Drone Policy (1/3): Reducing The Human Cost
Lowering the Human Cost of Drone Warfare
If you had a 10% success rate at work for five months, how much longer do you think your employer would keep you around? Most of us wouldn’t be allowed to fail at that rate for five months, let alone receive additional time to make up for those shortcomings. And we generally hold those who are responsible for human life, such as medical professionals and law enforcement officials, to even higher standards in their work.
Yet, as revealed in The Drone Papers last year, America’s drone warfare programs have at times operated at this low level of success. During one five month period between Jan. 2012 and Feb. 2013 almost 90% of those killed in American drone strikes were not the intended targets. This amount of collateral damage – of innocent lives lost – should not be acceptable. Nevertheless, neither substantive changes to drone programs nor individual punishments for lethal errors have occurred in the wake of these reports.
There are many factors that shape America’s drone policy, most notably political and economic concerns, but a social psychological perspective offers another way to understand and potentially address some of the failures of drone policy. For instance, considering two psychological phenomena, the bystander effect and moral disengagement, and how they may function within our drone bureaucracies reveals ways that policymakers can improve the current infrastructure and save lives.
About the Author
Jared Celniker
Jared is a PhD student in social psychology and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He studies political and moral decision-making and believes that psychological insights can help improve political discourse and policymaking.
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