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Circular causality blindness is more pronounced in conflicts, or “vicious cycles” than it is in harmony, or “virtuous cycles”.
In a virtuous cycle, we take credit for the generosity and magnanimity that we show others, and the fundamental attribution error continues to function, leading us to attribute the kindness and love that we receive from the other party to their positive character traits rather than their context. The result is often a sweet and prosocial narrative of compassionate and good-hearted people, us included, lifting each other up in mutual support and synergy. In this case who really cares if we’re not seeing reality with 100% accuracy, because it feels good and keeps the relationship going in a positive direction.
I do think that circular causality blindness occurs to some extent in healthy relationship dynamics, but I’ve observed far more of it and its negative effects in discordant and adversarial “dances” between individuals and also between groups. From high school cliques vying for status, to gangs fighting over territory, to political parties attempting to overpower one another, to nations playing out century-long international conflicts – human groups of every size also suffer from circular causality blindness.
Groups have tendencies to dehumanize their rivals more than their own members, to revise history in their favor, and to selectively attend to contextual factors that emphasize their own virtues and accentuate the moral shortcomings of other tribes.
From the top to the bottom of their hierarchies, tribes and their members tend toward the ethos that the social psychologist Roy Baumeister calls, “the myth of pure evil”. The myth of pure evil is a human sensemaking tendency which oversimplifies present-day social transactions and historical events into a heroes-vs-villains version of reality, of course positioning our own group as the heroes, or perhaps the victims, on the right side of history. The stories we tribally make to explain our experience tend toward linearity, with a beginning (the villains attack or invade, unprovoked), a middle (the heroes nobly respond in self-defense and with intentions of justice), and an end (we, the heroes, will be victorious, at any cost, over the malevolent adversary). These stories are not circular, because a circular narrative would introduce the challenging complexity that no side in societal and historical affairs is wholly virtuous, wholly malevolent, or wholly innocent. Just as with individuals in conflict with one another, all the groups involved in between-group conflicts have, to some degree, typically engaged in selfish or unattuned behavior that negatively impacted other groups. And such recognitions tend to demand the more difficult and less expedient human capacities of self-reflection, accountability, negotiation, and dreaded compromise, in order to restore harmony by balancing the needs of all parties, rather than only the needs of our own group. This is a harder path in the short term because it involves doing more work to create abundance, rather than overpowering others to compensate for scarcity.
Baumeister’s mere suggestion that pure evil is a myth is controversial, and can even make people outraged, precisely because of the cognitive biases that I’ve explained. We’re going against very strong primitive tendencies when we force ourselves to be objective and take a strict look at the transgressions of the group that we’re a part of, that we identify with, or that we’re rooting for. And the more we’re personally and emotionally invested in a conflict, whether it’s in the present-day or in the past, the more likely it is that circular causality blindness will prevent us from seeing the tragic complexity of mutual fault.
I’m not saying that every conflict between groups involves perfect ethical symmetry or moral equivalence. But I do find it interesting to look closely case by case at countless instances of supposed “pure evil” and find that, if we’re willing to be honest and look backward far enough at the relationship, we’ll generally find a breadcrumb trail of reciprocal provocation and escalation, essentially stemming from a mutual lack of concern or empathy on both sides for their fellow men and women who are different and perhaps have conflicting needs and beliefs about how to shape the world.
What also seems true to me is that the morality of decisions in ongoing conflicts, as well as in harmonious cycles of cooperation, seems impossible to measure objectively. Moral orientations in relationships between groups are typically subjective opinions of individuals and their collective group consensus — opinions that are almost inevitably made while looking through a biased lens of tribalism. Tribalism is the aspect of human nature that we evolved in order to achieve the level of pro-social behavior we’re capable of. It’s an archetypal ability that was necessary for our species to evolve; it just happened to be a double-edged sword that cuts toward both cooperation within groups, but also toward bias and dehumanization between groups. No matter how poorly one individual or tribe reacts, they virtually always have at least some legitimate grievance that they can point at to justify their reaction, which links the beginning and the end of a relational story as an iterative circle, rather than a simple line which leaves an innocent victimized party and a guilty villainous one.