Psychological Dimensions of the Israeli Settlements Issue: Endowments and Identities Open Access

Max Bazerman, Lee Ross, and Daniel L. Shapiro focused on the psychological challenges that confront those who seek to resolve the Israeli settlements dispute. Citing studies that show people's unconscious bias and proclivities, they highlighted potential barriers to agreement. Even in simple exchanges of trivial goods, for example, studies show that people attach greater value to something they own than they would if it were owned by someone else, so it is no wonder that this “endowment effect” is a powerful force acting on people who want to hold on to their land. Similarly, concessions made by one side are devalued in the eyes of those on the other. “If they are giving it away,” as the “reasoning” goes, “perhaps it's not as valuable as I thought it was.” How an issue or concession is framed is clearly of vital importance. If they were to leave the settlements, would the settlers feel that they are giving in, or could they view themselves as pioneers in a new chapter of Israel's history?

Studies show that people strongly believe that their own views of the world are the right ones and that people who don’t see the world their way are misguided, ignorant, or biased. Listening to someone whose views oppose your own is important, and everyone applauds opportunities to promote dialogue between opposing parties. But listening is not enough. To make real progress, each side must demonstrate understanding of the other side's point of view and even “admit some ambivalence” about their own views.

Powerful emotions triggered by the settlements dispute cut to the core of an individual's identity and affiliation. What is more fundamental than choosing where you want to make your home? Acknowledging these primal concerns and respecting each other's point of view — even those who you believe are standing in the way of progress — is an important step. Understanding the other side will not guarantee a successful and sustainable outcome, but without that understanding, there is little chance of one at all.

As a cognitive social psychologist, I study the systematic biases and systematic mistakes people make in their thinking, with particular emphasis on how people make decisions in the context of negotiation. I study powerful “nuggets” that have broad effects. How does one think rationally in a world that does not necessarily include rational actors? Other researchers have identified the systematic ways that people depart from rationality and how they do so when they think about the decisions of others.

The systematic errors (or departures from rationality) that psychologists have documented include overconfidence, framing, anchoring, availability, fixed‐pie assumption, escalation of commitment, ignoring the cognitions of others, reactive devaluation, and incompatibility.

In my presentation today, I would like to focus on a bias that has particular relevance in thinking about the relocation of settlers. It relates to the broad issue of entitlement and how it is psychologically defined. It concerns specifically what psychologists have termed “the endowment effect.” I will illustrate it with the following examples.

An experimenter gave one randomly selected group a souvenir coffee mug. After a few minutes, each of these people (“sellers”) was asked what they would sell the mug for. Subjects (“buyers”) in a second room were asked what they would pay to buy a coffee mug as a souvenir. The sellers, because they already owned the mug (i.e., it was part of their “endowment”), attached a value to their mugs at almost three times the amount the buyers were willing to pay for them. The sellers valued the mugs at more than double the value of the buyers who were given a choice between a mug and a sum of money. A mug is a trivial item, but imagine the endowment effect when someone is asked to attach a value to giving up something that is really important to them, like their home or a piece of land. The more important the item, the more this psychological effect will occur (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1990).

In another experiment, Richard Thaler asked business students at the University of Chicago how much they would be willing to pay for tickets to a sold‐out Chicago Bulls championship basketball game. They would pay an average of $330.10. He asked another group the least they would accept for tickets they already owned. The mean value was $1,920.45. This further demonstrates that once we have something, we seem to place enormous value on it.

Simon Gächter and Arno Riedl demonstrated in another experiment that past practices can affect a person's sense of entitlement or endowment. In this study, pairs of participants were given a general knowledge test. They were told that in the past the winner received $14.00 for participating and that the loser got $7.00, or half as much. In their particular contest, however, they were then told that this particular time a roll of the die would determine whether they got the usual $14.00 and $7.00 or whether instead they would get a total of $17.30, that they could split between the winner and loser in any proportions they wanted. The most common distribution participants chose was to split the $17.30 in a ratio where the winner got twice as much as the loser (Gächter and Riedl 2002). It was as if hearing about the usual split created an endowment ratio of two‐thirds to one‐third.

Max Bazerman's examples demonstrate nicely what experimental psychologists do — they conduct studies that tell us a story, like biblical parables, not testing a hypothesis so much as illustrating some human phenomenon or foible.

This brings to mind a quote from Amos Tversky about the role of conceptual analysis: “Sometimes our mission is to show that what is true in practice is possible in theory.” To elaborate, let me describe core findings from “prospect theory and loss aversion,” which show the importance of how issues are framed. Consider two questions. First, if I could make your brakes 20 percent safer, how much would you pay me to do so? Second, if I wanted to make your brakes 20 percent less safe, how much would I have to pay you? I trust that all of you would agree that the amount you would pay in the first instance, you would reject as a payment in the second. This illustrates that people are especially reluctant to accept a loss, to give up things they already have.

