I See, Therefore I Know

I was first introduced to the concept of Correspondent Inference Theory in Max Abrahm's paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work. Why Terrorism Does Not Work stayed with me (I have two previous posts that reference it), and so when I saw that Professor Abrahms had written an article for The Atlantic, A Psychological Theory Explains the Mail Bomber Reaction I was all over it.

Correspondent Inference Theory says, simply, that people tend to presume the motives of an action from the observable consequences of that action. And this, according to Professor Abrahms, is why terrorism doesn't work. Because no matter what political goals a terrorist might have, when a bomb goes off and people die, the destruction and the body count are inferred to be the goal, and whatever geopolitical concessions a terrorist may have demanded are forgotten.

Having not really had any experience with the broader theory, my own thinking on the topic was confined to terrorism, until I was mulling over the rush to ascribe motive to recent mail-bombing attempts and the weekend's synagogue shooting. While doing this I happened to have a conversation with a co-worker who was complaining about Facebook's supposed censorship of Right-leaning voices and it struck me. The Professor could have titled his paper "Why Everything Does Not Work."

Given a) the lack of an intuited link between the visible consequences of an action and the actor's desired intent and b) a high level of emotional resonance of either the action or the consequences, people will tend to fall into the correspondent inference fallacy. (And it does strike me as a straightforward logical fallacy.) And the visible consequences don't have to be material to have an impact. Take Colin Kaepernick for instance. The number of people who claimed that they felt disrespected by Mr. Kaepernick's choice to kneel, rather than stand, during the National Anthem lead any number of people to infer, incorrectly, that this feeling of disrespect was Mr. Kaepernick's intent, when his stated goal was to draw attention to police violence against Black people in the United States. just like the terrorists that Professor Abrahms discussed in Why Terrorism Does Not Work, Mr. Kaepernick's intent was drowned by the perceived effects of his protest.

And just about every form of activism that people typically engage in has this problem. The Me Too movement is plagued by suspicions that it's actually a cover for a broad score-settling with men, rather than a call for accountability. Of course, this one of those things that once you see, you can find everywhere, and so it's important to be careful. The fact that Correspondent Inference Theory can lead people to a logical fallacy doesn't mean that every time someone guesses at someone's motive, they're wrong; it's possible to come to the correct answer even with incomplete information. And people can come to conclusions with more information than one thinks they have; amusingly, it's possible that a charge of falling into the correspondent inference fallacy can result from one falling into the correspondent inference fallacy oneself.

But understanding the phenomenon grants a different perspective on events, and the reactions to those events.

And it's made me ask myself a simple question, one that I've often overlooked: Why do I believe the people I believe? Why do I believe that terrorists have political goals, or that Conservative activists are genuinely spooked by social justice culture? Why do I avoid attributing motives in line with the observable consequences in those cases where they strike me as incorrect?

Part of it, I think, is that I have a bias towards complexity, and the Correspondent Inference Theory seems to lead people to more simplistic answers for questions of "Why?" than I find workable. Maybe it's that, given that I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, I'm not a "naïve psychologist," as Fritz Heider described many people, and my marginally greater degree of sophistication (at the expense of being naïve in other areas) serves me in this regard. In the end, I don't really know. But understanding Correspondent Inference Theory and its predictions of human behavior make a lot of peices appear to fall into place. And that is, in the end, a useful thing.