WHY BEING WRONG CAN BE RIGHT:

MAGICAL WARFARE TECHNOLOGIES

AND THE PERSISTENCE OF FALSE BELIEFS

A Term Paper Analysis

Presented to

Prof. Yukinobu Kitamura

Graduate School of Business and Commerce,

Keio University, Japan

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance

by

Darren N. Zamudio

Std. No. 91780809

TERM PAPER OUTLINE

I. Abstract

II. Background of the Study

III. Analysis of the Paper

IV. Why False Beliefs Persist: Claims and Arguments

V. Conclusion

ABSTRACT

In developing countries, deeply rooted and widely-held beliefs are ubiquitous.

It is very common to have such beliefs about witchcraft, magic, ordeals,

superstitions, origins, life after death, and rituals that activate supernatural process to

help people steer their lives, despite being almost certainly incorrect. This term paper

critics and analyzes “Why being wrong can be right: Magical Welfare Technologies

and the Persistence of False Beliefs” as how it examines the role of ‘magical’ beliefs

in conflict with the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also, we will attempt

to find out the social effects of using gri-gri, a magical spell for bulletproofing against

the militants which requires certain ritual commandments to be followed. Towards

the end of the paper, we will give an analysis whether the points raised in the paper

are always true or arguably factual.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

A premise of modernism is that rational decision-making is a hundred percent

compatible with human thriving. Gri-gri is a counterexample showing that this is not
the case, at least if you remove the assumption of a market economy. Most

precisely, counterexample to the standard rationalist premises that knowing the truth

never makes you worse off.

In a recent paper written by the economists Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez

de la Sierra, the social effects of gri-gri and the role of magical beliefs in warfare

were analyzed. The researchers examined how false beliefs persist in Bulambika, a

small village in the province of Sud Kivu, where long-term conflict and fighting

between militant groups has created the ideal atmosphere for widespread belief of

the villagers and other people in witchcraft as another mechanism in warfare

technologies.

Since the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, the Eastern Democratic Republic of

the Congo had experienced persistence violence and large-scale conflict. Until the

year 2012, the area had been exposed to numerous attacks which left behind many

mutilated bodies. Since then, many villages experience trauma because of the

unfortunate event which led the lively bodies of their loved ones including families,

friends, and acquaintances, into corpse in just one massive murder.

The reason why killings were massive was because most of the villagers lack

larger forms of protection, as is probably obvious even up to these days. Another

reason is that, they also lacked any kind of coordinated resistance, and given the

larger fire power, were hopelessly outgunned.

As this reveals the face of insecurity, beliefs in magical spells (often called gri-

gri), which safeguard the villagers and militants against fatality when an inevitable

combat arises, become widespread. Hence, this situation raises an empirical

question of why these magical beliefs arise and still persist, especially in such high-
stakes conflict-ridden regions, such as the Village of Bulambika for instance, where

errors in judgment can have high private costs.

Meanwhile, an elder of the village had a dream where the tribe ancestors

taught him to use supernatural forces to bulletproof to cease the war. This

bulletproofing was said to serve as a mechanism in bouncing off or missing any

bullets fired at the villagers. And to make this happen, the villagers must participate

in a ritual performed in the forest and follow certain conditions, including not stealing,

not drinking rainwater or not eating cucumbers, for the bulletproofing to take effect. If

an individual ingests it, bullets cannot harm him or her.

Through a series of interviews with the villagers, Nunn and de la Sierra

learned that once villagers were under such spell, they opted to stay and fight back

during combats rather than just giving up and fleeing instead.

As time passed by, the villagers were able to get rid of their enemies and

acquire their guns. Surprisingly, the bulletproofing ritual allowed the village of

Bulambika to mobilize themselves by systematically biasing downwards their beliefs

about the change of getting killed during the combat. In some way, it also allowed

the villagers to mobilize against the aggressors so they were able to successfully

protect their village. Since then, bulletproofing magic became relatively widespread

throughout the Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here, the working paper provided an example for why false beliefs might

persist. “The bulletproofing ritual allowed the community to mobilize combatants by

altering their beliefs about the likelihood that they would die in combat. While, at the

individual level, this false belief is costly - it cases individuals to underestimate the

risk of combat - it nonetheless allowed the community to mobilize against the

aggressors, and successfully eradicate them.” As said earlier, false beliefs, although

detrimental for some people, were somehow beneficial for the community.

In a nutshell, Nunn and de la Sierra just show that cultural beliefs ill-suited for

modernity, such as beliefs in magic, may be Pareto efficient for the group, although

not the individual, under certain conditions.

ANALYSIS OF THE PAPER

The utility function, Ui = V (q(e1, …, eN), ei ), presented by the authors to

explain the individual satisfaction derived by the citizens from their actions, which is

solely based on their false beliefs, is faulty. It only captures the effort exerted by the

individual and the collective group based on the levels of their beliefs. Biases might

be present such as the free-rider problem.

