Wired for War: The Psychology of Leaders Who Choose Conflict
The traits that help people rise to power are the same ones that make them terrible at keeping the peace. Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Dr Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about wars and the psychology of the people who start them. Right now, as I record this, there are at least 20 active armed conflicts across four continents, and each one has a psychology story.
Leslie Poston:The US launched strikes on Iran in February that were sold as decisive, clean, and simple, the kind of action that looks like strength on a screen. Seven months later, it's a multi front regional war that spans Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and The Gulf States because the cognitively simple action produced cognitively overwhelming consequences. And that's a pattern you should remember because we're gonna be coming back to that. The Houthis just hit Saudi oil infrastructure last week, injuring more than 70 people. Every side in that conflict frames their own attacks as defensive retaliation, which is one of the oldest moral disengagement tricks in the book.
Leslie Poston:Bandura could have written those press releases himself. Sudan's civil war has displaced 12,000,000 people and killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. Two generals have been escalating for over a year because neither one can psychologically absorb the cost of being the person who stops. It's a classic sunk cost trap played out in human lives. Myanmar's civil war is in its fifth year.
Leslie Poston:Ukraine is still fighting. The Afghanistan Pakistan War escalated this past year. And those are just the ones that have made the news in The U. S. Each of these conflicts traces back to specific leaders who made specific choices, deciding that violence was the only path forward.
Leslie Poston:These choices weren't made by mysterious, inevitable forces of history. They were made by people. Humans with egos, blind spots, prejudices, and personality disorders, and incentive structures that reward aggression. War is a failure of leadership. A predictable, measurable, researchable failure.
Leslie Poston:And psychology research tells us that the people most likely to start wars are the people least equipped for the alternatives. The personality traits that help people rise to positions of power are the same traits that make them dangerous once they get there. You've probably heard of the narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Narcissism brings the grandiosity, the need for admiration and the conviction that you're exceptional. Psychopathy brings low empathy, the willingness to harm without guilt.
Leslie Poston:And Machiavellianism brings the strategic manipulation aspect, the view of other people as tools to be used. Some researchers have expanded this to something called the dark tetrad, which adds a fourth trait: sadism, the capacity to enjoy inflicting pain or dominating others. When you look at leaders who choose war when alternatives exist, that fourth trait starts to feel like a missing piece. All of these traits show up at higher rates in people who seek political power. Multiple studies have found that dark triad and dark tetrad traits are more common in people with increased political ambition, particularly surrounding the mechanics of campaigning, the manipulation and strategic deception, and the comfort with doing whatever it takes to win.
Leslie Poston:Other research has linked dark personality traits in political leaders to heightened aggressiveness and partisan conflict. The pipeline to political leadership selects for low empathy, high dominance, and comfort with manipulation. Diplomacy requires empathy. It requires seeing another side's perspective, sitting with the ambiguity of it, and accepting outcomes that aren't total victories for one side. De escalation requires frustration tolerance and ego management.
Leslie Poston:The dark triad profile lacks all of these. And if sadism is in the mix for a dark tetrad, the suffering caused by war might not even register as a cost. It might just register as a feature. So we keep putting people in charge who are psychologically wired for confrontation, and then our media acts surprised when they choose confrontation. The trait profile that wins elections and builds political coalitions and projects a kind of confidence that voters respond to is the trait profile that's poorly suited for the hardest parts of governance.
Leslie Poston:The confidence that reads a strong leadership on a debate stage is often rigidity when applied to a diplomatic crisis. The same risk tolerance that helps someone survive a brutal campaign becomes recklessness when applied to decisions that affect millions of lives. Just look at the current conflicts. The US strikes on Iran in February were sold as decisive and necessary and seemed like strong leadership to some people. But the personality profile behind that kind of decision, the hubris that a massive military strike would produce a clean outcome, the very low amount of concern for the cascade of consequences that would fall on other people, The framing of complex geopolitical relationships as simple good versus evil narratives, that's all textbook dark triad in action.
