ABSTRACT
Diplomatic thinking can easily fall prey to all kinds of fallacies and delusions, ranging from formal errors in logic to so-called cognitive traps. That is what we will be looking at in this chapter. To set the scene we open with a pleasant and intriguing puzzle, the so-called Wason selection task, which shows how logical fallacies interact with cognitive traps. We then study both logical and quasi-logical fallacies. Among the logical fallacies, there are two that we already met when studying conditional reasoning. We will just briefly recall them. The third fallacy is no less recurrent in diplomacy. It is the false (either-or) dilemma that we meet, for instance, in the ‘us and them’ rhetoric used in the post-9/11 ‘war on terrorism’ context. We then move to the quasi-logical fallacies, from ‘Slippery Slope’ and circular reasoning (‘begging the question’) to well-known errors such as over-generalisation, correlation-causation confusion, unreflective extrapolation, and cause-effect reversal. After having thus looked at the errors in logic we move on to the cognitive traps. There are many of them, but we will focus on those that are directly relevant for diplomatic practice: the Sunk Cost Fallacy, the Availability Heuristic, Hyperbolic Discounting, and Confirmation Bias. We close the chapter by looking at a few specific traps that are of particular interest to the negotiator.
