As an umbrella term, national 'security' encompasses many dimensions so it is in need of being perceived in correct perspective and proportion. A common prevailing assumption is that security leads to conditions of all-round development in a society. This is true when balanced security is there but if lopsided or overplayed, negative consequences could follow such as impeding national development and progress.
Many economic and other decisions are based on security-related issues. In history, many development and welfare decisions have been sacrificed at the altar of ultra-nationalism and security.
Perceptions are coloured by biases of all sorts. In other words, security and perceptions of security are not the same. As researchers and data-analysts show, people's subjective perceptions about the world may significantly diverge from reality. Objective security (reality) and subjective security (feeling and perceptions), as experienced by people, reflect a disparity of security perceptions at the country level.
For example, in terms of development - security debate the message by world leader and security specialists is that world is becoming increasingly an unsafe place - impinging on socio-economic development and affecting economic activity. At least, that is the message one gathers when listening to world leaders, military and politicians or reading foreign and defence policy strategists.
Why this is so? First, humans in the evolutionary sense still maintain a primordial fear of survival; secondly, bad news makes good and acceptable news rather than banal news; third, politicians and military analysts like to pander to security risks and paradigms based on win-lose realist models that thrive on a near-chaotic world. This makes sense of their anxieties and survival. Likewise, security journalists are adept in parleying dire situations about state of economy and security.
At many major world crises, world security has been highlighted in stark terms. Flash points carry more coverage India-Pakistan tensions over Kashmir, Arab-Israel over Palestine, North Korea-US, and Iran-US issues while many other mundane news go either under-reported or ignored. Admittedly, climate change, economy and epidemics carry stark security implications. Barring a few human issues they are more often exaggerated and political interests undergird their reportage and analysis. Years of wars, droughts, floods, pandemics and natural calamities in the past used to strike, causing millions of deaths as they swept across the lands.
Regardless of economic progress in development and human welfare in China by the Chinese regime, the issues are blown out of proportion to denigrate or embarrass the regime and their model of development. But as many know in the developing world there is countervailing evidence of China's rise as an economic power and lifting of mass population out of poverty in a brief span of three decades.
For instance, small Nordic countries are more security-conscious due to their smaller size and resources and encircled by big neighbours. The Netherlands', e.g., Integrated International Security Strategy of (2018-2022) mentions that the world has become more insecure in relation to certain aspects such as shifts in the balance of geopolitical power, increasing instability and insecurity around Europe and the Caribbean and a rise in hybrid conflicts and tensions.
This may be true, but again the security dimensions are often hyped-up. However, national and international research has demonstrated that the world actually has become a safer place - if one looks at the long-term trends: the chance that someone is being killed by violence has decreased significantly in the last centuries and decades. Media and technology are always eager to report even minor negative developments, least of all mini-crises. General trade communication and mutual dependence has made the world interdependent. Whenever natural or manmade disaster or pandemics erupt, they are taken care of by disaster relief agencies and world bodies. According to the above this is a neat, always declining trend line; peaks like those in 2014 might occur. Nevertheless, the overall trend towards violence is declining.
Human perceptions of security are based on family upbringing, education, parental influence, regional and world developments, press and media coverage. Another example that substantiates the claim that human perceptions can differ from reality can be derived from the study conducted by Hans Rosling in his book Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think.
In this book, Rosling shows on the basis of 13 factual questions about the current situation in the world: that common people, including highly-educated people, get most of the answers wrong. More worrisome is that majority of people even got worse results than when they would have picked answers at random: He states that "chimpanzees, by picking randomly, would do consistently better than the well-educated, but deluded human beings" - that "every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless - in short, more dramatic - than it really is". These positive trends are corroborated by Steven Pinker and Max Roser who collect all kinds of data to prove the slow, but long-lasting positive developments. For example, a comparative study of various foresight reports in 10 different countries demonstrate that security perceptions and corresponding threats to the respective national security of the states can differ significantly.
The examples are manifestations of a broader trend: the existence of a discrepancy between the reality of security and the feeling and thus the perception of security. Hence, the question arises how the mismatch between these realities and perceptions of security can be explained.
To a certain extent, these differences can be explained due to geography, culture and history but another important aspect in explaining the diverse security perceptions is in the psychology literature. More tellingly, cognitive biases held by elites in those states, i.e., the people who are outlining and implementing policy decisions, can help to clarify why certain policies are sound and why certain events are perceived as threats to national security.
Security is both a feeling and a reality. The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different counter-measures. The feeling of security is based on your psychological reactions to both risks and counter-measures. Heuristics are simplifying 'rules of thumb' that people use to make a difficult judgement. The reliance on the heuristic can cause predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions.
Cognitive systems are of two types as different modes of thinking. The first one operates automatically and quickly with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. It draws conclusions based on previous experiences, events, and emotional memory. The other is based on rational assessments, full of mental deliberations that demand complex computations . The former latter are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. The second one is much slower, more calculating and deliberative, gets activated when it fails to come up with a fast, suitable answer.
Cognitive biases that influence security perceptions It is not uncommon that a gap exists between the reality of security and the human perception of security. This divergence is the result of intuitive trade-offs made: even though humans are supposed to be good at making security trade-offs, they get it wrong most of the time.
For instance, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning psychologist, conducted research on common peoples' estimates regarding the principal causes of death after comparing the statistics. One of the conclusions was through example that people thought hurricanes were bigger killers than asthma, even though asthma caused 20 times as many deaths as hurricanes did. Also being bitten by snakes or attacked by predatory animals is considered as more dangerous whereas the automobile accidents in urban areas cause more injuries and deaths.
This is but one of the many examples showing that peoples' estimate of risk assessments often differ from the possible risks. Impliedly, that initial assessments are inadequate, albeit cognitive system based on reflexive and automatic responses is quick, and satisfying. But it is generally misleading where deliberate cognition should have been activated.
According to Schneier, there are several aspects of the security trade-off that humans might calculate wrongly: the magnitude, probability costs, how effective a particular counter-measure may alleviate the risk and how disparate risks and costs can be compared. The bigger human perception diverges from actual reality in any of these aspects, the more the perceived trade-off will not match the actual trade-off.
(The writer is presently Visiting Faculty, Dept of Defence and Strategic Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad)
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