By Max Abrahms
In the aftermath of the November 13 Paris attacks, politicians and pundits accused one another of “playing into the terrorists’ hands.”
But how does anyone know what the Islamic State (IS) group, or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), really wants?
One explanation comes from a cognitive bias called correspondent inference theory. It was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the social psychologist Edward Jones to explain the cognitive process by which an observer infers the motives of an actor.
The theory emerged from the work of Fritz Heider, who saw individuals as “naïve psychologists” motivated by a practical concern—a need to simplify, comprehend and predict the motives of others. Heider postulated that people process information by applying inferential rules that shape their responses to behavior. Correspondent inference theory resolves a crucial question that Heider left unanswered: How does an observer infer the motives of an actor based on his behavior?
Jones showed that observers tend to interpret an actor’s objective in terms of the consequence of his actions. Jones offered a simple example: A boy notices his mother shut the door, and the room becomes less noisy; the correspondent inference is that the boy’s mother wanted to make the room quieter.
Similarly, people infer the motives of terrorists from the observable consequences of their violent behavior—not from studying the groups more scientifically. This also helps explain why the presumed motives of terrorists seem to shift so rapidly and contradictorily. Until the Paris attacks, the conventional wisdom held that the IS commits acts of violence in order to establish a caliphate in the Middle East unadulterated by Western influence. Since the attacks, however, we’ve been told that actually ISIS wants to provoke the West into more military interference in order to showcase the West’s brutal behavior.
Before the attacks, we were told that France was a major target for the IS because of its failure to integrate its Muslim population. Now we’re told that ISIS wants France and the rest of the world to become even more xenophobic against Muslims on the theory that alienating moderates may make them more receptive to extremism. It’s no wonder that the media are constantly referring to terrorists as “masterminds” who commit “sophisticated” attacks. Regardless of what happens as a result of their attacks, the outcome will invariably be seen as exactly what the terrorists want.
Max Abrahms is a political science professor at Northeastern University and a member at the Council on Foreign Relations.