Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass № 8: Israel risks falling into game-changing mind traps

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, the “father of realism,” in his History of the Peloponnesian War remarked that the Athenian allies “were making judgments based more on dim desire than on firm forethought, since humans are accustomed to hand over to unreflecting hope, what they long for, yet to thrust aside with autocratic reasoning, what they do not wish for.”

This human weakness of one-sided wishful thinking can partly explain the startling historical pattern that many powerful countries have been defeated by a seemingly weaker enemy despite their material superiority. Indeed, single battles and entire wars are often lost inside the heads of politicians, generals and their troops. As regards the “inner theater” of people, where they play an inner game, there is much scientific evidence that a combination of biases and fallacies tends to distort the thinking of actors in various walks of life, prompting them to make fatally wrong decisions. The above case of blind wishful thinking coupled with the rigorous rejection of counterarguments – a counterproductive task for which reason paradoxically is given the full power of an absolute sovereign – serves as one example of such distorted thinking.

The state of Israel, in its determined geopolitical bid to permanently reorder the Middle East in its favor by sheer force, risks falling into several such treacherous mind traps and ultimately failing despite the odds, at least on the surface, being stacked in its favor. At the same time, these distortions prompt the US-led “collective West” to adopt a rather lenient attitude to Israel’s crossing of an increasing number of red lines with a sense of perpetual impunity and immunity. The presence of biases and fallacies is particularly pernicious in times of war, when the judgment of many powerful decision makers, due to emotional overload and the pressures of what is perceived as “necessity,” anyway tends to be more clouded than in times of peace.

Biases are mental shortcuts that help human beings make decisions quickly in the midst of an overwhelming amount of information, yet accompanied by the risk of committing serious errors of judgment. Fallacies are logical mistakes in the process of using one’s reason and making an argument. Importantly, biases and fallacies can interact; a bias can even be transformed into a fallacy if it is used in the process of reasoning and arguing. Given this close relationship, the two mind traps are treated together here.

Based on the latest insights from cognitive science, I developed the “Bias Mind Map” (see Exhibit 1), which synthesizes the most important mental heuristics and was first used to analyze the root causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis (Published in The Effective Executive, 11 (December 12, 2008, p. 58). This analytical framework makes it possible to analyze mental distortions in a systematic and comprehensive way and to uncover the root causes of problematic phenomena, which otherwise often are captured only in the form of anecdotes.

Exhibit 1

Let us a have a look at this powerful set of potent mental distortions, which partially reinforce each other in a pernicious manner and, as a result, may derail Israel, converting apparent success into real failure. There are additional important biases and fallacies pertinent to the issue at hand, but not covered here due to space constraints. It turned out that the speech delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 27, 2024 constitutes a particularly rich treasure trove to mine for instructive samples of distorted thinking and thus is suitable to be used for textbooks on biases and fallacies. While singling out the prime minister due to his prominent position inside the state of Israel, it should be emphasized that he is not the only politician who fell into the various mind traps, but that instead there is a sizeable ruling coalition of like-minded persons in Israel. Furthermore, many enemies of Israel are equally succumbing to various biases and fallacies, which helps to explain the escalatory battles raging in the Middle East – a tragedy that has its roots in poisoned hearts and minds and needs to be cured in this inner place first.

1. Threat bias

Decision makers who frame a problem as an overwhelming threat tend to overcommit resources to combatting the perceived problem, often at the expense of losing better opportunities elsewhere. For example, the managers of automobile manufacturers, panicking because of the government-enforced phasing out of the internal combustion engine, tend to overspend resources on unproven “green” technologies while failing to milk the cash cow of cars with the old mature technology as long as it lives.

In Israel’s case, in the wake of the Hamas attack on settlements on October 7, 2023, Palestinian military resistance groups were framed as an existential threat endangering the Jewish state’s very survival. At the very beginning of his UN speech, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated: “My country is at war, fighting for its life… we face savage enemies who seek our annihilation, and we must defend ourselves against them.” (Emphasis added by author). By the way, by imputing life into an abstract construct, the Israeli politician commits the fallacy of reification and hypostatization.

As a consequence of threat bias, Israel’s leadership overcommitted scarce resources on the above-mentioned “defense,” deciding to embark on a costly multifront war with its enemies in a bid to eliminate opposition wherever it might surface. By opting for an all-out confrontation, it undermined its valuable relationship with Western allies, especially the US, and was prevented from channeling funds to more productive uses.

