Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2024
States and non-state actors conduct unclaimed coercive attacks, inflicting costs on adversaries to signal resolve to prevail in a dispute while refraining from claiming or denying responsibility. Analysts argue that targets often know who is responsible, which enables coercive communication, and that the lack of claims of responsibility grants coercers plausible deniability in the eyes of third parties. The puzzle of different audiences holding different beliefs about who is behind an unclaimed attack, even when they may have the same information, has been neglected. We address this puzzle by theorising that targets and third parties tend to reach different conclusions due to distinct emotional reactions: targets are more likely to experience anger, which induces certainty and a desire to blame someone, as well as heuristic and biased information processing, prompting confident attribution despite the limited evidence. A vignette-based experiment depicting a terrorist attack lends empirical plausibility to our argument.
1 9/11 Commission, ‘Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States’ (22 July 2004), pp. 190–214, available at: {https://9-11commission.gov/report/}.
2 Michael Morrell, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism. From Al Qa’ida to ISIS (New York: Twelve, 2015), p. 38.
3 Robin Wright, ‘Israel wages a growing war in Syria’, The New Yorker (10 April 2018), available at: {https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/israel-wages-a-growing-war-in-syria}.
4 This section and the following draw on Costantino Pischedda and Andrew Cheon, ‘Does plausible deniability work? Assessing the effectiveness of unclaimed coercive acts in the Ukraine war’, Contemporary Security Policy, 44:3 (2023), pp. 345–71. By covert action we mean ‘a variety of secret foreign policy actions that may be administered by military or intelligence bureaucracies … in a way that conceals and renders deniable the role of the sponsoring state for most audiences’. Austin Carson and Keren Yarhi-Milo, ‘Covert communication: The intelligibility and credibility of signaling in secret’, Security Studies, 26:1 (2017), pp. 124–56 (p. 128).
5 See, for example, Daniel Byman and Sarah Kreps, ‘Agents of destruction? Applying principal-agent analysis to state-sponsored terrorism’, International Studies Perspective, 11:1 (2010), pp. 1–18; and Dennis Pluchinsky, ‘The terrorism puzzle: Missing pieces and no boxcover’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 9:1 (1997), pp. 7–10.
6 See, for example, Rory Cormac and Richard Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black: Covert action and implausible deniability’, International Affairs, 94:3 (2018), pp. 477–94; Klaas Voß, ‘Plausibly deniable: Mercenaries in US covert interventions during the Cold War, 1964–1987’, Cold War History, 16:1 (2016), pp. 37–60.
7 Allison Carnegie and Austin Carson, Secrets in Global Governance: Disclosure Dilemmas and the Challenge of International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Carson and Yarhi-Milo, ‘Covert communication’, pp. 124–56.
8 Andrew Higgins, Michael R. Gordon, and Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Photos link masked men in East Ukraine to Russia’, New York Times (20 April 2014), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/world/europe/photos-link-masked-men-in-east-ukraine-to-russia.html}.
9 Michael Joseph and Michael Poznansky, ‘Media technology, covert action, and the politics of exposure’, Journal of Peace Research, 55:3 (2018), pp. 320–35.
10 See, in particular, Jennifer. S. Lerner and Larissa. Z. Tiedens, ‘Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger’s influence on cognition’, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19:2 (2006), pp. 115–37.
11 Jennifer S. Lerner, Julie H. Goldberg, and Philip E. Tetlock, ‘Sober second thought: The effects of accountability, anger, and authoritarianism on attributions of responsibility’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24:6 (1998), pp. 563–74; Michael MacKuen, Jennifer Wolak, Luke Keele, and George E. Marcus, ‘Civic engagements: Resolute partisanship or reflective deliberation’, American Journal of Political Science, 54:2 (2010), pp. 440–58.
12 Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotional beliefs’, International Organization, 64:1 (2010), pp. 1–31.
13 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
14 Brandon Valeriano, Benjamin Jensen, and Ryan Maness, Cyber Strategy: The Evolving Character of Cyber Power and Coercion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 124–7.
15 Bruce Hoffman, ‘Why terrorists don’t claim credit’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 9:1 (1997), pp. 1–6 (p. 4).