Leslie Poston:And the aftermath has proven it. What was framed as a clean strike spiraled into a multi front regional war that's still expanding seven months later. The same pattern shows up in how leaders on all sides of these conflicts operate. They escalate because backing down would wound their ego and double down because admitting a mistake might threaten their self image. They frame diplomatic options as weakness because their personality requires them to see compromise as losing.
Leslie Poston:The psychology is consistent across cultures, political systems, and history. We don't have a war problem. We have a leadership selection problem. We've talked about Ben Dura before on this podcast. He spent decades studying moral disengagement, the psychological mechanisms that allow people to do harm while maintaining a positive self image.
Leslie Poston:One of his key behavioral observations is diffusion of responsibility. When the chain between decision and consequence is long enough, the person at the top can genuinely feel like they didn't cause the harm. The president signs an order. A general translates it into strategy. Officers relay it to the units.
Leslie Poston:Soldiers carry it out, and civilians die, but the president can feel like they didn't kill anyone. They signed a piece of paper. They didn't get their hands dirty. The psychological distance between decision maker and consequence is enormous, and that distance is a feature of the system. Construal level theory from psychologists Jakob Trope and Nira Liberman can explain why this distance matters.
Leslie Poston:When we're psychologically distant from something, we think about it in abstract terms. National security interests or strategic objectives. We even say things like acceptable casualties, which there is no such thing. But these are all abstractions that make violence manageable for the people who order it. The further you are from the consequences, the easier it is to frame your decision in terms that sound reasonable.
Leslie Poston:That distance right now is actively increasing. The US military is testing weaponized robot dogs with AI assisted targeting through a system called Kodiak, which carries modular weapons and uses onboard AI for real time target detection and ballistic calculation. China unveiled a missile armed robotic combat dog at the World Defense Show this year, a quadruped platform carrying four anti tank missiles with electro optical targeting and autonomous navigation. A San Francisco entrepreneur built a humanoid robot designed to load and fire mortars and then told the Washington Post that he envisions a future of fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon showcased autonomous robotic dogs at its annual lab day this spring, and they can independently navigate buildings and hostile environments without human guidance.
Leslie Poston:And then we think of what happens when AI starts choosing who dies. Israel's lavender targeting system flagged at least 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants, according to reporting by nine seventy two magazine. Intelligence officers described the human review process as a rubber stamp that took about twenty seconds per target just twenty seconds to decide whether a human being lives or dies based on an algorithm's recommendation. A second system called WheresDaddy tracked targets to their family homes because it was easier to locate them there. Thousands of civilian deaths followed, the majority of them women and children, in a system where no single human being bore clear responsibility for any individual death because the machines were making the recommendations.
Leslie Poston:The lavender system itself had an acknowledged error rate of about 10%. And in a system that flagged at least 37,000 people, that's almost 4,000 people incorrectly identified. And because the Where's Daddy system directed strikes at homes rather than military sites, Those errors didn't just kill the wrong target, they killed their families and their neighbors as well. Researchers at the Action on Armed Violence Organization described it as a system trained in an environment where Palestinian civilian life was implicitly devalued. An algorithm that reflected the biases of its creators.
Leslie Poston:And this is what automation bias looks like at scale. Human operators overtrusting machine outputs under time pressure, exactly as AI ethics researchers predicted. The formal structure of human oversight was preserved while its substance was gutted, and Bandurat wrote about this specifically in a paper called Disengaging Morality from Robotic War. He described drone operators who fire missiles from a control room in Nevada and then drive home and have dinner with their families. They switch their moral control on and off daily.
Leslie Poston:Remote warfare, he argued, represents one of the most extreme examples of moral disengagement that we have. And he wrote that before AI assisted targeting compressed the human role in kill decisions to almost zero. No binding international treaty governs autonomous weapons. The UN's convention on certain conventional weapons has been discussing this since about 2014, but without producing anything enforceable. The US, China, and Russia, the three countries most aggressively developing these systems, are also the three most resistant to a ban.
