What I don’t know can hurt you: Collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified

Journal article

Scott Danielson, Paul Conway, Andrew J. Vonasch
PLoS ONE, 2021

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMedCentral PubMed

Cite

APA Click to copy
Danielson, S., Conway, P., & Vonasch, A. J. (2021). What I don’t know can hurt you: Collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified. PLoS ONE.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Danielson, Scott, Paul Conway, and Andrew J. Vonasch. “What I Don’t Know Can Hurt You: Collateral Combat Damage Seems More Acceptable When Bystander Victims Are Unidentified.” PLoS ONE (2021).

MLA Click to copy
Danielson, Scott, et al. “What I Don’t Know Can Hurt You: Collateral Combat Damage Seems More Acceptable When Bystander Victims Are Unidentified.” PLoS ONE, 2021.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{scott2021a,
  title = {What I don’t know can hurt you: Collateral combat damage seems more acceptable when bystander victims are unidentified},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {PLoS ONE},
  author = {Danielson, Scott and Conway, Paul and Vonasch, Andrew J.}
}

Abstract

Five experiments (N = 2,204) examined responses to a realistic moral dilemma: a military pilot must decide whether to bomb a dangerous enemy target, also killing a bystander. Few people endorsed bombing when the bystander was an innocent civilian; however, when the bystander’s identity was unknown, over twice as many people endorsed the bombing. Follow-up studies tested boundary conditions and found the effect to extend beyond modern-day conflicts in the Middle East, showing a similar pattern of judgment for a fictional war. Bombing endorsement was predicted by attitudes towards total war, the theory that there should be no distinction between military and civilian targets in wartime conflict. Bombing endorsement was lower for UK compared to US participants due to differences in total war attitudes. This work has implications for conflicts where unidentified bystanders are common by revealing a potentially deadly bias: people often assume unidentified bystanders are guilty unless proven innocent.