… Basically, Sagan’s team found Trump supporters are happy to bomb foreigners. Why the authors want to focus on (or have the media focus on) the minority of voters who would support war crimes over the large majority of Americans that don’t is unclear. But what they find “disturbing” is these voters also appear “appear insensitive to informational cues that most security experts would expect to reduce such levels of support.”
Voters may ‘appear’ that way, however, because Sagan and his team did not include ‘informational cues’ on knowledge or exposure to the Geneva Conventions in their experiment – something lots of ‘security experts’ including my co-author and I found matters tremendously in such matters. Indeed, when we replicated the original Iran Study we found that providing these cues reverses the result on saturation bombing: CONT.
Charli Carpenter (UMass-Amherst), Duck of Minerva