This chapter introduces the reader to the topic studied in the book, factual misinformation and its appeal in war. It poses the main research question of who believes in wartime misinformation and how people know what is happening in war. It then outlines the book’s central argument about the role of proximity and exposure to the fighting in constraining public misperceptions in conflict, and the methods and types of evidence used to test it. After clarifying some key concepts used in the book, it finally closes with a sketch of the manuscript’s main implications and an outline of its structure and contents.

This chapter builds the theory about how civilians form factual beliefs in war, walking through the two major factors that power the theoretical engine behind the book’s argument. First, it explores the role of people’s psychological motivation in how they think about the world and its application to belief formation in war zones. In general, people will be motivated to interpret events in a way that fits their prior worldviews in the dispute, but not everyone will do so: for those who are closer to the action, such biases are outweighed by an “accuracy motive” and the need to get it right. Then, it discusses the role of people’s information sources in shaping their factual beliefs. The media in conflict zones is particularly prone to fueling factual biases, but not everyone is equally vulnerable: those more directly exposed to the relevant events will often reject biased narratives due to their community’s local information about what is actually taking place. Ultimately, the chapter weaves these two factors together, showing how they jointly ensure that fake news spreads widely in war, but those who are close enough to the action tend to be more resilient and know better.

This chapter examines belief in misinformation during the Coalition air war against ISIL in Iraq. In particular, it investigates a unique nationwide survey of contemporary Iraq that measures Iraqis’ factual perceptions about the Coalition airstrikes against ISIL, as well as whether they have lived under ISIL rule where the vast majority of strikes actually occurred. Moreover, this survey is paired with geo-located event data on the Coalition airstrikes themselves obtained from Airwars in order to measure the respondents’ proximity to the events more directly. Overall, the results reveal that Iraqis’ factual misperceptions about Coalition actions are widespread – fueled by both their own preexisting political orientations and streams of information in the dispute – but that civilians with greater personal exposure to the campaign are much less likely to embrace these falsehoods. Indeed, both experience living under ISIL control and proximity to the airstrikes themselves significantly reduce factual misperceptions about the Coalition’s aerial campaign, including false claims about its targeting of Shiʿa Arab-led militias and its strategic benefits to ISIL.

Ancient and modern observers of the Roman court have often characterized it as a fundamentally theatrical space. Court ‘performances’ therefore included senators flattering the imperial family, imperial family members costumed as deities, conspirators disguising their intentions, and the emperor himself, who could play a variety of roles. But performance in the formal sense was also central to court culture, so this chapter explores the sorts of performances occurring in court contexts (tragedy, comedy, pantomime, storytelling, etc.). It also examines the wider role in the court of the (often low-status) performers, including actors, pantomime dancers, storytellers, and jesters. They fundamentally shaped the court’s cultural life, and could themselves be powerful, popular, and wealthy. But they were also disposable court bodies with precarious court positions, since their performances could incite political controversy, and they stood in the place of others who wanted closer access to the emperor.

Two different classes of variables capable of affecting the intensity of emotions are introduced: global variables, which can influence the intensity of many different emotion types across different emotion groups, and local variables, which have relatively local effects, influencing only the intensity of particular emotions or emotion groups. Examples of global variables are presented, including sense of reality, psychological proximity, unexpectedness, and arousal, along with examples of local variables such as deservingness, relevant for Fortunes-of-others emotions such as Schadenfreude, and likelihood, relevant for emotions involving envisaged events. A detailed discussion of examples of emotion types involving both kinds of intensity variables is provided. Also discussed is the relation between global and local variables on the one hand and the central variables discussed in Chapter 3 on the other, with particular attention paid to the issue of how such interactions contribute to the overall intensity of particular emotion types. The difficulty of calibrating intensity across different emotion types is discussed.

