ABSTRACT
Communicators use analogies in strategic discourse to invite inferences about ambiguous situations that reinforce their own constraals of these situations. For example, in the short-lived political debate preceding the U.S.’s entry into the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict, supporters of our involvement likened it to WW II (a war most Americans believe we “won”), whereas opponents called attention to its similarities with the Vietnam War (which many consider a “defeat”). Several years earlier, Gilovich (1981) found that political science students were far more likely to recommend intervention in a hypothetical foreign policy crisis when irrelevant features of the scenario (e.g., the location used for press briefings) called to mind WW II (Winston Churchill Hall) rather than Vietnam (e.g., Dean Rusk Hall). The presence of analogical cues did not, however, lead students to judge the scenario as being more similar to one of the previous conflicts than the other. Subsequent reasoning research has also found that seemingly trivial cues can compel people to unwittingly employ historical analogies in their judgments and decisions.