16 Pluchinsky, ‘The terrorism puzzle’, p. 4.
17 Vincent Bauer, Keven Ruby, and Robert Pape, ‘Solving the problem of unattributed political violence’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61:7 (2017), pp. 1437–564; Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree, Countering Terrorism (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2017), pp. 131–64; Erin M. Kearns, ‘When to take credit for terrorism? A cross-national examination of claims and attributions’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 33:1 (2021), pp. 164–93; Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, ‘Why states won’t give nuclear weapons to terrorists’, International Security, 38:1 (2013), 80–104.
18 In other cases of unclaimed acts that are not coercive, the public nature of the act, but not its attribution to a given actor, is necessary, given that these actions do not seek specific concessions from targets. For instance, terrorist attacks may be part of a spoiling strategy, aiming to erode trust in a peace process, or a destabilisation strategy, seeking to create a climate of chaos. Erin M. Kearns, Brendan Conlon, and Joseph K. Young, ‘Lying about terrorism’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 37:5 (2014), pp. 422–39; Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, ‘The strategies of terrorism’, International Security, 31:1 (2006), pp. 49–80. On secrecy and strategic surprise in inter-state war, see Branislav L. Slantchev, ‘Feigning weakness’, International Organization, 64:3 (2010), pp. 357–88.
19 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
20 Andrew Bowen, ‘Coercive diplomacy and the Donbas: Explaining Russian strategy in eastern Ukraine’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 42:3–4 (2019), pp. 312–43; Cormac and Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black’; Joseph and Poznansky, ‘Media technology, covert action, and the politics of exposure’; Voß, ‘Plausibly deniable’. Poznansky distinguishes between the ‘state model’ of plausible deniability, aiming to obfuscate the involvement of the state in a covert operation, and the ‘executive model’, aiming to shield chief executives from responsibility. As most International Relations scholarship on plausible deniability, this article focuses on the former, though extending its application to non-state actors as perpetrators. Michael Poznansky, ‘Revisiting plausible deniability’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 45:4 (2020), pp. 511–33.
21 With enough time, investigators may be able to gather sufficient evidence to convince third parties about the culpability of the suspect. However, retaliating long after an attack may be practically or politically unfeasible. See Crenshaw and LaFree, Countering Terrorism, pp. 150–8; Cormac and Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black’, p. 480. Plausible deniability may also enable governments to avoid domestic political costs. See, for example, Alexander B. Downes and Mary L. Lilley, ‘Overt peace, covert war? Covert intervention and the democratic peace’, Security Studies, 19:2 (2010), pp. 266–306.
22 Pluchinsky, ‘The terrorism puzzle’, p. 8. Some analysts of cyber warfare are less sanguine about the ease of attribution by the target of unclaimed attacks. Yet these analysts too note that, in cases in which the target is relatively confident about ‘who did it’, not enough evidence may be available to convince third parties, complicating retaliation. See, in particular, Martin C. Libicki, Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), pp. 41–2.
23 Byman and Kreps, ‘Agents of destruction?’, pp. 4–6.
24 Austin Carson, ‘After the Saudi oil attack, will the U.S. and Saudis start a war with Iran? Here are 3 things to know’, Washington Post (17 September 2019), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/17/after-saudi-oil-attack-will-us-saudis-start-war-with-iran-here-are-things-know/}.
25 Ibid.
26 Carson and Yarhi-Milo, ‘Covert communication’, p. 132.
27 Carson, Secret Wars.
28 Carnegie and Carson, Secrets in Global Governance.
29 Stephen Herzog, ‘Revisiting the Estonian cyber attacks: Digital threats and multinational responses’, Journal of Strategic Security, 4:2 (2011), pp. 49–60; Ian Traynor, ‘Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia’, Guardian (16 May 2007), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia}.
30 Carol Morello, Kareem Fahim, and Simon Denyer, ‘Standoff with Iran exposes Trump’s credibility issue as some allies seek more proof of tanker attack’, Washington Post (16 June 2019), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-crown-prince-blames-iran-for-tanker-attacks-as-tensions-soar/2019/06/16/7eeb43ca-900c-11e9-b162-8f6f41ec3c04_story.html}.