Leslie Poston:Their argument, autonomous weapons will be more precise, reducing civilian casualties. But what actually happened when Israel deployed AI targeting was the opposite. Precision was total fiction. Speed was real, and the civilian body count was staggering. Every layer of technology between the leader and the killing field is another layer of psychological insulation.
Leslie Poston:Robot dogs don't have families who grieve, and algorithms don't testify war crime tribunals. AI targeting systems don't lose sleep. The leaders who authorize their use can say they never personally harmed anyone. The system did it. But when no one is responsible, everyone is expendable.
Leslie Poston:Even though we're talking about some political topics this week, we are a psychology podcast, so let's take a look at the cognitive simplicity of violence. Diplomacy is cognitively expensive. It requires holding multiple perspectives simultaneously, tolerating contradictions, managing your own emotional reactions while reading someone else's and accepting outcomes where not everybody gets everything they want. But hopefully, the decision benefits the most people. It requires what we call integrative complexity, the ability to incorporate different dimensions and perspectives when you're making decisions.
Leslie Poston:Research by Swedfield has consistently shown that integrative complexity in leaders' communications drops before military conflicts and rises during peaceful negotiations. Violence is binary. It's us and them, right and wrong, win or lose. From a cognitive load standpoint, war is simpler than peace. When leaders are exhausted, stressed, or surrounded by advisors who have their own reasons for pushing conflict, the simpler option has built in cognitive advantage.
Leslie Poston:Janus documented this dynamic in detail when he studied the Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam War. War cabinets develop an internal logic where dissent feels like disloyalty. The inner circle filters out contradictory information. Alternatives stop being seriously considered, and the group develops what he called an illusion of invulnerability, a shared rationalization for why the aggressive option is the only option. He found this pattern in nearly every catastrophic foreign policy decision he studied.
Leslie Poston:The advisors closest to the leader became yes men. The leader then stopped hearing alternatives, and the group collectively convinced itself that the most aggressive path was both necessary and risk free. The people with the most information are making the worst decisions precisely because their social dynamics prevent them from using that information honestly. The US Iran war began with coordinated US Israeli strikes that killed Iran's supreme leader. Seven months later, a multi front war spanning half a dozen countries, the Strait Of Hormuz choked off, renewed fighting in Lebanon, the Yemen ceasefire shattered Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure, global oil supplies disrupted, all of this after the cognitively simple action created cognitively overwhelming consequences.
Leslie Poston:And once a conflict starts, the sunk cost trap kicks in. Kahneman and Spearsky's work on loss aversion tells us that the people feel losses about twice as intensely as equivalent gains. So once a leader has committed troops, spent resources, and absorbed casualties, the psychological pressure to keep going becomes immense. Admitting the war was a mistake means admitting that everyone who died, died for nothing. So leaders keep escalating to justify what's already been lost.
Leslie Poston:Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran all followed this pattern. Peace requires tolerating complexity and uncertainty, but war only requires the willingness to simplify. There's also war by other means. The dark tetrad selection problem, moral disengagement, the cognitive simplicity of aggression don't just apply to military conflict. The same psychology drives other kinds of institutional violence.
Leslie Poston:The major AI companies trained their models on the creative output of millions of artists, writers, musicians, and photographers without consent or compensation. When those creators objected, the response followed Bandura's moral disengagement playbook precisely. Euphemistic labeling. It's training data, not stolen work. It's learning from what came before, not copying to replace.
Leslie Poston:Advantageous comparison. All artists learn from other artists, as if an algorithm scraping billions of copyrighted works is the same as a painter studying at a museum. Displacement of responsibility. The technology is inevitable, as if the companies building it had no choice. They describe mass scraping as ingestion and call the replacements tools.
Leslie Poston:When entire categories of creative jobs disappear, they'll call it disruption, a word that's now so sanitized it sounds like a compliment. Artists including SZA and composer Kenneth Bloom have publicly criticized the inclusion of their music in AI training datasets. Rainbow shops got caught using AI generated replicas of real human models in ad campaigns without those models' consent. The Anderson versus Stability AI lawsuit alleged that AI companies used copyrighted artworks to train their models without authorization. Courts in The US and Europe are weighing cases that could reshape the industry.
