Does War Support Increase When Costs Are High?

A popular theory in the academic study of war ethics is "Just War Theory." This theory has a basic premise that a just war—one that is morally acceptable—requires a minimal amount of innocent lives dying. It is an ethical imperative to keep these "costs" down no matter how ethical of a cause behind the war.

Indeed, nearly all wars focus, to some extent, on the casualties of the war when attempts are made to justify whether a war is doing more good than bad. These are people, after all, that have nothing to do with the conflict yet are potentially being killed or seriously injured due to the conflict. (I'll refrain from getting more graphic in these descriptions, but yeah, war is awful. Think about it).

I think the common sense notion would be then, that the more casualties a war results in, the less support for war there might be. But, recent research headed by psychologists at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that the opposite also can be true.

Specifically, participants in two studies either were primed to think of the term "don't waste" or to think of a control topic; they also either read an essay about the casualties that have resulted in the Afghanistan War (in one study) or about the weather.

The results indicated that people were more supportive of the war if they had just thought about not wasting and read that the war had a lot of casualties. War casualties had the opposite effect (reduced war support) when people were not thinking about not wasting.

This is based on research on economic decision making regarding "sunken costs." The basic idea is that the more someone invests in something/someone, the more hesitant they are going to be to want to get rid of that something/someone. This is why a team might continue with a top draft pick more than a fifth round pick if the player(s) are both struggling, and why it is often hard for gambler's to quit when loosing. The investment—even the loss—merits continued investment to recoup something and salvage the situation.

I conducted some research in 2005 that remains unpublished. This research showed that for Republicans, there was a positive correlation between how much they wanted war and how much they wanted what was best for opposition civilians. But, for Democrats, there was a negative correlation. That is, for Democrats, caring about civilians was related to less war support, but for Republicans, it was the opposite.

I wonder if this is because republicans are more likely to be in a "don't waste" mindset regarding war. At the time, I thought it was because, given that republicans typically had higher support for war at the time, that they were justifying this support by saying that it was good for opposition civilians. Either are possibilities.

Regardless, it is interesting that in some cases, the more innocent people are dying, the more war support might sometimes increase.