Expert Political Judgment

by Philip E. Tetlock

  Hedgehog deterrence theorists did not dismiss the possibility of brush-fire wars, especially in areas where the deep-pocketed Americans have little interest in “incentivizing” good behavior. And they did not dispute that “rogue states” had active programs to procure weapons of mass destruction. But they saw the problems as manageable as long as the right deterrence messages are sent out: messages should begin with “develop” or “use these weapons” and end with “it will be the end of you, your regime, and possibly your country.” Whether threats were predicated on “develop” or “use” hinged on judgments of rationality. Those inclined to preemption feared weapons falling into the hands of risk-seeking leaders or messianic movements. Those inclined to see containment and deterrence as stable saw no reason to suppose that “Kim Jong-il or Saddam Hussein harbors more of a death wish than Stalin or Mao” (both of whom had their fingers on the nuclear trigger). “These guys are consummate survivors.” One deterrence theorist advanced the counterfactual that if Nazi Germany had existed in a world of mutual assured destruction, there would have been no second world war: “Even Hitler, the twentieth century’s poster boy of malign irrationality, would have behaved more cautiously.”

  Foxes clustered around more middle-of-the-road analyses. They conceded that peace requires deftly managing balance-of-power relationships and implementing credible deterrence commitments. But they also saw real risks of provoking desperate states and setting off conflict spirals that could be avoided by adopting a more empathic posture. These foxes made mental room for two contradictory propositions: (a) nuclear proliferation is not as dangerous as supposed because such weapons (coupled with secure second-strike capabilities) induce caution; (b) nuclear proliferation is every bit as dangerous as widely supposed because, absent 100 percent confidence in the leadership and command and control of each new nuclear power, each instance of proliferation has the net effect—after subtracting out the benefits of mutual deterrence—of increasing the likelihood of nuclear war.28 One fox gets the last word: “I’m not smart enough to know who is right. I’m not sure anyone is. We don’t have a lot of experience with nuclear war.”

  Foxes are Less Likely to Get Swept Away in Their Own Rhetoric

  Hedgehogs reminded one fox of Churchill’s definition of a fanatic: someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject. This was, of course, unfair: most hedgehogs were not fanatics. But it was true that, once many hedgehogs boarded a train of thought, they let it run full throttle in one policy direction for extended stretches, with minimal braking for obstacles that foxes took as signs they were on the wrong track. We see this phenomenon most clearly when hedgehogs launch into arguments with self-reinforcing feedback loops that, left unchecked, lead to predictions of radical change. For instance, pessimistic hedgehogs readily constructed loops in which “bad causes” like hatred, poverty, and environmental degradation produced bad effects that, in turn, became bad causes that led to more of the same. Optimistic hedgehogs were equally adept at working in the opposite direction: “good causes” like the rule of law, freedom of inquiry, and market competition produced good effects that, in turn, became good causes that led to more of the same.29

  The downside risk was that when hedgehogs were wrong, they were often very wrong. The long list of predictions gone awry includes the disintegration of nation-states that are still with us (Canada, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, etc.), the collapse of powerful political parties (such as the Swedish Social Democrats, the British Labor and later the Conservative parties, the Cuban Communist Party and the Republican Party in the United States), a global depression precipitated by meltdowns of equity markets in the leading economies and debt defaults by less developed economies, and nuclear wars in the Indian subcontinent triggered by the Kashmir conflict and in the Korean peninsula by the enigmatic personality cult regime in Pyongyang.

  But there was also upside potential in this aggressive intellectual style, which will be explored more in chapter 6. Hedgehogs made many mistakes, but when they were right, they were very right. When stunning discontinuities took almost everyone by surprise, it was a good bet that a few hedgehogs would be left standing to take credit for anticipating what no one else did. The trade-off here should be familiar to baseball fans. Home run hitters know that they need to swing hard at a lot of pitches. They also know they will strike out frequently, but they judge the price acceptable if they can hit enough home runs. Experts who in 1988 predicted the collapse of the USSR in 1993 might be forgiven for “overpredicting” the collapse of other regimes.

