Building trust in a counterinsurgency context

According to experts the major conventional wars of America’s past are likely not the wars of America’s future. Instead of engaging in major conventional wars, the U.S. may well find itself engaged in asymmetric wars, such as the recent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defeating an insurgency requires more than overwhelming military superiority. The U.S. Military’s counterinsurgency (COIN) manual, for example, suggests that defeating an insurgency requires something of a holistic approach to warfare that includes military, civic, economic, and psychological action with an ultimate goal of winning the political support of the local populace. While each of these COIN elements is important, this paper will focus on one critical element of the psychological component of COIN. Specifically, the COIN manual states that the development of trust between coalition forces and the local populace is essential. Benefits of improved trust between forces and the populace include fewer cultural misunderstandings (which can lead to unnecessary violence) and increased intelligence flow. Despite the obvious importance of trust between coalition forces and local populations, there are very few experimentally validated approaches to trust generation, and certainly few if any experimentally validated approaches tested in cultural environments of interest to the Department of Defense. This paper aims to start the validation process, with a specific eye toward understanding how to generate trust cross-culturally, and in cultures of interest to the Department of Defense. This paper will briefly describe a set of experiments that examined how one simple approach might help people in a COIN context generate trust. Social psychological theory predicts that when people act in a manner that appears contrary to their own self-interest they “prove their honesty” and are consequently perceived as more trustworthy. The primary purpose of the current set of experiments was to examine whether or not acting in a manner that appears contrary to self-interest can help individuals generate trust. Two preliminary experiments were conducted in the United States and found evidence that acting in a manner that appears to others to be contrary to self-interest in a political context has notable trust generating efficacy. A third experiment replicated these findings in Saudi Arabia. Importantly, from a COIN perspective, each experiment also found that individuals who were perceived to work against their own self-interest also garnered more political support than others.