24 October 2024

Published today, the research led by Dr Scott Danielson from Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) explores how people make life-and-death decisions in wartime scenarios, showing that when bystanders are unidentified, we tend to assume they are enemy combatants.

“Civilian casualties are a grim reality of modern warfare, and with the increasing reliance on airstrikes, the death toll of innocent bystanders has become impossible to ignore,” says UC School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing lecturer Dr Danielson.

“About as many civilians as soldiers die in war each year, some during strikes targeted at enemy combatants. There have been many reported cases of mistaking innocent civilians for enemy combatants, with the possibility of many more being unreported,” he says.

Together with his colleagues, UC Senior Lecturer Dr Andrew Vonasch and Associate Professor Paul Conway of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, Dr Danielson conducted five experiments in which more than 2000 participants were presented with a realistic moral dilemma: a military pilot must decide whether to bomb a dangerous enemy target, also killing a bystander. “We set our first two experiments in the conflict between the United States and ISIS in Iraq. Results showed people wanted to avoid killing a civilian and most participants did not endorse bombing a valuable military target if it meant killing a civilian bystander in the process. However, the outcome changed when the bystander’s identity was unknown: more than twice as many people endorsed the bombing,” Dr Danielson says.

Crucially, about half of the American participants supported sacrificing unidentified bystanders despite no evidence that they were enemies. “Unidentified bystanders were considered as acceptable collateral damage because they were presumed to be affiliated with or supporters of ISIS,” he says.

“Even outside the conflict with ISIS, Americans in our studies were still comfortable with unidentified bystanders as collateral damage. When the scenario involved a fictional war between countries which we made up, the effects were largely the same. What we are seeing is a bias about war generally, not feelings about one particular conflict.” He says research participants who endorsed the bombings in the story were more likely to have positive attitudes towards ‘total war’: the theory that there should be no distinction between military and civilian targets in wartime conflict.

Dr Vonasch says there were key differences between the results of participants from different countries. “Bombing endorsement was lower for participants in the UK compared to the United States, which we attribute to national and cultural differences in total war attitudes.” According to the study’s authors, these findings have implications for military strategists who must decide whether to attack areas where there are both enemy militants and unidentified bystanders. Dr Danielson says to minimise civilian deaths, future research should investigate how to reduce this cognitive bias towards assuming bystanders are enemies rather than innocent civilians and convince decision makers to evaluate more carefully who their weapons are targeting.

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