So what is this thing called “free-rider problem” in an economic concept? A

free-rider problem is a market failure which transpires when people take advantage

of being able to use a common resource, or collective good, without any payment, as

is the case when citizens of a country or any certain community utilize public goods

without paying their fare share in taxes. In this case, biases from free-rider problem

can most likely exist since the authors only included the effort exerted by the

individual and collective group based on their levels of their beliefs.

As what was also stated in the working paper, Ui has an inverse relationship

with ei. This means that as the individual effort increases, the individual utility in turn

decreases. On the other hand, Ui has a direct relationship with q. This only signifies

that as collective effort increases, individual utility also increases.

 Analyzing an individual’s behavior, he or she might prefer not to maximize his

or her efforts and just rely on the collective efforts. Hence, the correlation mentioned

earlier is not very clear with its intention of showing the relationship among individual

effort, individual utility, and collective effort.

Furthermore, the paper focused on the hypothesis that false beliefs are

persistent because citizens find them “beneficial.” The term “beneficial” is vague and

broad as it should have been further explained. For instance, the citizens find false

beliefs beneficial because there is no individual who can organize a system that suits

the community; hence, citizens just resorted on these false beliefs.

The underdevelopment, education system, economic status, literacy rate, and

the like of the area should have been tackled in the paper to further extend the

discussion and analysis on the persistence of false beliefs. There should have been

a clear ground where economists will be able to decipher their explanation on why

false beliefs persist.

Towards the end of the discussion of the paper, the authors mentioned that

false beliefs on the perceived costs of bad behavior are also persistent. Moreover,

the author said that these beliefs helped in controlling the crime rate in the area.

These false beliefs should have been further elaborated as it may delineate the

purpose of the paper. Their lack of evidence to support their claims somehow

weakens the arguments they provided. Their intention was very cohesive however;

the explanation was too vague, leaving the economists to be skeptic towards the

paper. In this case, statistics on crime rates should have been presented to better

support the claim. Without graphs, figures, and numbers, the facts sounded like

mere speculations, without having any clear basis.

WHY FALSE BELIEFS PERSIST: CLAIMS AND ARGUMENTS

Through repeated pillaging, rape, and killings in villages that apparently

fostered insecurity, Nunn and de la Sierra became interested in studying

bulletproofing spell which protects villagers willing to take up arms just to defend

their village from having combats, as mentioned earlier in the paper.

The researchers claimed that villages with the belief in this bulletproofing were

more likely to survive, encouraging the spell to also spread out in other villages

nearby. Even when the belief was proven wrong due to some villagers being shot to

death, belief in the bulletproofing spell didn’t waver, as it was assumed that those

villagers who died had not followed the certain conditions and rituals which were too

difficult to follow. As mentioned a while ago, if an individual ingests the gri-gri and

follow certain ritual commandments, then bullets cannot harm him or her. This belief

is very puzzling as it sounds – inasmuch as bullets did seem to keep murdering

people. What more puzzling is that this belief did not only survive, but it was also

adopted by many villages, cities, and regions nearby.

So what is the reason behind this? The paper argues that gri-gri encourages

resistance on mass scale. With combined bravery and cowardly, only a small

percentage of the villagers would attempt to fight back beforehand. If you want to get

a chance of survival, then you need everyone to fight back against the militants. As

such, gri-gri lowers the perceived cost of said resistance. For instance, gri-gri let the

villagers to be more courageous to the point that there would be no reason for them

to fear guns since the bullets cannot hurt them anymore. As a result, everyone
fought hence; this situation shows how gri-gri becomes beneficial to the point that it

already overcomes the negative effects.

Furthermore, since more villagers are fighting, individuals who take gri-gri also

raises the marginal utility of the others which means that it is much better to fight

against the militants together. Also, since there are rituals conditions in using gri-gri

which are apparently hard to follow – if one breaks a certain moral code, it will not

work --- this gri-gri can also cut down not just war-related crimes, but other crimes as

well.

Considering a group-level selection, the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus

allow any given villages, cities, and towns, to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a

time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents, making it widespread

geographically, or they will adopt gri-gri themselves, which will also let gri-gri be

widespread. In any case, gri-gri will still remain extensive and prevalent after the said

group-level selection. As much as we want to say it is clever, it is more appropriate

to describe it as a decent analysis of why certain beliefs persist despite being false.

Given the circumstances, the researchers think that this situation provides a

colorful illustration of how deeply ingrained these beliefs can be and of the tension

between the cost to the individual having these beliefs and the benefit to the group

that creates them.

