What I don’t know can hurt you: collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified
What I don’t know can hurt you: collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified
Five experiments (N=2,204) examined responses to a realistic moral dilemma: a military pilot must decide whether to bomb a dangerous enemy target, also killing a bystander. Few people endorsed bombing when the bystander was an innocent civilian; however, when the bystander’s identity was unknown, over twice as many people endorsed the bombing. Follow-up studies tested boundary conditions and found the effect to extend beyond modern day conflicts in the Middle East, showing a similar pattern of judgment for a fictional war. Bombing endorsement was predicted by attitudes towards total war, the theory that there should be no distinction between military and civilian targets in wartime conflict. Bombing endorsement was lower for UK compared to US participants due to differences in total war attitudes. This work has implications for conflicts where unidentified bystanders are common by revealing a potentially deadly bias: people often assume unidentified bystanders are guilty unless proven innocent.
Danielson, Scott
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Conway, Paul
765aaaf9-173f-44cf-be9a-c8ffbb51e286
Vonasch, Andrew
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23 October 2024
Danielson, Scott
dcedcded-63d0-4c29-b765-d36232d23f5c
Conway, Paul
765aaaf9-173f-44cf-be9a-c8ffbb51e286
Vonasch, Andrew
7d713f33-50d6-4312-8720-b8b744a04752
Danielson, Scott, Conway, Paul and Vonasch, Andrew
(2024)
What I don’t know can hurt you: collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified.
PLoS ONE, 19 (10 October), [e0298842].
(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0298842).
Abstract
Five experiments (N=2,204) examined responses to a realistic moral dilemma: a military pilot must decide whether to bomb a dangerous enemy target, also killing a bystander. Few people endorsed bombing when the bystander was an innocent civilian; however, when the bystander’s identity was unknown, over twice as many people endorsed the bombing. Follow-up studies tested boundary conditions and found the effect to extend beyond modern day conflicts in the Middle East, showing a similar pattern of judgment for a fictional war. Bombing endorsement was predicted by attitudes towards total war, the theory that there should be no distinction between military and civilian targets in wartime conflict. Bombing endorsement was lower for UK compared to US participants due to differences in total war attitudes. This work has implications for conflicts where unidentified bystanders are common by revealing a potentially deadly bias: people often assume unidentified bystanders are guilty unless proven innocent.
Text
Danielson et al, 2024, Anonymous Bystander Collateral Damage, PlosONE
- Accepted Manuscript
Text
journal.pone.0298842
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Accepted/In Press date: 12 September 2024
Published date: 23 October 2024
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Local EPrints ID: 495741
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/495741
ISSN: 1932-6203
PURE UUID: 4bb22169-3e76-4ded-906f-aa9a7ab3dfb2
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Date deposited: 21 Nov 2024 17:37
Last modified: 22 Nov 2024 03:05
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Author:
Scott Danielson
Author:
Paul Conway
Author:
Andrew Vonasch
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