confidence, both in male/male interactions and in courtship of females, has led to greater degrees of overconfidence supported by deeper structures of self-deception.
A related variable is thrill seeking. A tendency toward thrill seeking can be measured by choice of risky driving, risky sports, drugs, and gambling. Measured this way, men are much more prone to thrill seeking than are women. Of course, wars can be very thrilling, at least at the beginning. It is also easy to imagine that an illusion of control gives greater impetus toward war. If you think you can control events favorably after initiating an (often surprise) attack on your neighbor, you are more likely to do so.
War is waged by the powerful. They decide and typically send others to die. Being put in a position of power—made to feel powerful—reduces one’s orientation to the viewpoint of others, their welfare, and their emotions (see Chapter 1). So warlike decisions will be helped along by the biases that power induces. Except for some civil wars, typically wars are fought by an in-group against an out-group. (Even in civil wars, in-groups and out-groups can be, and are, quickly formed.) As we have seen, few distinctions are as powerful in our psychological lives as that between in-group and out-group, with the latter easily inviting derogation, dehumanization, and overt attack, with the aim of elimination or subjugation. This must have begun long before human warfare, in intergroup violence in our chimpanzee (and more distant) past. But warfare presumably intensified the negative consequences and connotations of being an out-group member.
An additional sex difference is highly pertinent. There are several lines of evidence to suggest that men are likely to be less compassionate toward others than are women. They are less likely to read emotions correctly from facial expressions (the sex difference persists even when the time given per expression is only one-fifth of a second). They are less likely to remember emotional information and relate it to the emotional reaction of others. And there is evidence that men are much less likely than women to show compassion toward others who are perceived to have acted unfairly against them. For example, women treated either fairly or unfairly by a partner in an artificial economic game show similar evidence of compassion toward the two when either is being given an electric shock. By contrast, men show no neurophysiological evidence of compassion toward the unfair person when that individual is subjected to electric shocks. Indeed, they show pleasure in inflicting pain. This predicts a male bias toward self-deception whenever it can be based on perceived unfairness. Moralistic outrage in men is expected to be especially heartless and easy to manipulate—toward war, for example.
False historical narratives also contribute. An honest narrative might force people to make reparations for past crimes and to confront more directly their continuing effects. A false one permits a continual policy of denial, counterattack, and expansion at others’ expense.
DEROGATION OF OTHERS → FATAL OVERCONFIDENCE
The derogation of the abilities—never mind moral value—of others can have immediate, dangerous consequences when contemplating war, especially if the other people are assumed to lack fighting ability or motivation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, for example, it has been shown that planning for the US war on Vietnam in the 1960s was rational and calibrated on almost every point except one—the United States underestimated the discipline of its opponents and their willingness to absorb punishment.
This mistake is especially striking, since there is a near-universal rule in animal behavior (including that of humans) of a “home field” advantage: the lizard wins in his or her own territory against an opponent he or she would lose to in the opponent’s territory. Motivation is stronger to protect what you have than to seize what you don’t. Why would one ever assume that the locals cared less about your invasion of their land than you do? But nationalist and/or racist conceptions tempt us to exactly this position. Home-field advantage is true of sports teams in front of their own fans—where they show both a boost in testosterone not enjoyed when playing on the road, as well as a greater chance of winning. Anything that tends to increase fan effect (such as domed stadiums) tends to increase home-field advantage. But much of the effect may be due to the referees who show an increasing bias toward the home team with the same factors. Incidentally, in baseball there is something called “home-field clutch.” In the World Series, the home team wins more often during