinejad was referring not to the assassination of
Iranian scientists, but to economic sanctions. "It was very much a standard
Ahmadinejad speech," Kalbasi said.
Kalbasi engaged in a twitter exchange with the Times of Israel, and, after I spoke
with him, the Times, to its credit, ran a brief article quoting him and raising the
possibility that it got things wrong (though not admitting error). But presumably
that article wasn't ballyhooed on the home page, and it isn't linked to from the
original, misleading article--and, anyway, it isn't quite as enticing as the article
about Ahmadinejad's "gloating" was. At last check, the ratio of Facebook
"recommends" between the original article and the quasi-correction was more
than 5-to-1. What Mark Twain said in a much slower age is still the case: untruth
can go "round the world while truth is pulling its boots on." And one reason is
confirmation bias.
Kalbasi doesn't think the Israeli
media's apparent distortion of
Ahmadinejad's remarks was
intentional. He agreed with me
that this was probably
confirmation bias at work. And
he said he sees the same thing
in the Iranian press--
distortions of remarks by
President Obama and Israeli
leaders that may well be
"innocent" in the sense that the
person doing the distorting isn't conscious of it. Certainly in Iran and nearby
countries you can find earnestly held but wildly implausible beliefs about Zionist
machinations. In Saudi Arabia an obviously intelligent university professor once
explained to me his theory of how 9/11 happened, and, though I forget the details,
the subject of Israel definitely came up.
A striking thing about human self-deception is how diverse and subtle its sources
can be. The classic form of confirmation bias is to choose the most convenient
among competing pieces of evidence--as may have been the case if Fisher indeed
was exposed to both the printed and audio versions of Channel 2's translations
and chose the printed one. But look at some other elements of self-deception that
seem to have been at play here:
1) Unreflectively narrowing the meaning of vague or ambiguous words. The
word "harm" (or, depending on the translation, "blow") in Ahmadinejad's remarks
had no clear, specific referent. But pegging the word to the assassination of
Iranian scientists, and pegging its repetition to the murder of Israeli tourists, can
happen pretty automatically if your mind is so inclined.
2) Accepting evidence uncritically. Commentary is the one player in this game of
telephone that seems not to have distorted anything. Still, if Ahmadinejad's
remarks, as misleadingly conveyed by Israeli media, hadn't fit so nicely into
Commentary's world view, might they have been treated more skeptically?
Certainly, in the case of Commentary--and in the case of all of us--you can
imagine a translated quote from a world leader that would so violate our world
view that we'd demand corroboration of the translation before trusting it. But
evidence that is welcome gets a pass.
3) Making slight and essentially unconscious fudges. Translation is a complicated
thing, and even something as straightforward-sounding as grammatical tense can
be fuzzy. If you go into the process of translation thinking you already know what
the speaker was saying, the fuzziness can grow.
Obviously, I don't know exactly what was going on in the heads of the players in
this story, and this reconstruction has involved some speculation. But the main
point is that the incendiary reports about Ahmadinejad's remarks in Israeli and
American media were very likely wrong, yet it's highly plausible that at no point
did anyone consciously choose to perpetrate distortion. That's the way human
psychology is.
I want to emphasize that I think it's entirely possible that Iran is, in fact, behind
the Bulgarian bus bombing. And, if so, retaliation for the assassination of Iranian
scientists would indeed be a plausible motivation.
Still, two points are worth making:
First, given the way human psychology works, the thought that Ahmadinejad
"gloated publicly... over the deaths of Israelis" may well be more conducive to war
than the belief that Iran is responsible for the deaths. And this "gloating," which
many Israelis now believe happened, apparently didn't.
Second, as we listen to Bibi Netanyahu and others assure us that they have
overwhelming evidence of Iranian involvement, it's useful to keep in mind that
confirmation bias is at work in politicians and intelligence analysts as well as in
the rest of us. If we learned nothing else from the runup to the Iraq War, we
should have learned that.
I'm sure that Colin Powell believed the things he told the UN Security Council
about evidence of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction,
and I'm sure George Bush believed them, and I assume the people who briefed
Powell and Bush believed them. But they weren't true. And now 100,000 people
are dead, and Iraq is still a cauldron of violence.
After the Times of Israel story came out, Colin Kahl, a Washington national
security analyst and former Obama administration official, tweeted a link to it
along with the comment, "Iranian leaders are going to gloat their way right into a
war." All told, a more accurate rendering of the moral of the Times of Israel's story
is: "Israelis and Iranians and Americans may deceive themselves right into a war."
[Note, 7/26, 10:30 p.m.: The paragraph above that begins with "OK," has been
changed to correct an inaccuracy. It originally read, "OK, so Channel 2's on-air
correspondent didn't do the lion's share of the tense shifting. However, the
Channel 2 website also ran a printed excerpt from Ahmadinejad's speech, also in
Hebrew, which did clearly change the tense of the remarks (to the "present
perfect" tense, which is kind of a misnomer, since it places the action clearly in the
past--in this case: "have been rewarded with a far stronger response".) It's this
version of the remarks that the Times of Israel apparently translated from Hebrew
to English, and that appeared in Gabe Fisher's story."
The reason for the change is this: Although both the Times of Israel and Osterloh
(the Hebrew expert I consulted) translated the Hebrew into the present-perfect
tense of English, it turns out that there is, strictly speaking, no present-perfect
tense in Hebrew. The Hebrew they translated was in the past tense--although, as
Osterloh has now explained to me, it was "past tense with a present-perfect sense."
In any event, the original point of this paragraph remains true: Channel 2's
translation of the Persian into Hebrew took action that in Ahmadinejad's original
remarks hadn't been placed the past (i.e. Iranian retaliation) and, by changing the
tense, placed the action in the past. (Thanks to the commenter FuzzyFace, who
pointed out that Hebrew has no present perfect tense even before Osterloh
emailed me with the same point.)]
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/how-confirmation-
bias-can-lead-to-war/260347/
Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

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