Psychologists have studied a number of barriers to dispute resolution. These include: failure to recognize “common ground” or shared interests; dissonance that justifies continuing conflict; insisting on justice, fairness, and equity rather than an advance over the status quo; divergent views of past events and present situations; and reactive devaluation. People will devalue a compromise offer or concession as a consequence of its having been put on the table — especially (but not exclusively) if it has been offered by the other side.

Here is a very relevant research example illustrating how the source of a concession can influence how valuable it is perceived to be. The example involves Israelis’ ratings of a Palestinian versus Israeli proposal as a function of its putative authorship. The most dramatic finding was that Israelis viewed a proposal offered on May 6, 1993 by their own side, but attributed to the Palestinians, less positively than they evaluated a Palestinian proposal offered four days later, but attributed to their own government. Palestinian evaluations of their own side's proposals were also influenced by putative authorship. As a portent of things to come, Palestinians also viewed their own side's proposal as much better for Israelis than did the Israelis.

This example demonstrates a major barrier to dispute resolution: people in conflict find it hard to move away from the status quo, especially if it seems to be benefiting someone seen as having interests different from their own. This issue is relevant both for negotiations with the other side (across the table) and with your own side (behind the table).

Another major issue involves the effect of intergroup perception and dialogue. Such conflict cannot be solved without talk, but talk alone is not enough. (If talk were enough, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would have ended a long time ago.) To understand why getting the two sides together to explain their positions proves less effective than one might hope, it may be useful to consider the work that my students and I have been doing over the past few years on “naïve realism.”

People believe that the way they see the world is the way it “really is.” This belief is the first of three dangerous convictions:

1. I see things as they really are.

2. Other fair‐minded people will share my views.

3. If people do not share my views and their minds cannot be changed by my telling them how things really are, that shows they are lazy, stupid, or biased.

People also believe that while their own experiences and identities make them wiser, other people's identities and experiences lead them to be biased. And they believe that their own positions on various issues are the correct, reasonable, and balanced ones. For example, everybody in this room thinks they are exactly as liberal as it is reasonable to be. And everyone thinks they are as religious or orthodox as it is reasonable to be. It brings to mind a joke made by comedian George Carlin: have you ever noticed that anyone driving more slowly than you is an “idiot” and anyone driving faster than you is a “maniac?” Applying this to the problem of the settlements, people believe that anyone with different views on the settlements project is unthinking, deluded, or benighted. Those who oppose the settlements, of course, have similar views of the champions of the settlements.

Benjamin Franklin said that, in most matters, especially religion, most people think they are in possession of all truth and that, insofar as others disagree, it is to that degree that those others are in error. Research by my students and me has shown exactly this phenomenon. That is, when students are asked to assess the role that normative factors versus biases played in determining a peer's views on a number of issues, they tended to attribute those views to biases precisely to the extent that they perceived those views to be discrepant from their own.

Naïve realism also leads us to think media and mediators are biased against us. One study we did concerned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Audiences who were pro‐Arab and audiences who were pro‐Israeli were shown sixty minutes of the same news coverage, and both groups thought the coverage was biased against them. The same goes for the recent U.S. presidential debates. Both sides think their candidate won and believe that pundits didn’t give their side its due.

As I stated earlier, many of us hold great hope for dialogue. We think that if we just explain things to the other side, and if they are open‐minded, matters will get better. But actually explaining one's own position in itself does not usually help. What does help is acknowledging good points of the other side’s position. One example of this involves an experiment where participants on different sides of the affirmative action debate were told they had to negotiate to split up some scholarship money. Some participants were asked only to explain their own side, while others were instructed to acknowledge a good point on the other side. The results showed that participants in the latter condition were more confident that they would be able to agree at the end, liked those on the other side better, and were more successful in reaching an agreement.

Before closing, let me relate a further study that would also seem relevant in the settler context. The first relates to the usefulness of demonstrating an understanding of someone with whom you are in conflict. This study involved a simulated negotiation about the legalization of marijuana. A substantive concession to be made by the experimenter‐negotiator was held constant. In some cases, however, before the concession was made, the negotiator asked the other person for his or her views and then paused to say that he or she heard what was said and was now thinking about the issue before offering the concession. The concession was more likely to be accepted in the case when the negotiator said they had heard and considered the other side.