As a caveat, it might be argued that Israeli leaders framed the Hamas attack as an existential threat and exploited other methods of distortion only for propaganda purposes to sway the domestic and international audience. But even if this were true, there is always the danger of politicians finally believing in their own rhetoric and committing grave errors as a consequence. Threat bias can interact with other biases, as we will see now.

2. Vividness bias and emotional appeal

In his UN speech, Netanyahu portrayed the conduct of the Hamas combatants in the following climactic sequence: “They savagely murdered 1,200 people. They raped and mutilated women. They beheaded men. They burned babies alive. They burned entire families alive – babies, children, parents, grandparents. It seems reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust.”

This passage is evidence of vividness bias coupled with repeated emotional appeal. Vividness bias, an instance of selective attention, is the tendency of people to overemphasize stark features at the expense of neglecting less salient aspects. For example, a spectacular plane crash, costing the lives of several hundred people, usually draws more attention than the dry statistic of over 480,000 people dying from smoking every year in the US alone. Due to vividness bias, coupled with strong emotional intensity, the plane crash is likely to lead to frantic efforts to find its cause and prevent similar occurrences, while the larger problem of smoking is left lingering in the background. In both cases, proactive preventive measures are often neglected. After all, the tombstone bias, which is very prevalent in the airline industry, implies that determined large-scale overhauls only occur as a reaction to the actual deaths of people.

The use of emotion-laden metaphors can strengthen vividness. For example, Netanyahu stated: “Hamas kidnapped 251 people from dozens of different countries, dragging them into the dungeons of Gaza.” The term “dungeon,” which conjures up dark images of the supposedly cruel Middle Ages, together with the term “the underground terrorist hell of Hamas” used in another section of the prime minister’s speech, are also instances of emotionally inflaming hyperbolism. In fact, former hostages reported after their release that they had been kept in flats – in locations that supposedly were more secure than the dwelling places of most Palestinian civilians, many of whom were killed even in zones that the Israeli army had designated as “safe.”

Moreover, Netanyahu brought people who had been affected by Hamas’ incursion with him to the UN, thus using the method of personalization, which tends to increase vividness, contrasting with the mere statistic of over 40,000 Palestinians (and counting) killed by Israel. At the same time, Palestinians were collectively called “murderous monsters,” an instance of dehumanization coupled with emotional appeal and a fallacy of composition, extending a perceived attribute of individual group members to an entire class of people. In Israel’s case, the accentuated vividness and emotionality reinforced the threat bias and urge to take massive action. It also swayed decision makers from the “collective” West to support or at least accept Israel’s aggressive stance. As a consequence, its representatives even condoned Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant’s radical and incendiary statement that Palestinians are “human animals” and his decision to impose a complete siege on Gaza, completely closing it off from basic necessities without which survival is impossible. They also acquiesced in Israel’s army prohibiting rescue workers in Lebanon from coming to the aid of victims of Israeli bombing attacks trapped in rubble and threatening to bomb the helpers in case of non-compliance.

3. Faulty analogy

The above passage related to the victims of Hamas is also an example of the fallacy of drawing a false analogy. The claim that the local incursion on October 7, 2023 is analogous to the Holocaust contradicts the common opinion of leading historians that the Holocaust cost an incomparably larger number of Jewish lives. Again, such distorted thinking reinforces the threat bias.

Moreover, comparing and matching the events on 7 October 2023 with what happened on 11 September 2001 by using the same highly iconic and memorable date format – that is, 7/10 modelled after 9/11 – to refer to the Hamas attack is equally fallacious, given that there are significant differences between the terrorist attack on the US, which was much larger in scale, and the local incursion in Israel.

In another memorable passage of his speech, Netanyahu exclaimed: “…we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.” Obviously, it is wrong to compare the situation of Israel after the local Hamas incursion with the epic exodus of an entire people marching out of a foreign country into the “promised land.” Netanyahu also errs by at least implicitly comparing himself to the divinely inspired Prophet Moses who, in contrast to the Israeli politician, fulfilled a command issued by God. However, the analogy may exert a strong impact on the thinking and motivation of the Israeli leader and his followers who, due to strong nationalist sentiments, might feel a strong urge to expand their territory.