People with extreme views appear to have fixed positions, but actually reflect calculations unlikely to be swayed by wartime information. The Evaluative Public, whose valuations are not in the tails, use wartime information to form their conflict approval. Evaluators are sensitive to changes in beliefs about observed casualty levels and expectations of likely future casualties. The Evaluative Public represents those who change positions in war, from support to opposition, depending on their ETC and RP. Using historical data and innovative experiments, we demonstrate that people’s personal experience with war drives their estimates of total casualties. Holding goals constant, higher costs yield higher opposition while lower costs increase support. Holding costs constant and allowing goals to change leads to opinion change. Geographically and temporally proximate casualties strongly influence estimates of a war’s total costs. Thus, we see that casualty patterns affect people’s estimates of a war’s costs and that these costs, when contextualized with the value of a conflict and expected costs, shape wartime support, even in the face of strong individual-level characteristics.

This chapter examines and compares the effects of issue characteristics on the nine blame games examined in Chapters 3-5 and consults three additional test cases in the USA in order to corroborate and refine the findings. The chapter demonstrates how issue characteristics – namely the salience of a policy controversy and its proximity to average publics – influence the content of blame game interactions. Issue characteristics influence how political opponents signal the severity of a policy controversy to the public, how they can try to put incumbents under pressure, and how incumbents seek to manage blame for the controversy. This chapter clarifies what is meant by blame games being played out in front of an ‘audience’, and it shows how politicians work with issue characteristics to pull the audience onto their side.

This, and the following three chapters, deal solely with the first element – the establishment of a duty of care – in a variety of scenarios. English courts have long drawn a distinction between the existence of a duty of care in the context of loss caused by physical injury or property damage, on the one hand (the subject of analysis in this chapter); and where economic loss or psychiatric injury is caused, on the other. In the latter scenarios, special rules apply for the establishment of a duty of care, which are the subject of consideration in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.

How do networks behave with regard to spatial divisions, do they respect or transgress distances, qualifications of spaces, mobilities? Can the development of new means of communicating over distance change this relationship of networks to space? Where do our relatives or, more generally, those with whom we are in contact live? Are we close (spatially) to our close (emotionally) ones ? What are the effects of urban evolutions on relational structures? How does spatial mobility influence networks? This is the issue of the spatial dimension of personal networks or, to put it another way, the link between "spatial" proximity and "relational" proximity. We show the importance of the local (city-wide) dimension of networks, but also their ability to retain their structure after mobility, despite significant changes in their composition.

Chapter 6 analyzes word association responses, categorizes them into meaning-based and syntagmatic and compares to the patterns of corresponding usage corpora. It shows that words eliciting meaning-based responses tend to be independent in usage while words eliciting syntagmatic responses tend to participate in multi-word units, suggesting that word associations can indeed say something about the processes at work in language use. A deeper analysis of syntagmatic associations and their comparison to usage patterns suggest the psycholinguistic reality of the model of a unit of meaning and in particular of abstracted associations: those of colligation and semantic preference. The chapter also discusses the core meaning effect, the influence of directionality and contiguity on the strength of association, the relationship of syntagmatic association to the boundaries of a unit of meaning as well as the evidence of the processes of fixing and approximation observed in Chapter 5.

If all of the potential Pigouvian externalities were internalised, both the positive and negative, then growth could be sustainable development. One of the challenges discussed was the complexity of integrating preferences for future generations who remain unable to voice concerns to present-time policymakers. Law and Economics literature considers the difficulty for decision makers to evaluate the risk of needing to take action based on incomplete information; the transaction costs of implementing the precautionary principle are complex. The polluter pays principle appears based on Pigou’s theory of externalities and on legal notions of justice, that tortfeasors should render damages for the injuries that they caused. Coase’s observation that either side of an injury could efficiently avoid that result and Calabresi’s maxim to search for the ‘least cost avoider’ have made implementation of the polluter pays principle both less obvious and less compelling. The allocation of human cum environmental rights is at its core an act of Coasean re-allocation, to provide one group with ex ante rights to reduce the transaction costs to achieve an efficient outcome for all parties. Overall, the Law and Economics literature has been in broad alignment with many of the key principles of general environmental law.