My more general point is that in a conflict it is essential to acknowledge the moral basis of the other side's thinking, and, where it exists, to acknowledge one's ambivalence about the absolute correctness of one's own side. Secular Jews, in America as well as in Israel, for example, have some ambivalence in opposing the settlers and other “extremists” because they often recognize that the survival of the Jewish identity over the ages has depended on Jews who have been more zealous than themselves. In Israel, cosmopolitan Jews from Tel Aviv may have some identification with the Hilltop Settlers because of the ways their struggle resonates with the stories of earlier pioneers. It might help if national religious settlers would recognize and acknowledge the need for some ambivalence about their own positions. In particular, they might acknowledge that the survival of the Jewish people and their own state has at times also depended on compromise and realism, as exemplified by David Ben Gurion's painful compromises during the war in 1948.

The eminent emotions researcher, Magda Arnold, suggested that emotions tend to arise when something is at stake that is personally significant to us (Arnold 1960). The Israeli settlements situation is a case in point. It encompasses personally relevant issues regarding national security, religion, and the nature of the political community. And many settlers have practical concerns about not wanting to lose their homes, farms, businesses, or community of friends and neighbors.

What further complicates this situation and creates a risk that it will turn into a Greek tragedy is the degree of overlap between each side's identities. It is Israeli versus Israeli, brother versus brother, Cain versus Abel. And one need only recall what happened to Abel to recognize the emotional gravity of a conflict within one's own family.

In this brief talk, I present a framework I have developed for understanding and dealing with some of the identity‐based concerns that are likely to be triggered in a conflict. In particular, I recommend that parties pay greater attention to the power of affiliation and autonomy in their relationships with one another. While this framework does not provide “the answer” to the settlements issue, I hope it will provoke questions and provide possible directions for reframing it.

Identity is a core issue in this conflict over the settlements. According to Uzi Benziman, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “The government is trying to use money to persuade settlers to evacuate willingly” (Lynfield 2004). But Yaacov Lev, a member of the Gaza Coast Regional Council, suggested that the issue is not money: “We invested our hearts and souls in every tree and path in this place” (Lynfield 2004).

To understand more specifically how identity plays into the Israeli settlements issue, one must first understand the concept of “identity.” Many assume that identity is a fixed concept that resides in our heads. Yes, we have that kind of identity, where we conceive of ourselves as a Jew, a Muslim, a Catholic, a man, or a woman. No matter the context, we know that this is an attribute of our identity.

Yet there is another layer to our sense of identity, one that is fluid and variable. I call this our “relational identity,” because it is how we continuously define the relational space between us and another person or group. In a specific relationship, do we feel interpersonally close to one another or distant? Do we feel free to act as we would like or constrained?

All parties, whether individuals or groups, shape their relational identities as they interact with others. The national religious settlers, for example, define and communicate their relational identity (vis‐à‐vis the Israeli nonsettlers) as they negotiate, protest, and make statements via the media. They may be expressing messages — subtly or overtly, intentionally or unintentionally — such as:

As settlers and nonsettlers communicate such alienating messages back and forth, each casts the other in an increasingly negative light. Noncooperative behavior becomes more likely.

There are two main components of our relational identity: affiliation and autonomy. I call these two components “relational identity concerns” (Shapiro 2002), because we often have an emotional interest in having these components met. The first of the concerns, affiliation, is the sense of closeness that a party feels in relation to another. Do I feel close or distant from you, included or excluded? Autonomy, the second relational identity concern, is the freedom to decide how one wants to act, think, and feel, without imposition from others.

Regardless of decisions made by the Israeli government and settlers, important relational identity concerns are at stake for the settlers, and how these concerns are dealt with can have a significant impact on the course of the conflict. If these concerns are met, the relationship between parties flows smoothly. If these concerns are unmet, negative emotions tend to get stirred, and adversarial behavior becomes more likely.

There are at least two serious issues related to affiliation:

1. A gap exists between the way many settlers view themselves and the way other Israelis view them. Many of the national religious settlers see themselves as pioneers of Zionism, ideology, and faith. Yet some Israelis and government officials now view settlers as a burden on Israel's strategic interests.

2. Many settlers feel alienated and betrayed by the government. National religious settlers believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government have betrayed their vision and the true interests of the Jewish state. He had once championed the settler cause as its leader, hero, and father figure. But now some settlers feel that, through his policy of disengagement, he is abandoning the settlers — his children — and is disowning fundamental Jewish vision and beliefs.

To help deal with the above two issues, I offer the following suggestions:

1. To reduce the gap in perspectives about the settlers, each side might try to appreciate the point of view of the other. Harvard Law School professor and Program on Negotiation founder Roger Fisher and I are completing a book on how to deal with emotions in negotiation. We suggest that a powerful way to build affiliation is to understand and acknowledge another's point of view in a way that demonstrates that we see merit in that point of view, even if we do not agree with it. If the Israeli government and settlers want to work cooperatively on the settlements issue, the government would be well advised to appreciate the pioneering efforts of the settlers. Whether or not settlements are relocated, some form of public recognition seems sensible, given the contributions of the settlers to the Zionist cause. Still, if relocation does occur, it is my belief that these tangible forms of recognition are not a substitute for compensation, just as compensation is not a substitute for recognition. Both substantive and identity‐based issues need to be dealt with on their own terms.

