If Peace is Better Than War...

Then why is there so much conflict?

Between raging regional wars, cringey political divisiveness, and, for me, a profession of treating high-conflict couples, paths toward peace often feel like a mirage in the desert. Like moths to a flame, we humans seem to find ourselves perpetually drawn toward conflict.

So I was surprised to discover a book titled Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, insisting that:

…even the bitterest of enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace.”

[In this newsletter, we regularly discuss books with surprising messages, the kind that can transform how we see things. What transformative books have you read lately? Share in the comments!]

Author and University of Chicago political scientist Christopher Blattman went further, arguing that:

War’s destructiveness means that both sides are almost always better off finding a peaceful split than going to war.

For the most part, humans are inclined to choose peace over war because the costs of war are simply too high. Blattman acknowledges that this assertion may surprise us. After all, wars between individuals and regionals do happen and the horror that results from conflict is profound. It really does feel, as Al Yankovic poignantly put it, that we are all doomed.¹

But our view that war is our default is analogous to a doctor who perceives a world inhabited by only sick people. That is, though our attention gets absorbed by atrocities, for the most part, the costs of war do seem to help to preserve peace.

The human default setting seems to lean in the peaceful direction with a few hitches. It’s these hitches we need to attend to, since they are, according to Blattman, the reasons that our default settings to prioritize peace can fail.

Why do we choose war over peace?

The harsh reality is that people do go to war, whether that’s with other countries, with their political opponents, and with their spouses, kids, and colleagues. How do we understand what causes people and regions to decide battle is not costly enough to preserve the peace?

Blattman’s offers reasons that seem to fall into two buckets. The first is that the people who decide whether or not to go to war are often not the ones who get saddled with the consequences of that choice. Political leaders are the prime example here. When leaders enter into war, they often get the benefit of power gains, notoriety, righteous vengeance, and dominance. The ravage the people in their nations experience not only barely touches them, it benefits them. As Blattman writes:

Unchecked rulers like these are one of the greatest drivers of conflict in history.²

But the second set of reasons intrigues me more. This set of reasons has to do with misperceptions and it’s a topic we regularly explore in this newsletter. As Blattman explains:

We are overconfident creatures. We also assume others think like us, value the same things we do, and see the world the same way. And we demonize our enemies and attribute to them the worst motives. We hold on to all sorts of mistaken beliefs, even in big groups, and when we do, it hijacks our ability to find a bargain we and our enemies can agree to. Competition and conflict make all these misjudgments worse.

Misperceptions between groups and in close relationships aren’t just a one-off; they happen all the time. Consider a brilliant set of experiments from University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley and colleagues in which couples were brought in to do a sort of Newlywed Game. Each participant of a couple was asked to guess things like how much their partner liked certain activities, movies, or art and how funny they would find sexist jokes. Participants also gave their own responses, allowing the researchers to gauge the accuracy of guesses in both directions. Results showed that predicting partners thought they were right about 55 percent of the time. But they were right only 25 percent of the time. Longer relationships, as it turned out, were associated with less accuracy.³

Our overconfidence in knowing other people, those we are close to, as well as those who are our opposition, feeds conflict in a major way. And it interferes with efforts to achieve compromise. As Blattman explains:

Any strategic choice, like finding a compromise with an enemy, requires us to predict what the other side believes and what they will do. Unfortunately, humans often forget that others hold different beliefs or have alternative versions of events. We unconsciously project our minds onto theirs. We assume that they have the same information as we do. We underrate the events and offenses from the past that matter to the other side. We forget that they interpret history differently.

Blattman cites eminent psychologist, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, Aaron Beck, who discussed how this misperception can play out in close relationships in his book Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence. According to Beck, feuding partners often see themselves as the victim and their partner as the villain. This view causes us to naturally interpret innocuous comments or behaviors as derisive or aggressive (and causes them to interpret us in this way, too).

So, how can we choose to fight for peace?

In a car ride with my youngest son the other day, we got to talking about the war in the Middle East and how stuck that conflict, among others, has become. I said something like, “People on both sides fight to win, even when winning is impossible. And then they just keep fighting.” To which my wise little sage responded, “But why aren’t they fighting for peace?”

This seems to me to be the most important mindset shift. We need to follow my kiddo’s line of thinking and pivot from thinking, “We need to win the fight,” to thinking, “We need to fight for peace.” It’s this mindset shift that can help us return to a position of recognizing that peace is better than war. We might even remember that we don’t need to like the other side to make peace a better choice than war.

Admittedly, I’m not a political scientist, but it also does seem like it’s incumbent upon us to prioritize creating policies that don’t make leaders immune from the costs of war. And maybe to pick leaders that aren’t totally callous about letting innocent people bear the costs of war.

More importantly, in our everyday lives, we can strive to choose peace over war by monitoring our misperceptions. This effort begins by recognizing that we are all vulnerable to misunderstanding and misjudging other people, particularly those we view as our opposition. After all, people misunderstand each other all the time in healthy, happy relationships, where we tend to give one another the benefit of the doubt and catch misperceptions through regular communication. It’s not surprising that things get trickier in less healthy relationships. In conflictual relationships, the benefit of the doubt goes out the window, and we might have limited contact (or dismiss information that comes in when we do have contact), making it hard to get corrective feedback on our inevitable misperceptions.

There’s a lot we can do to up our motivation and ability to choose peace over war. The trick is that we need to be deliberate about doing it because otherwise, forces outside of our control (like out-of-touch leaders and our automatic misperceptions) will take over. We can break it all down into three steps:

1. Recognize that it’s better to loathe our opponents in peace, rather than in war.

2. Make sure that costs of war are born by the people making the decision to go to war.

3. Stay attuned to the misperceptions and misjudgments we are certain to have and actively try to recalibrate them and see the other side’s humanity.

And, if all else fails, we should simply watch a lot more Al Yankovic videos. Because if we are all doomed, at least we can be doomed with some good beats combined with hilarious riffs.

1. This hilarious-because-it-was-true Al Yankovic music video about the 2020 presidential debate between Biden and Trump always comes to my mind when I think about how awful things sometimes feel. The video starts with Yankovic responding to a request over his earphones to “be not hysterical, despite, you know, things?” Dated, but worth watching.

2. Unchecked rulers are a central reason that we go to war despite its profound costs. This is a critical fact to consider as we approach the 2024 election.

3. Epley and his colleagues have other studies documenting a phenomenon that they call “closeness communication bias. " This bias describes how overconfidence in knowing our partner can interfere with checking. And the lack of checking means that when we get it wrong (which we inevitably will!), we are likely to continue to believe we have it right.