What Shapes Civilian Beliefs about Violent Events? Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

Why do civilians in warzones often hold widely divergent beliefs about what is happening in the fighting? While there is a burgeoning literature on the micro-dynamics of armed conflict, variation in civilians’ factual beliefs has received scant attention. Yet such beliefs are critical, as they form the basis for wartime opinion and action. I argue that—particularly for civilians outside the direct “line of fire”—this variation comes not chiefly from an event’s empirical nature, but from civilians’ prior political orientations in the dispute. In order to investigate these dynamics, I fielded a survey experiment in Pakistan in which I manipulated the features of a reported counterinsurgent air strike and then measured civilians’ ensuing beliefs about it. The results show that these beliefs are most driven by the perpetrator’s identity and civilians’ own preexisting attachments. While actual casualty levels matter too, these findings suggest that civilians’ beliefs about conflict events are often deeply biased in nature.