Iraq and the Danger of Psychological Entrapment

As Robert M. Gates appears this week at his Senate confirmation hearings for defense secretary, Wesleyan University psychologist Scott Plous sees a hidden trap. To understand it, take a little test.

Let's say your elderly dad has a beloved car. Its reliability was legendary, but it has started to have problems. He gets one thing fixed, and something else goes wrong. Each fix doesn't cost much, but they add up, and then the problems start to get bigger. Your dad is convinced the next repair will get the car as good as new. Would you advise him to pull the plug and get rid of the car?

Or consider this. A friend invests some money after getting a tip about a stock. The price soars, and your friend gains 10 percent overnight. He immediately doubles his investment. A week later, the thing tanks, and he is in the red. A month later, it dives again, and he has lost a quarter of his investment. Should he cut his losses and sell?

One more, and yes, these are all trick questions. A woman you care about falls in love. After many years of a happy relationship, the person she is with develops a vicious streak, starts smashing things and occasionally gives her a black eye. Would you tell her to walk out of the relationship?

The trick in all these questions is that when presented with such scenarios, it is easy for us to answer yes. Your dad should sell that car, your friend should save what money he can, and the person you care about should dump that abuser.

Every day, of course, when it comes to such decisions in our own lives, millions of people answer no.

The difference is because of a widespread phenomenon in human behavior known as entrapment. When you invest yourself in something, it is exceedingly difficult to discard your investment. What is devilish about entrapment is not just that it can result in ever greater losses, but that those losses get you ever more entrapped, because now you have even more invested.

Plous, a social psychologist and author of "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making," said experiments show that psychological entrapment comes in at least four guises: the investment trap, in which we try to recover sunk costs by throwing good money after bad; the time delay trap, in which a short-term benefit carries the seed of long-term problems; the deterioration trap, in which things that started out well slowly get worse; and the ignorance trap, in which hidden risks surface suddenly.

What does this have to do with the Gates confirmation? Plous sees the U.S. dilemma about what military course to take in Iraq as a perfect example of psychological entrapment -- on a national scale.

"What is remarkable is that the war in Iraq is a kind of super trap that has all these elements," Plous said. "Some weeks things look better, and then they look worse and then there is a setback. What we need is to take a step back and ask, 'If we were faced with the choice today without sunk costs, what decision would we make?' "

Plous is talking about the quick military victory followed by the zigzag decline into nightmare: the lack of intelligence on the ground about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction; the hundreds of billions of dollars invested to fight the war; and above all, the lives of thousands of Americans that have been lost.

Plous said his alarm bells went off when he realized that President Bush was explicitly using the language of entrapment in speeches to rally support for the war. "Retreating from Iraq would dishonor the service of our brave men and women who have sacrificed in that country and have given their lives in that country, which would mean their sacrifice would be in vain," the president said recently.