  To resist the conformity pressures of conventional opinion as tenaciously as some hedgehogs do, self-confidence is essential—and self-reinforcing feedback loops are powerful confidence generators. Hedgehogs often intuitively appreciated this point. The more senior ones reported that, in their mentoring, they stressed the dangers of “analysis-paralysis” and the benefits of taking bold stands that do not bend with the changing winds of intellectual fashion.

  Foxes Are More Worried about Our Judging Those in the Past Too Harshly (and Less Worried about Those in the Future Judging Us Harshly for Failing to see the Obvious)

  Many hedgehogs were skilled at convincing not just others, but themselves. Some even talked themselves into the curious mental state of “anticipatory hindsight.”30 After generating a battery of reasons that made his predicted outcome seem foreordained by a divinity with whom he was on intimate terms (“from God’s lips to my ears”), one hedgehog paused to ponder how today’s concerns will look to tomorrow’s chroniclers: “Historians will wonder how so many smart people could have been so myopic.” The psycho-logic is straightforward. What the future holds in store is, from his point of view, already obvious. It will therefore be even more obvious to historians of the future. It will also be obvious to those historians that it should have been obvious to us. The warning signs were too plain for all but the obdurately obtuse to ignore.

  A sampling of conflicting hedgehog arguments bearing on possible futures facing the United States in 1992–93 conveys the flavor of the anticipatory hindsight effect. Back then, it was not unusual for pessimistic hedgehogs to pronounce on the inevitability of American decline, with rhetorical flourishes such as “Decline, like fog, creeps up on civilizations on little cat’s feet” and “It has not yet dawned on most Americans, but our decline is well under way.” Indeed, any doomster worth his or her salt could (and some still can) generate a list of reasons why decline was inevitable. One left-of-center hedgehog argued: “The government spends far more than it raises in taxes. We consume more than we produce. We borrow more than we save. We import more than we export. We are on the fast track to second-class status.” He compared “free-market ideologues” to the “sailor on the Titanic who declared that God Almighty could not sink this ship. Every great power before us thought itself immune from decline, and none was right.” We should learn from the baserate fate of previous great powers.

  Optimistic hedgehogs expected the opposite with equal conviction. One opined that “future generations will laugh at the neurotic pessimism of today’s pundits, with their hand-wringing about global warming and Western decline.” The dominant forces in the twenty-first century will converge into a self-amplifying virtuous circle in which “economic development stimulates democracy, instantaneous cross-border communications undercut oppressive governments, and democracy lays the foundation for the rule of law necessary for markets to flourish.” Early twentieth-century optimists, like Norman Angell who thought the great powers had become too interdependent to go to war again, were merely premature. Humanity is moving fitfully but inexorably toward a peaceful capitalist global order. Only the pedantic would split hairs over whether humanity reaches its destination in the twenty-first or twenty-second centuries. This preemptive off-on-timing defense gives forecasters a century’s worth of wiggle room.

  Whereas hedgehogs were preoccupied with the dangers of underplaying their intellectual hand, foxes frequently ex
pressed mirror-image concerns. One respondent captured in an introspective moment a defining marker of the fox temperament: “Whenever I start to feel certain I am right … a little voice inside tells me to start worrying.” Self-criticism had been elevated to declaratory cognitive policy. Confidence beyond a certain point became a sign not that one is right but rather that one may be wrong, and that the time had come to brake the train of thought driving confidence into the zone of hubris.