31 Alonso Gurmendi, ‘Tracking state reactions to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam’, Opinion Juris blog (20 June 2022), available at: {http://opiniojuris.org/2023/06/20/tracking-state-reactions-to-the-destruction-of-the-kakhovka-dam/}.
32 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994); Rose McDermott, ‘The feeling of rationality: The meaning of neuroscientific advances for political science’, Perspective on Politics, 2:4 (2004), pp. 691–706; Mercer, ‘Emotional beliefs’.
33 Antoine Bechara, Daniel Tranel, and Hanna Damasio, ‘Characterization of the decision-making deficit of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions’, Brain, 123:11 (2000), pp. 2189–202; Damasio, Descartes’ Error; Antonio Verdejo-García, Jose M. Pérez-García, and Antoine Bechara, ‘Emotion, decision-making and substance dependence: A somatic-marker model of addiction’, Current Neuropharmacology, 4:1 (2006), pp. 17–31.
34 Todd Hall, ‘We will not swallow this bitter fruit: Theorizing a diplomacy of anger’, Security Studies, 20:4 (2011), pp. 521–55; Todd Hall, ‘On provocation: Outrage, International Relations, and the Franco–Prussian War’, Security Studies, 26:1 (2017), pp. 1–29.
35 Rose McDermott, Anthony Lopez, and Peter Hatemi, ‘Blunt not the heart, enrage it: The psychology of revenge and deterrence’, Texas National Security Review, 1:1 (2017), pp. 68–88.
36 Jack Snyder, ‘Backlash against human rights shaming: Emotions in groups’, International Theory, 12:1 (2020), pp. 109–32.
37 Markwica’s book represents an important exception, as it studies both appraisal and action tendencies of emotions, including anger, in coercive diplomacy. Robin Markwica, Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
38 Mark D. Alicke, ‘Culpable control and the psychology of blame’, Psychological Bulletin, 126:4 (2000), pp. 556–74; Julie H. Goldberg, Jennifer S. Lerner, and Philip E. Tetlock, ‘Rage and reason: The psychology of the intuitive prosecutor’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 29:5–6 (1999), pp. 781–95; Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner, ‘Fear, anger, and risk’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81:1 (2001), pp. 146–59; Lerner and Tiedens, ‘Portrait of the angry decision maker’. Other appraisal tendencies of anger that are less relevant to attribution of unclaimed attacks are a sense of high individual (as opposed to situational) control and optimism.
39 Galen V. Bodenhausen, Lori A. Sheppard, and Geoffrey P. Kramer, ‘Negative affect and social perception: The differential impact of anger and sadness’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 24:1 (1994), pp. 45–62; Lerner, Goldberg, and Tetlock, ‘Sober second thought’; Larissa Z. Tiedens and Susan Linton, ‘Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: The effects of specific emotions on information processing’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81:6 (2001), pp. 973–88.
40 MacKuen, Wolak, Keele, and Marcus, ‘Civic engagements’; Elizabeth Suhay and Cengiz Erisen, ‘The role of anger in the biased assimilation of political information’, Political Psychology, 39:4 (2018), pp. 793–810.
41 Lerner and Keltner, ‘Fear, anger, and risk’. Experimental studies of the guilt phase of criminal trials illustrate the effect of anger’s appraisal tendencies on attribution in contexts in which there is a suspect, but the evidence of culpability is ambiguous. For example, Bright and Goodman-Delahunty report that mock jurors are more likely to find defendants guilty and be more confident about the sufficiency of the prosecution’s evidence when shown gruesome crime pictures that make them angry. David. A. Bright and Jane Goodman-Delahunty, ‘Gruesome evidence and emotion: Anger, blame, and jury decision-making’, Law and Human Behavior, 30:2 (2006), pp. 183–202. See also Susan Bandes and Jessica Salerno, ‘Emotion, proof and prejudice: The cognitive science of gruesome photos and victim impact statements’, Arizona State Law Journal, 46:4 (2014), pp. 1003–56; David. A. Bright and Jane Goodman-Delahunty, ‘The influence of gruesome verbal evidence on mock juror verdicts’, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 11:1 (2004), pp. 154–66; and Kevin S. Douglas, David R. Lyon, and James R. P. Ogloff, ‘The impact of graphic photographic evidence on mock jurors’ decisions in a murder trial: Probative or prejudicial?’, Law and Human Behavior, 21:5 (1997), pp. 485–501.