Bulletproofing spells are just one of many military and civilian spells which are

used as a mechanism in warfare technologies present in the Eastern Democratic

Republic of Congo. As mentioned in paper earlier, some evidences lack to support

the claims about behaviors and crime rate hence, it remains a blur towards skeptic
people. With this, the authors are now working to develop experiments to show how

these beliefs map onto behavior.

With this, they are considering measuring the fight or fight response of the

sympathetic nervous system to situations that imitate the presence of an actual

danger. In this way, they will be able to come up with an approach to find out how

such beliefs persist and map onto various behaviors.

Eminently, understanding how beliefs are formed could recommend some

amendments and other inputs to policies not just in the Eastern Democratic Republic

of Congo, but in other places as well.

In addition, the researchers suggest that the type of policy recommendations

that might come out when people take into account the cultural diversity and the

beliefs that people hold are potentially very diverse in many ways. Using such

concept in this working paper on power allocation in failed states will possibly

reintegrate foundations of human behavior and social organization into the economic

sphere. Hence, this will improve any individual’s capacity to intervene successfully

from states which failed and even avoid its continuous disruption.

Even though, the working paper is vague in many ways due to lack of

evidences, the researchers were able to draw a parallel between witchcraft in a

place like the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and science in western nations

in order to depict how understanding belief formation can help people further

understand recent political phenomena which can possible transpire in our everyday

lives. In this case, it is imperative to decipher where gri-gri comes from and in order

to do that, one must also understand the overarching institution. And for that, there is
nothing but total silence. This overarching mechanism is primordial to the

bulletproofing spell.

In addition, I also find it extremely disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific

integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then

making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than being superstitious. It

seems like downright ludicrous to think that a magical spell, such as gri-gri, will

cause bullets to bounce off of someone. The belief is labeled as “false” by the

researchers without any supporting arguments or evidences given for such being the

case until the conclusion where it is written as false belief. In other words, the word

“false” is an unnecessary modifier. It seems like it its being used as a rhetorical

device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.

Another point is that must be emphasized is that, it can be observed in the

paper how identical science and witchcraft are in the eyes of the researchers. Putting

this in a sense, it is very hard to decipher how a medication works or what scientists

talk about, but people trust them because society has given them legitimacy as an

institution that produces knowledge. Interestingly, this also reflects the traditional

power structures in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo which make witch

doctors and other superstitious entity which enable bulletproofing, look more

legitimate than ever.

In essence, the researchers emphasize that if you believe that someone else

has a wrong view of the world, and they are trying to influence you, you will just

discredit anything they say. This may lead to certain groups being completely

isolated in a false view of the world, say for instance, the false belief that climate

change does not exist. Entirely arbitrary beliefs can persist and can make severe
implications not just for the social environment, but for political change implication as

well.

Lastly, it is evident that the researchers insist in the paper how mind-boggling

various beliefs are formed or in any way, its implications affect one’s behavior – and

yet, no one still knows the answer how it does. Now more than ever, it is imperative

to start examining these beliefs more closely.

CONCLUSION

Overall, the paper was interesting and intriguing at the same time. First, it is

interesting because the concept of proving why false beliefs persist is fresh to the

eyes of the readers. People won’t have second thoughts reading the paper as the

topic is very common and not too technical. However, the paper is also intriguing

because as people start reading it, they will wonder if these claims raised in the

paper are true as well.

Moreover, it leaves me feeling uncomfortable since the paper has been

bombarded with unresolved problems with it and yet, I think it is fascinating in the

sense that it is applying a well-known concept to a novel context. Personally, I had a

hard time seeing how this “bulletproofing” technique could possibly be true. I would

recommend the researchers to use some psychological concepts as it comes handy

to make their claims stronger and for their readers to better grasp why false beliefs

persist even if those are not factual in the first place.

 If there would be a specific criticism for the paper, it is that the researchers

vastly downplay negative externalities which were inflicted by the required rituals to

be followed by the villagers. Rather, the researchers suggest that these acts might

be optimistic in some way.

As mentioned earlier a lot of time, using gri-gri would require certain

commandments to meet and one example for that is “don’t steal from civilians.” The

said commandment seems functional however; they weren’t able to mention another

form of bullet-magic which requires human sacrifice and worse, cannibalism. By

considering this, the cost-benefit of using gri-gri will completely be messed up since

the cost may possibly overturn the benefits of these certain warfare technologies. To

be fair, the researchers’ approach were too broad and they did not event look at just

one specific place, such as Liberia. They wanted their arguments to be more

generalized in a sense that these can also be applied to other places in differing

situations.

The rest of the arguments are quite good, and such complicated attempt to

examine irrational rituals and beliefs are very much appreciated. Personally, I think

that the researchers just complicated things which are already complicated on its

own. They could have just considered the fact that gri-gri is just a magic spell since

transforming an abstract event, which is not likely to happen in real life, into an

economic concept just gives off generalized conclusions in the end.