  The thought protocols yielded numerous such examples. The fate of the American economy in the late 1990s—in particular, its high-tech sectors—offers an instructive reversal of the dour “declining empire” talk of the 1980s. Although it is difficult to re-create emotional atmospherics in the wake of the NASDAQ crash in 2000, it is worth recalling that many forecasts were beyond upbeat. They were euphoric: Dow 36,000, telecommuting eliminating rush-hour traffic jams, Web retailers driving brick-and-mortar stores out of business, interactive televisions allowing couch potatoes to alter plots from their armchairs, universities swept away by on-line learning, and near-instantaneous electronic flows of capital making borders obsolete.

  The errant predictions were driven by unchecked momentum. If a proposal passed the low-hurdle “can I believe this” test, boomster technophiles did not pause to ponder potential resistance from flesh-and-blood humans who have deep-rooted social needs and work within remarkably durable social systems. Of course, the boomster technophiles can argue that they were “just off on timing” and that variants of all their predictions will still come true. But a dose of foxlike prudence would have spared this group considerable embarrassment.31

  A final example of the perils of not knowing when to apply the mental brakes comes from the 1992 Ukrainian forecasts. In a debriefing interview, I gave one easy-to-spot fox the explanations that an equally easy-to-spot hedgehog had given for his pessimism. The hedgehog had argued: “Things did not have to be this awful. The Ukraine was once a wealthy part of the Russian empire…. But the current leadership is hopeless. These party chieftains don’t have the faintest idea why they can’t just print money. As for rule of law, they play by Brezhnevist rules. So we have Mafia-style cronyism, a bad-joke currency and the squandering of resources on value-subtractive state enterprises. I see hyperinflation and massive unemployment in the next few years and a debt-to-GDP ratio going through the roof.” This expert had an accurate bead on Ukrainian economic performance in the 1990s, but he went overboard in predicting war and border change. He foresaw growing tensions with Russia that would culminate in interethnic violence, a Russian energy embargo and military intervention to protect Russians, and the forced ceding of territory to mother Russia.

  The fox replied: “I don’t disagree with anything he said. But he did not allow for the chance the Ukrainians will come to their senses. The formula for recovery will become undeniable in the next five years: just look west.” The fox also doubted the “tightness” of the connection between economic implosion and violent conflict with Russia. He suspected that the Ukrainian leadership would not recklessly provoke the Russians and that the Russians were not spoiling for a fight. Wariness of facile generalizations helped this fox forge an integrative set of economic and political expectations that were more accurate than that of most other specialists.32

  I also asked several foxes to comment on the phenomenon of anticipatory hindsight. Some thought it possible that we, the inhabitants of the present, might be deemed dumb by inhabitants of the future for failing to see beyond our noses. But most found the mirror-image error more worrisome: the danger that we, the inhabitants of the present, are unfairly blaming the inhabitants of the past for failing to predict the unpredictable. One fox waxed metaphysical: “Sure, we now know what happened. But before we scold the imbeciles back then for their stupidity, let’s imagine how many other things could have happened and, if one of them had, how that would transform the grand lessons we draw from history.” (Chapter 5 multiplies these examples of foxes’ greater sensitivity to “close-call counterfactuals.”) Another fox was sensitive to the power of the mind to play tricks on us: “We forget how clueless everyone was about how things were going to work out in the Soviet Union in 1988…. It feels good to lord over those saps who could not see beyond their noses.” Good judges retain memory traces of their prior opinions even after they know what needs to be explained. It encourages humility.

  Foxes See More Value in Keeping “Political Passions Under Wraps”

  Many participants hailed from academic fields regularly roiled by accusations of politicized scholarship—fields in which critics on the right accuse the left of serving as chronic apologists for Soviet tyranny or Latin American corruption or Islamic terrorism, whereas critics on the left portray the right as chronic apologists for American imperialism and multinational corporations.

