Some say it's bravery, others plain stupidity, to believe that you can succeed against all the odds. But one evolutionary biologist thinks there is a good reason for this supposed military incompetence. The underdogs win a significant number of the battles they fight, says Dominic Johnson of Harvard University. He thinks this is either because self-belief allows them to fight harder and better, or because their confidence bluffs the opponent into backing down.
To seek clues as to how their overconfidence affects the fight, Johnson and a team from Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs analysed historical records compiled by the US Army. They selected details of 120 conflicts, some of which were fought during the American Civil War, the First and Second World Wars and the Yom Kippur War.
If increased performance from self-belief is the key to conquering a superior force, then smaller armies should do just as well during a surprise raid on an opponent as during a fully fledged battle. But if bluffing is more important, they should do less well in surprise raids as their opponent has not had a chance to assess their confidence.
Sure enough, Johnson's team found that weaker forces were statistically more likely to win battles than raids, no matter who started the fight or how big the difference in power between them (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 23, p 245).
"That's counter-intuitive, but it supports the hypothesis that bluffing plays a role," says Johnson, though he admits he can't rule out other explanations for the result.
He points out that animals and people delude themselves about their own abilities in other situations too. Animals often choose to fight larger rivals, and more than half of all athletes in a competition believe they will win.
Aryeh Nusbacher, a war historian from Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, says that Johnson's conclusions are overly simplistic. Saying that wars are won or lost because of confidence is "an absurdly limited point". Even deciding which is the weaker army relies on a number of assumptions, he says.
Johnson admits that war is intensely complicated. The weather, geography and intelligence are just a few of the other factors that can swing a victory. But even if blind luck determines most outcomes, Johnson says it's still important to understand what else might decide the day.
New Scientist issue: 3 August 2002
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