42 From our theoretical perspective, targets and third parties can be likened to family members of homicide victims and jurors in the corresponding criminal trials, respectively. Bereaved family members tend to be more confident in the culpability of the defendant and to disagree with juries’ acquittal or exoneration verdicts. Though multiple psychological processes are at play, anger induced by the loss of loved ones is probably a key factor behind these diverging attribution judgements. Sarah Goodrum, ‘Bridging the gap between prosecutors’ cases and victims’ biographies in the criminal justice system through shared emotions’, Law & Social Inquiry, 38:2 (2013), pp. 257–87 (pp. 273–4); Samuel R. Gross and Daniel J. Matheson, ‘What they say at the end: Capital victims’ families and the press’, Cornell Law Review, 88:2 (2003), pp. 486–516 (pp. 507–10); Darren Thiel, ‘Moral truth and compounded trauma: The effects of acquittal of homicide defendants on the families of the victims’, Homicide Studies, 20:3 (2016), pp. 199–219 (pp. 214–16).
43 Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
44 Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotion and strategy in the Korean War’, International Organization, 67:2 (2013), pp. 221–52.
45 Examples of studies using vignette experiments with fictional scenarios and hypothetical actors include articles by Brutger and Kertzer and by Tomz. Ryan Brutger and Joshua D. Kertzer, ‘A dispositional theory of reputation costs’, International Organization, 72:3 (2018), pp. 693–724; Michael Tomz, ‘Domestic audience costs in international relations: An experimental approach’, International Organization, 61:4 (2007), pp. 821–40.
46 On nominal and ordinal approaches to measuring emotions, see Klaus R. Scherer, ‘What are emotions? And how can they be measured?’, Social Science Information, 44:4 (2005), pp. 695–729 (p. 717). A possible problem with an ordinal scale is that subjects might score two emotional responses (say, fear and anger) at the lowest level on the scale because they are experiencing them with much less intensity than in the context of real-life events, even though subjects actually feel one of the two marginally more intensively than the other. Another possibility is a variant of the central tendency bias: as subjects probably would not feel strongly either one of those two emotional responses, they might score both at an intermediate level on the scale, without making the introspective effort of assessing whether there is in fact a difference in intensity between the two.
47 Roger D. Petersen, Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 30.
48 See, for example, Stuart J. Kaufman, Nationalist Passions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Markwica, Emotional Choices; Mercer, ‘Emotion and strategy in the Korean War’.
49 For instance, anger was the most commonly experienced emotion by US citizens in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, both in the immediate aftermath and after a year. See Mitja D. Back, Albrecht C. P. Küfner, and Boris Egloff, ‘The emotional timeline of September 11, 2001’, Psychological Science, 21:10 (2010), pp. 1417–19; Jennifer S. Lerner, Roxana M. Gonzalez, Deborah A. Small, and Baruch Fischhoff, ‘Emotion and perceived risks of terrorism: A national field experiment’, Psychological Science, 14:2 (2003), pp. 144–50; Baruch Fischhoff, Roxana M. Gonzales, Jennifer S. Lerner, and Deborah A. Small, ‘Evolving judgments of terror risks: Foresight, hindsight, and emotion’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 11:2 (2005), pp. 124–39.
50 The experiment was registered on 1 November 2019 and conducted in mid-December 2019. We calculated the required sample size based on the objective of detecting with 80 per cent power a 20 per cent difference in the rate of confident attribution of attacks between subjects from another country (50 per cent) and subjects from the target country (70 per cent). Thus, a minimum of 186 subjects are needed to study attribution of unclaimed attacks and another 186 for claimed attacks, for a total of 372. We rounded up our sample to 400 (the additional two subjects were already taking the survey when the 400 quota was met). The research was approved by the Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Institutional Review Board.
