The Psychology of Tit for Tat

Unsurprisingly, there are some psychological obstacles to a “tit-for-tat” strategy:

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

This evokes any number of dorm arguments I had in my freshman year. Whenever we touched on a foreign policy issue, the question of “who struck first” invariably arose as if it were meaningful for resolving the problem. It’s critical to remember that while any foreign policy action of course involves sending a message, the message you send may not be the message that the other party hears. This has obvious implications for any discussion of will, resolve, or reputation.

UPDATE: To spell out briefly what those are (I’m a little embarrassed to find an NYT website link to such a short post), expressing resolve or will requires the sending of a message to another. If, say, the Greek Navy were to seize a Turkish fishing boat, Turkey might seek to demonstrate toughness or resolve by destroying several Greek ships or firing missiles at a Greek port. The Greeks, though, don’t have to interpret this act as one of “toughness” or “resolve”; they can believe, rather, that the Turks are simply expressing hostility and aggression. Since there is always an incentive to deceive when sending a message like this (the Turks will always want the Greeks to believe they’re tough, whether that’s true or not), it is extremely difficult to craft messages that both sides understand in the same way.