Netanyahu also drew the following faulty analogy in the form of a thought experiment: “Just imagine, for those who say Hamas has to stay, it has to be part of a post-war Gaza—imagine, in a post-war situation after World War II, allowing the defeated Nazis in 1945 to rebuild Germany? It’s inconceivable. It’s ridiculous. It didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now.” Hamas differs in fundamental respects from the National Socialists who attempted to conquer Russia and many other countries. Furthermore, rather ironically, many members of the NSDAP actually did serve in important positions in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany. Again, the prime minister’s fallacious analogy can exert a powerful impact on thinking and motivation, though, given that Gaza in the endgame is compared to an utterly destroyed Germany, which might direct the mental and physical efforts of Israeli players towards this dire outcome.

4. Escalation, closure, and bifurcation bias

I coined the term “gambler’s dilemma” (Published in Performance Journal, 2 (July 3, 2009, p. 50-59) to describe the difficult choice between the two undesirable options of (a) stopping on a successful path and subsequently being haunted by the question whether you stopped too early and (b) adopting the behavior of a prototypical gambler, continuing after a blinding streak of successes until you finally lose everything. Put in a nutshell, you only know the limit once you have overreached. Alas, “stop” appears to be the hardest word for many helmsmen! 

Not surprisingly, faced with such a dilemma, many movers and shakers tend to escalate their commitments. This pattern often yields pernicious results, since it is a grave mistake to conjecture that doing more of what you believe has caused your success necessarily will bring about further successes. Escalation can be due to perceptional bias, whereby decision makers, in a tunnel vision, possibly reinforced by groupthink, observe more positive data than negative signals and, in their thinking, focus only on the positive aspects. Moreover, they are often driven by loss-avoidance bias, fearing to forego what they have already invested. Furthermore, impression-managing helmsmen do not want to write off such sunk costs, since they do not want to be seen as failures in the eyes of others and are eager to avoid internal and collective cognitive dissonance from apparent inconsistency. Finally, escalation can result from movers and shakers engaging in irrational competition with opponents, in which all parties are bound to lose.

The tendency to continue gambling and escalate commitments is worsened by closure bias – the need, urge and desire to reach completeness and arrive at an end point at which an uncertain and ambiguous situation has given way to certainty and clarity, such as the knowledge that no opportunities have been missed. Many advertisers are exploiting closure bias by offering solutions that allegedly are “100 percent” effective. Alas, closure often proves to be a myth, since it is difficult to achieve it and even after it has been reached, the final outcome might not prove satisfactory. 

Obviously, Prime Minister Netanyahu is escalating commitments, exponentially increasing the number of fronts on which Israel is fighting and the intensity of combat on each front. Clearly, he wants to demonstrate “steady leadership,” an impression that would be destroyed by changing course. He also strives for closure, as evidenced by the following passage from his UN speech related to the attempt to free all hostages held by Hamas: “We will not spare that effort until this holy mission is accomplished.” Elsewhere he stated: “I want to assure you, we will not rest until the remaining hostages are brought home too, and some of their family members are here with us today… we remain focused on our sacred mission: bringing our hostages home, and we will not stop until that mission is complete” (emphasis added by author). 

In view of this ambitious objective of returning all hostages – alive or dead – to Israel coupled with the urge for closure, Israel can possibly continue its war against several neighbors for a very long time, since even if there is only one hostage unaccounted for or if the remains of only one hostage have not been returned to Israel, the mission has not been completed and therefore needs to be continued.

Finally, framing the mission as being holy and sacred, which here are “magical words” that cannot be reduced to concrete measurable things and preclude refutation at the mythical level chosen by the speaker, as if by supernatural force transforms the bleak realities of war into a noble enterprise.

The tendency to opt for extremes can be reinforced by bifurcated thinking, which is distorted by the “either-or” bias. Succumbing to oversimplification, overgeneralization and exaggeration, such reasoning excludes viable alternative options, such as more moderate solutions.

Netanyahu clearly fell prey to black-and-white thinking, as will become obvious from his following message, which he reinforced visually by maps of blessing (“good” Israel and its allies) and curse (an alleged arc of terror, including “evil” Iran and its proxies): “As Israel defends itself against Iran in this seven-front war, the lines separating the blessing and the curse could not be more clear… In this battle between good and evil, there must be no equivocation.” Clearly, a nuanced middle position between the qualifiers of “good” and “evil” (such as the acknowledgment that all human actors have good and bad traits and are capable of noble and ignoble acts) and a synthesis reached as a product of dialectical reasoning (such as the fruitful coexistence of a secular Israel and theocratic Iran, interacting in a mutually enriching manner and both bringing blessings to the entire world), does not form part of Netanyahu’s bifurcated world view.