51 Hall, ‘On provocation’; Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, ‘How do observers assess resolve?’, British Journal of Political Science, 51:1 (2021), pp. 308–30; Joshua D. Kertzer, ‘Re-assessing elite–public gaps in political behavior’, American Journal of Political Science, 66:3 (2022), pp. 539–53; Mercer, ‘Emotion and strategy in the Korean War’; Keren Yarhi-Milo, Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Keren Yarhi-Milo, Joshua D. Kertzer, and Jonathan Renshon, ‘Tying hands, sinking costs, and leader attributes’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62:10 (2018), pp. 2150–79.
52 Allan Dafoe, Samuel Liu, Brian O’Keefe, and Jessica Chen Weiss, ‘Provocation, public opinion, and international disputes: Evidence from China’, International Studies Quarterly, 66:2 (2022), pp. 1–14; Alexander Debs and Jessica Chen Weiss, ‘Circumstances, domestic audiences, and reputational incentives in international crisis bargaining’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 60:3 (2016), pp. 403–33; Michael Tomz, Jessica L. P. Weeks, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, ‘Public opinion and decisions about military force in democracies’, International Organization, 74:1 (2020), pp. 119–43.
53 Highly dramatic and lethal kinetic covert actions by states are, of course, possible (e.g. the Lockerbie bombing by Libya), but they have not directly affected the United States in recent years, a fact that might have reduced the plausibility of a scenario depicting such an event in the eyes of our respondents.
54 The online appendix reports the vignettes and the corresponding questions (available, with other replication materials, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BLBF53).
55 Before seeing the vignette, subjects were asked a battery of general questions, which we used for robustness checks.
56 Dacher Keltner, Kenneth D. Locke, and Paul C. Audrain, ‘The influence of attributions on the relevance of negative feelings to personal satisfaction’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19:1 (1993), pp. 21–9.
57 See, for example, Alexander L. George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1991); Kydd and Walter, ‘The strategies of terrorism’; Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, and Fischhoff, ‘Emotion and perceived risks of terrorism’; Petersen, Western Intervention in the Balkans.
58 Lerner and Keltner, ‘Fear, anger, and risk’; Tiedens and Linton, ‘Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty’. Fear has other appraisal tendencies that are less relevant to attribution of unclaimed attacks, in particular, a sense of situational (as opposed to individual) control and pessimism.
59 See, for example, Aaron M. Hoffman, ‘Voice and silence: Why groups take credit for acts of terror’, Journal of Peace Research, 47:5 (2010), pp. 615–26 (p. 615). We sidestep the debate about whether confusion is an emotion, a mental state, or a metacognition. See Phoebe C. Ellsworth, ‘Confusion, concentration, and other emotions of interest: Commentary on Rozin and Cohen (2003)’, Emotion, 3:1 (2003), pp. 81–5; Ursula Hess, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t – The confusing case of confusion as an emotion: Commentary on Rozin and Cohen (2003)’, Emotion, 3:1 (2003), pp. 76–80; Paul Rozin and Adam B. Cohen, ‘High frequency of facial expressions corresponding to confusion, concentration, and worry in an analysis of naturally occurring facial expressions of Americans’, Emotion, 3:1 (2003), pp. 68–75; Paul J. Silvia, ‘Confusion and interest: The role of knowledge emotions in aesthetic experience’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4:2 (2010), pp. 75–80.
60 Of the 402 respondents, 26 chose the ‘other’ answer. Five of them typed in a description of their feelings compatible with dictionary definitions of one of the five listed answers – confusion (see the online appendix for a list of the 26 responses). Thus, we ran robustness checks coding these five subjects as expressing confusion. Our results are robust to this alternative coding and to dropping the 26 observations with ‘other’ as an answer (see Tables A25–A26 in the appendix).