2. To deal with feelings of betrayal, build structural connections as colleagues. The settlers and government might identify common goals and work as “colleagues” to accomplish them. For example, the settlers clearly know a lot about the operation of a settlement. Assuming that some settlements will remain and expand, how could such a process happen most effectively? A joint working group of settlers and government officials could meet and brainstorm ideas. Affiliation between the groups would increase.

There are at least two serious issues related to autonomy:

1. The settlers fear an imposed relocation. While some suggest that settlers do not want to be involved in plans being developed by Israel's relocation agency for fear of conceding that they will move, their lack of participation will have an impact on their autonomy because they will lose the ability to freely express opinions about proposals and ideas targeted toward them.

2. The settlers feel that they are being treated like objects. Some of the settlers feel as though they are chess pieces, being moved from one settlement location to another at the sole discretion of Israeli officials.

To deal with the above two concerns, I advise parties to consider the following strategic suggestions:

1. To reduce fear of imposed relocation, consider involving the settlers in deliberations over the settlements issue. The settlements issue is currently conceived of as a zero‐sum situation, where the settlers either completely leave or completely stay. But there are many creative ways to think about this issue. It could be beneficial to establish an unofficial joint brainstorming group between second‐tier government officials and settlers to consider, without commitment, various ways to satisfy each side's interests. Out of such a brainstorming might come helpful ideas to deal with the settlements issue in ways that respect each side's autonomy.

2. To avoid having settlers feel being treated like objects, consult before deciding. Consider having the government establish a practice of consulting settlers, or at least informing them, of what decisions are being considered or made. The more that settlers are consulted and informed, the more they will feel a part of the process. And if negotiation, whether formal or informal, can be established between the parties, such joint decision making would further enhance each side's sense of autonomy.

Decisions need to be made and will be made regarding the settlements, whether any of the ideas I have presented are considered or not. None of these ideas diminish the importance of using objective criteria, facts, and data in determining how to deal effectively with the current situation. However, if parties feel demeaned in terms of their relational identity, there will be an emotional reaction that can create short‐term resistance or long‐term social instability or both.

I suggest that Israelis have a choice about the identity‐based narrative to be embraced as they deal with this very important, very political, very emotional conflict. Whether at the negotiation table or while making media statements, Israelis involved in this issue need to think and deal very carefully with issues of autonomy and affiliation. This situation holds much promise, as long as each party keeps in mind that, yes, they are their brothers’ keeper.

Aren’t the settlers so diverse that you can’t please all of them?

Yes. And you will be more likely to have satisfaction among settlers if their concerns for affiliation and autonomy are satisfied — at least to the extent pragmatically possible. If they feel disaffiliated from the government, they will be less inclined to work with the government. And if they fell treated as objects, they will be much less inclined to negotiate in the first place.

Professor Bazerman, is the obvious bargaining approach for the government to take with the settlers to say, “The market value of your house is now zero, because you have to move. Now what will you take for your worthless house?”

I was talking about the likely psychology that we can anticipate, not necessarily the correct approach to take. You need to aim for an agreement knowing what we know about entitlements, even though there are some people with whom no agreement is possible, and no amount offered will be thought to be enough. The entitlement is not necessarily appropriate — it might be totally out of whack with market realities.

Telling settlers market value is zero is not the answer. But if an owner always overvalues the ownership, what can the state do?

We could think of a variety of strategies in the abstract. Obviously, you don’t let each settler determine the value of his own home. You may be able to come up with an agreed‐upon process to fairly value homes, for example. My message is that these cognitive biases won’t go away — you need to work around the biases.

The price might not feel fair, but the procedure can be made to feel fair.

Maybe part of the problem in Israel today is that the Prime Minister has totally shut off communications with the settlers, thus making them feel more like objects. How do you make the government address the question in a way that would be similar to your recommendations? Aren’t there risks for the government if it opens formal negotiations with the settlers?

If the process of communication is official and formal, there is great risk. Unofficial, informal negotiations might work better, perhaps with second‐tier representatives from each side.

Do emotions equal identity, or are they formal manifestations of the latter? Are we right to focus on emotions?

Emotions and identity are not the same thing. Identity is a sense of how we see ourselves alone or in comparison to others. Emotions are an internal experience often involving cognition, physiology, and the felt desire to act in a particular way, whether to hit a person or to escape from a situation. Emotions often are the symptomatic, internal response to an identity‐based concern of ours that has gone met or unmet. Many emotions, positive or negative, may be triggered when our identity is implicated. My suggestion is that we focus not on emotions per se, but rather on their triggering antecedents — on people's need for autonomy and affiliation.