  Foxes, as usual, saw some merit in the accusations leveled by each side. But they did not mindlessly split the differences. Most foxes could identify academic fields that they felt had become so suffused with bias that only a vocal minority dared to state obvious but unpleasant truths. One conservative fox observed: “Too many of my colleagues have a “hear no evil, see no evil” attitude toward groups that have gotten a raw deal from the West. So they worry about the feelings of poor Soviet apparatchiks being insulted by Reagan’s evil-empire talk, or poor finance ministers from sub-Saharan Africa being insulted by International Monetary Fund (IMF) technocrats who impose so many onerous conditionalities on loans that you might think the ministers themselves were thieves.” A second, more liberal, fox thought the key to good judgment was the capacity to distinguish between explanations (which require seeing the world from the other’s perspective) and excuses (which require recognizing that just because the other has thoroughly rationalized a policy does not oblige you to embrace the rationalization). A second, quite liberal, fox made a similar point: “It is an admirable human trait to sympathize with the underdog, but it is stupid not to recognize that underdogs can be rabid and vicious.” We set ourselves up for nasty surprises when we ignore repugnant characteristics of groups that we believe have been “shafted” by the reigning hegemon. He feared that this “willful blindness” explained why many experts on the Middle East were blind-sided by the ferocious repressiveness of the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s and why “the same crew” glossed over the potential for terrorism in the late 1990s. There was no logical reason why one could not simultaneously take the position that the shah of Iran was a corrupt despot whom the Americans inflicted on the Iranian people in 1953 and that Khomeini’s brand of Shi’ite fundamentalism had been in many ways worse. Or why one could not simultaneously believe that the Saudi monarchy was abhorrent but that its clerical critics would impose an even worse “Talibanish” regime if they got the chance. A self-described neo-Marxist fox saw a “depressing relationship” between how strongly observers opposed the old white-minority government in South Africa and how reluctant they now are to acknowledge ominous signs of “moral drift” in the new black-majority government (“endemic corruption, a stupid and cruel AIDS policy, and a cowardly unwillingness to condemn Mugabe’s tyranny”).

  Foxes worried about colleagues who had “little stomach for unpalatable truths.” A liberal fox pointed to the “hyperventilating” that greeted Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis that “the great source of conflict in the post–cold war world will be cultural.” Rather than addressing the argument on its merits, “too many colleagues started slinging epithets—calling Sam a ‘racist essentialist.’ ” A conservative fox thought that his “ideological allies” should be more honest about how unsavory many of America’s cold war and post–cold-war allies were. “Would it kill them to admit that Iran is more democratic than Saudi Arabia?” A third fox lamented the reluctance of “idealists” to admit that “America had good balance-of-power reasons during the cold war” for embracing “mind-bogglingly corrupt” dictators such as Mobutu (Zaire/Congo) and Suharto (Indonesia), for supporting the muj
ahedeen struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, for tilting toward Iraq when Iran seemed close to prevailing, and for permitting Saddam to stay in power (after Gulf War I) by massacring Shi’ite rebels in southern Iraq. But this fox also lamented the reluctance of realists to admit that, good though the reasons once were for such policies, there are “blowback risks” in adopting a purely Realpolitik stance: chaos in the Congo and Indonesia, transnational Islamic terrorist networks headquartered in Afghanistan, and the uncertainty over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Moral purity takes a toll in predictive accuracy. Ignoring the vices of our friends and the virtues of our enemies sets us up for nasty surprises.33

  Foxes Make More Self-conscious Efforts to Integrate Conflicting Cognitions

  Open-mindedness is no guarantee that one will strike the right balance between the competing arguments that dominate the debate at any moment. Judges who are indiscriminately complex—who enter whatever arguments come to their attention in an automatic balancing act—would be all too easy prey for forceful agenda setters. Good judges need to be judicious: they need to be discerning consumers of the massive flows of information and misinformation circulating through the marketplace of ideas.

  Can we say anything more specific about these balancing acts? Did foxes give more weight to certain ideas over others? The answer is usually no. Foxes were not especially likely to endorse particular substantive positions on rationality, levels of analysis, macroeconomics, or foreign policy. Their advantage resided in how they thought, not in what they thought.