61 Jonathan Renshon, Julia Lee, and Dustin Tingley, ‘Emotions and the micro-foundations of commitment problems’, International Organization, 71:S1 (2017), pp. 189–218. Approaches to emotion measurement relying on behavioral indicators such as voice and facial expression are also generally ineffective at identifying discrete emotions. See Iris B. Mauss and Michael D. Robinson, ‘Measures of emotion: A review’, Cognition and Emotion, 23:2 (2009), pp. 221–6. Moreover, physiological and behavioral approaches require specialised equipment, which makes their use outside the laboratory impractical.
62 Even Wilson, who has made a strong case for the ‘adaptive unconscious’, where a broad range of mental processes occur beyond individual awareness, acknowledges that cases ‘in which people fail to recognize a feeling … may not be very common’. Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 135.
63 James K. Gross and Robert W. Levenson, ‘Emotion elicitation using films’, Cognition and Emotion, 9:1 (1995), pp. 87–108.
64 Our treatment and control groups are well balanced in terms of pre-treatment variables, as reported in Table A2 in the online appendix. The only exception is the self-reported level of interest in current affairs, which is marginally higher for subjects reading about unclaimed attacks than those reading about claimed attacks.
65 Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, and Dustin Tingley, ‘A general approach to causal mediation analysis’, Psychological Methods, 15:4, (2010), pp. 309–34. We use the STATA mediation package developed by Hicks and Tingley. Raymond Hicks and Dustin Tingley, ‘Causal mediation analysis’, Stata Journal, 11:4 (2012), 605–19.
66 Kristopher Preacher and Andrew Hayes, ‘Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models’, Behavioral Research Methods, 40:3 (2008), pp. 879–91.
67 Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, and Teppei Yamamoto, ‘Identification, inference and sensitivity analysis for causal mediation effects’, Statistical Science, 25:1 (2010), pp. 51–71.
68 This is a standard approach in the literature. See, for example, Renshon, Lee, and Tingley, ‘Emotions and the micro-foundations of commitment problems’. Unfortunately, we cannot conduct a sensitivity analysis as proposed by Imai, Keele, and Yamamoto, because that method cannot handle a set-up where both the mediator and the outcome variable are binary. See Imai, Keele, and Yamamoto, ‘Identification, inference and sensitivity analysis’; Kosuke Imai, Luke Keele, Dustin Tingley, and Teppei Yamamoto, ‘Causal mediation analysis using R’, Working paper (September 2019), available at {https://cran.ism.ac.jp/web/packages/mediation/vignettes/mediation-old.pdf}.
69 See, for example, Erica Borghard and Shawn Lonergan, ‘The logic of coercion in cyberspace’, Security Studies, 26:3 (2017), pp. 452–81; Jon R. Lindsay and Erik Gartzke, ‘Coercion through cyberspace: The stability–instability paradox revisited’, in Kelly M. Greenhill and Peter J. Krause (eds), Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 179–203; Travis Sharp, ‘Theorizing cyber coercion: The 2014 North Korean operation against Sony’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 40:7 (2017), pp. 898–926; and Valeriano, Jensen, and Maness, Cyber Strategy.
70 Damasio, Descartes’ Error.
71 Thus, anger-driven attribution differs from the phenomenon of ‘positive illusions’ – the widespread tendency for individuals to be overconfident about their capabilities and prospects of success – which can be considered a deviation from rationality. See Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
72 Mercer, ‘Emotional beliefs’.
73 Erik Gartzke, ‘The myth of cyberwar: Bringing war in cyberspace back down to earth’, International Security, 38:2 (2013), pp. 41–73.
74 Gartzke, ‘The myth of cyberwar’, p. 47.
75 Gerald L. Clore and Karen Gasper, ‘Feeling is believing: Some affective influences on belief’, in Nico H. Frijda, Antony S. R. Manstead, and Sacha Bem (eds), Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10–44.
76 Max Abrahms, ‘What terrorists really want: Terrorist motives and counterterrorism strategy’, International Security, 32:4 (2008), pp. 78–105 (pp. 89–90).
77 Edward E. Jones and Richard E. Nisbett, ‘The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior’, in Edward E. Jones, David E. Kanouse, Harold H. Kelley, et al. (eds), Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press 1972), pp. 79–94; Jervis, Perception and Misperception, pp. 321–3.
78 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, p. 68.