Leslie Poston:Making a living as an artist got measurably harder since 2025, with job losses and reduced freelance work across creative industries directly attributable to generative AI. Some artists are leaving their fields entirely. The power asymmetry is the same as in military conflict. Leaders making decisions that benefit them while the costs fall entirely on people with no seat at the table. The same confidence that because you can take something, you're entitled to it.
Leslie Poston:And the military connection is more than just a metaphor. Several Israeli startups that make AI enabled targeting products are reportedly marketing their use in Gaza as a selling point. The same AI architecture that trains on scraped creative work is being adapted for scraped surveillance data to build kill lists. The underlying logic is identical: extract value from people without their consent at scale, using technology to make that extraction feel impersonal and inevitable. And the accountability gap functions identically as well.
Leslie Poston:The CEO didn't fire the illustrator, the algorithm did. The company didn't steal the photographer's work, the training pipeline ingested publicly available data. The executive didn't replicate this musician's voice without consent. The model learned patterns. Every layer of technical abstraction is another layer of moral insulation, same as the drone, the robot dog, the AI kill list.
Leslie Poston:The corporate version doesn't necessarily kill people, but the psychological architecture is the same. So what does real leadership look like? Successful de escalation is almost invisible. Nobody throws a parade for the war that didn't happen or the negotiation that dragged on for months and ended with everyone just slightly dissatisfied, which is how you know it actually worked. The psychological profile of leaders who successfully deescalate conflicts is almost a mirror image of the dark tetrad.
Leslie Poston:It has high cognitive empathy, the ability to accurately model what the other side is thinking and why. It has high frustration tolerance, the ability to absorb insults, setbacks, and provocations without retaliating. What psychologists call a need for cognition, a genuine preference for complex thinking over simple answers, and the willingness to take a political hit for a long term outcome that benefits people other than yourself. We're seeing some really great examples of this at the local level in The United States right now with Mayor Scott, Mayor Mamdani, and some of the other people that are campaigning. Swayfield's integrative complexity research backs this up.
Leslie Poston:Leaders whose communications hold multiple perspectives and acknowledge trade offs are consistently associated with peaceful outcomes. Leaders whose communications become simpler and more one dimensional are associated with escalation. The pattern holds across eras, countries, and types of conflict. So the diagnosis seems clear. The better question is what we can do about it.
Leslie Poston:Research points to several concrete paths. First, integrative complexity is trainable. It's a skill, not a fixed trait. Conflict resolution programs that specifically train leaders in perspective taking and tolerance for ambiguity have shown measurable results. Some diplomatic and military training programs have already incorporated this work.
Leslie Poston:If we know that low integrated complexity predicts escalation, building that capacity in leaders before they face a crisis is a straightforward intervention. Second, psychological screening for leadership roles is gaining traction. Some organizations have started using assessments designed to flag dark tetrad traits in candidates for high stakes positions. This isn't personality policing. It's the same logic behind psychological evaluations for law enforcement and aviation.
Leslie Poston:If we screen pilots for traits that makes them dangerous in a cockpit, the argument for screening people who control militaries and entire economies seems pretty obvious. Third, and this might feel a little more personal, civic literacy about personality and power matters. Research on manipulation tactics shows that when people learn to recognize them, their susceptibility drops. Voters who understand what narcissistic leadership looks like, who can distinguish between confidence and rigidity, decisiveness and recklessness, make different, better choices. Media literacy plays into this as well.
Leslie Poston:When we understand how media framing shapes our perception of what strong leadership looks like, we can start to question whether the loudest voice in the room, like we talked about on a previous episode, is actually the most capable one. And unfortunately, none of this is fast or simple. But research says that these interventions work, and they're already being implemented in pockets around the world. Those 20 plus active conflicts happening right now trace back to specific leaders making specific choices. So the goal needs to be to change who ends up in those rooms and what psychological tools they bring with them when they get there.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, off. As always, until next time, stay curious. And don't forget to subscribe, like, and share so that you don't miss an episode.
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