Preference for violent options biases estimates of threat gravity

Evidence

The utilitarian cost-benefit calculus, however, can be quite slippery in specific applications. Estimates of future harm contain many uncertainties and ambiguities. Predictive judgment is, therefore, subject to many biases (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). As a result, calculations of long-term human costs and benefits are often suspect. Estimating the gravity of potential threats also is fraught with subjectivity. Moreover, violence is often used as a weapon against minor threats on the grounds that if left unchecked, they will escalate and spread to cause far more human suffering. The frequently invoked domino theory reflects this type of escalative projection error concerning a likely course of events. Estimate of the gravity of a situation justifies choice of options. But preference for violent options often biases estimates of gravity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 394

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing inversion — that moral estimates justify options while preference for those options biases the estimates — is a genuinely circular mechanism worth sitting with: justification isn’t downstream of assessment but loops back to corrupt it.
• XREF: Directly supplies the psychological machinery behind vault claims about how people rationalize supporting punitive or harmful policy on threat-escalation grounds.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 394