5. Overconfidence and fallacy of last move

Escalation of commitment against the backdrop of the urgent need for closure is worsened by overconfidence bias, which has been described as the “mother of all biases”. It is the tendency to overestimate one’s capabilities, which in the extreme case becomes sheer hubris. Forms of overconfidence include excessive trust in the accuracy of one’s judgments and the belief in being better and ranking higher than others.

The following passage from Netanyahu’s speech is evidence of overconfidence: “Israel will win this battle… we now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage…” The speaker did not provide any evidence for his claim that Israel has the most courageous army in the world. In another example of unwarranted confidence bordering on hubris, Netanyahu cited a phrase from the Book of Samuel (“The eternity of Israel will not falter”) and commented on it as follows: “In the Jewish people’s epic journey from antiquity, in our odyssey through the tempest and upheavals of modern times, that ancient promise has always been kept and it will hold true for all time”, characterizing Israel as a torch that “will forever shine bright” (emphasis added by author). In view of the rise, fall and disappearance of many powerful peoples, such an axiomatic and dogmatic prediction positing the eternal existence of one’s nation, which even now is already surrounded by powerful enemies, appears to be highly optimistic to say the least.

Overconfidence, which leads to blind judgment, can also reinforce the fallacy of the last move. Put simply, this error is the failure to realize that pressure tends to create counterpressure. More specifically, it is the mistake of neglecting possible reactions from opponents (leading, in a dynamic cycle, to a spiral of escalation) and of believing instead that one’s action will create a final and stable outcome in an unopposed manner. For example, in a bidding contest, overconfident participants are prone to expect other participants to drop out of the race. When more than one player holds such a static view, a veritable bidding war is likely to ensue, which is detrimental to all participants. In such cases, a perceived great chance often becomes a veritable bombshell. Moreover, people who fall into this trap often ignore regression to the mean, that is, the statistical tendency to move from outliers (such as “total victory” in a battle) to a more stable middle-ground equilibrium (such as a situation where the power of antagonists is balanced). 

Clearly, Netanyahu believes that it is he who makes the last move in a final showdown with all of Israel’s enemies. This is evidenced by the following remark in his UN speech: “What we seek is a demilitarized and de-radicalized Gaza. Only then can we ensure that this round of fighting will be the last round of fighting” (emphasis added). Since, as we have seen, the Israeli prime minister believes in the final victory of Israel, this combat in his estimate will indeed be the final round. Netanyahu thus ignores the highly likely scenario of enemies fighting back and a resulting spiral of violence that gets out of hand.

Even if “victory” is achieved in the short run, grave repercussions, including unintended consequences, may materialize over a longer time period, such as new, even greater resistance and conflict. In particular, applied to the current situation, the following unintended consequence may result from Israel’s use of excessive force: The leaders of Iran might conclude that their conventional forces are too weak in the all-out-contest with Israel and, as a result, develop nuclear weapons. Incidentally, “demilitarization” and “deradicalization” are very vague terms, which have not been properly defined. They therefore give the leaders of Israel great latitude in continuing their war against Palestinians and other enemies almost indefinitely. This is because they can routinely repeat the mantra that Gaza has not been completely demilitarized and deradicalized, as long as there is one single fighter living anywhere in the world and vowing to free Gaza from Israeli occupation, for example. 

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In conclusion, various powerful biases and fallacies, which are treacherous mind traps poisoning reasoning and argumentation, can act as veritable game changers in the Middle East conflict, ultimately – in a stunning reversal of fortunes – transforming Israel’s success in fighting its enemies in many locations at once into spectacular failure. Viewed from a wide time horizon, the blind, blunt, impulsive and almost exclusive desire and obsession of Israel’s ruling coalition to “win,” which has materialized in an aggressive political agenda and flawed criteria for making moral judgments, may not really serve the real interest of the Jewish people, not least because its enemies will equally try to beat their Jewish opponents, resulting in a vicious cycle of violence in which everybody eventually loses.

To avoid such a lose-lose situation, truly enlightened statesmanship is required, which hinges on great intellectual rigor and human empathy, among other things. This entails thinking critically, systemically, dynamically, dialectically and ethically, including the very rare ability of holding competing views in one’s mind simultaneously and trying to resolve dilemmas by creating win-win-outcomes, all along doing what is right, even if this proves to be unpopular and even might lead to one’s own demise as a leader.