Filenews 9 October 2025 - by Andreas Kluth
As the world (including the self-proclaimed chief peacemaker in the White House) holds its breath for the announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, let's take a moment to reflect on the growing risk of war, including a world war.
Even a cursory glance at today's major military powers suggests that both their leaders, as well as the political elites, are dangerously overconfident in themselves and could – as in 1914, say – be sleepwalking towards disaster because of what internationalists call "mutual optimism."
If you're not worried yet, there's one study, the largest of its kind, that comes to exactly this conclusion. Jeffrey Friedman at Dartmouth College has just published the findings of the research he did (between about 2016 and 2022) of about 2,000 national security officials from more than 40 Western countries – men and women, North Americans and Europeans, civilians and members of the armed forces.
Friedman's questions were in the form of statements in which respondents had to attribute probabilities. Some samples: The United States is the only country in the world that has stealth aircraft. (The correct answer is no.) There are more active military personnel in the European Union than in Russia (yes). Jihadist terrorists in recent years have killed more people in France than in the US (yes). There are more refugees from Syria than from Venezuela (at that time, yes).
Starting in 2020, Friedman told me, he started asking each question in two versions. For example, half of the participants were asked this variation: "What are the chances that Boko Haram has killed more civilians than ISIS since 2010?" The other half were asked to answer this: "What are the chances that ISIS has killed more civilians than Boko Haram since 2010?"
As you might have guessed, Friedman did not want to test the knowledge of the participants, but to measure what I consider to be "intellectual humility" (or its absence, hubris). And the facts were clear: The participants were overly optimistic.
When the participants estimated that the statements had a 90% chance of being true, those statements were true in just 58% of the cases – essentially, they were heads or tails. Even when the participants felt completely confident – assigning a probability of 0 or 100% – they were wrong more than 25% of the time. There was no difference between men and women, Americans and Europeans, military and civilian.
In addition, the participants did not only make a mistake by chance, but were prone to false positives – that was the point of changing the questions. One would expect that if you ask a large number of rational experts to assign odds on whether ISIS or Boko Haram are more lethal organizations in a condition of comparison with each other, the averages should add up to 100%. But consistently (for 244 of the 280 questions in the experiment) the sum was higher.
In another context, such a bias toward false positives suggests that people are more likely, say, to send an innocent person to prison than to release a guilty person. In international relations, it helps to explain, for example, why White House advisers in 2002 felt confident that Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons (when he wasn't) and were confident that they could not only overthrow his regime but also quickly stabilize and democratize Iraq (when they couldn't).
In attempting to hypothesize this dangerous cognitive asymmetry, Friedman alludes to the work of psychologists such as Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, known worldwide for discovering cognitive biases. One is heuristic availability, our human tendency to magnify the probability of what comes to mind most easily and set aside other possibilities.
In 2002, for example, it was much easier to imagine that Saddam introduced aluminium tubes to make centrifuges to enrich uranium than to think that he just wanted the metal to make conventional missiles (which turned out) or something completely different.
Another pitfall is the so-called consensus bias, our tendency to say "yes" before even considering the content of a proposal. This is made worse if we add groupthink, peer pressure, or fear. This is why authoritarian regimes tend to make more catastrophic mistakes than open societies. Consider Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which his advisers and generals assured him would be "a matter of days."
The bad news that emerges from Friedman's research is two. First, memories of the last world war have faded, and today's generation of leaders and experts – from China and Russia to the US and elsewhere – is showing signs of declining humility and growing hubris, similar to European leaders in the summer of 1914.
Second, the most powerful military power on the planet, the United States, is moving away from a culture of open and objective analysis and shifting toward groupthink and reasoned reasoning based on a test of loyalty to the leader – what one might call a war on expertise.
But there is also good news. Friedman discovered in his research that you can dramatically enhance humility and improve outcomes by giving participants just two minutes of training, essentially preparing them to be aware of their biases.
The stakes in international relations are often war and peace, life and death. Consider some of the questions that the White House is called upon to address today. Did the U.S. really "wipe out" Iran's nuclear program, or did it just delay it for a while? Is Russia waging a hybrid war against European NATO countries just to harass the alliance or to test its vulnerabilities for an all-out attack? Is North Korea planning to attack the South or China to seize Taiwan? If the time comes for war, who is most likely to win?
Here are the suggested lessons from Friedman's research to leaders of all countries: First, appreciate expertise and recognize that its job is to tell the truth to power, not flatter you. Second, don't allow advisors to present individual scenarios, but stick to alternative hypotheses – and then "turn" them so that the positives become negative.
Above all, do not reward the self-confidence (and certainly not the show) of your executives, but humility. And always, always, always, always remain humble.
Adaptation – Editing: Lydia Roubopoulou
