SIMULATION

http://sim.sagepub.com/ Information processing behaviour in a crisis situation....... a simulation study

P.N. Rastogi SIMULATION 1969 13: 177 DOI: 10.1177/003754976901300404 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sim.sagepub.com/content/13/4/177

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Indian Premier Shastri - President

Ayub

Than

Information processing behaviour in a crisis situation....... a simulation study

by P. N. RASTOGI
INTRODUCTION The present work is
Indian Institute of Kanpur, India
a

Technology
1/31/69
2/13/69 2/24/69

simulation study of the inof Indo-Pak decisionbehaviour formation-processing makers during a crisis period of ten days prior to the outbreak of war between the two countries on September 1, 1965. The decision-makers are the late Indian Premier Shastri and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan. The rationale is to develop an artificial system utilizing a limited number of socio-psychological mechanisms in the context of the available data in order to test the correspondences with the real system. The study is patterned after an earlier work by Professor Pool and Alan Kessler with respect to the crisis situation preceding the outbreak of the first World War. Toward the end, we explore a way of making the model interactive by viewing a decision-maker as a transducer of Bayesian probabilities.

digital

Material received First review received Second review received Third review received Revised copy received

5/19/69 6/2/69

Background of the conflict situation and scenario. India and Pakistan emerged as two independent

na-

tions after the withdrawal of British power from the Indian subcontinent in August 1947. Princely states governed directly by the native rulers were expected to merge with either of the two new nations. Dispute between India and Pakistan developed over the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Hindu ruler and predominantly Muslim population. As a sequel to the brutal attacks by the marauding Pathan tribesmen from Pakistan, the state acceded to India in October 1947. India accepted the accession, sent her armed forces to clear the invaders, and referred the matter to UNO in the light of Pakistans involvement in the affair. A ceasefire came into existence on December 31, 1948, leaving

the vale of Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh areas with India and the northern part with Pakistan. Subsequent negotiations over the holding of a plebiscite and final settlement failed repeatedly. In 1962 India suffered serious military reverses under a large-scale Chinese attack which exposed her military weakness. Minor military clashes between India and Pakistan had been going on intermittently across the ceasefire line, but new and more serious clashes occurred early in 1965 over Kutch, a marshy and barren area on the west coast. This affair had barely subsided when in August 1965 a massive infiltration of disguised armed personnel, estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000, began from Pak-held Kashmir to the Indian side, with the ostensible objective of fomenting internal revolution. This state of affairs culminated in Indias crossing of the ceasefire line on August 26, to seal off the entry point of the infiltrators. Pak retaliation came in the form of a massive tank attack in the Chhamb sector of the Indian-held Kashmir on August

31, 1965.
The simulation study here reported covers a period of days from August 22 to August 31, 1965. The scenario consists of about 200 to 225 messages per day presented to the decision-makers. Same information was made available to both the decision-makers. Reconstruction of the scenario posed a very big problem, as the account of events in the newspapers of the two countries
ten

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7 17

differed a great deal. In such cases, details which are consistent with accounts of events in References 3 and 4 and in Time magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, and other external sources were used. In the simulation there are no secret messages available to only one of the decision-makers, obviously owing to lack of information concerning confidential matters. The simulation model, however, has provision for handling secret messages. The mechanisms ofinformation processing. In the simulation a decision-makers mind is deemed to be composed of four conceptual segments: attention space, pressing problems, put-aside section, and memory. Each of these segments contains messages which come from the environment and are arranged hierarchically according to their attention-commanding power (hereafter called salience). Attention space thus consists of the most salient information, and memory the least salient. Messages are organized around discrete information categories termed &dquo;events,&dquo; which enable a decisionmaker to order his world-view out of a random mass of incoming information. The salience of an event is equal to the greatest salience of a message belonging to its set; salience governs the placement of a message in any of the four mind segments. As a piece of information grows old, its salience gradually decreases and it slides down the hierarchy of mind areas, finally to memory from which it is in time deleted in accordance with a forgetting rate. The following socio-psychological propositions govern the dynamics of information processing: 1. Persons pay more attention to news that deals with them. 2. Persons pay less attention to facts that contradict their views. 3. Persons pay more attention to news from trusted, liked sources. 4. Persons pay more attention to facts that they will have to act on or discuss because of attention by others. 5. Persons pay more attention to facts bearing on actions they are already involved in; i.e., action creates commitment. Each message is a piece of information related to some event and having one or two actors and a relationship between them. For example: Indian troops cross cease-fire line in Kashmir or China supports Pak on Kashmir. In accordance with the above propositions, each message is coded for its importance to each decision-maker and his country, his attitude toward the reliability of the source of the message, the effect of the relationship between the two countries, and his perception of the importance of the message for public opinion within his own country. The above set of propositions are the basis for the &dquo;saliency bias&dquo; routines for a message when it is received by a decision-maker.

An actors mind at time to is, however, not a vacuous entity; it contains his stable backlog of experience, with which he views and interprets events in his environment. In the present context, this is represented by initializing an affect (psycho-attachment) matrix for each of the decision-makers. The matrix represents the decisionmakers perception of other countries on a dimension of friendliness/unfriendliness in relation to their own countries and amongst themselves. Thirty-one countries from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America are represented in the affect matrix. The number is based on relative frequency of interaction, and is easily expandable. A salience matrix representing the differential importance of each of these countries to the decision-makers country is also initialized. The matrices do not have to be symmetric. Country A may for example have a higher affect and saliency rating toward country B, which, however, may not fully reciprocate. The affect and salience matrices summarize the world-view of each decision-maker at the start of the simulation period. They provide a baseline against which he assesses the incoming environmental information. Information concerning purely internal events, however, remains unaffected. At the end of each day in the simulation period, the changed contents of the affect matrix represent the changed world-view of the decision-makers as a result of the happenings and interactions in the simulated period. The historical situation and the very limited period under purview here, however, lack extensive interchange between the decision-makers countries and other countries. The sizes of the attention space, pressing problems list, and put-aside list are the same, i.e., each of them can accommodate up to a maximum of 9 events. Similarly an event-space contains a maximum of 9 messages associated with that event category. This provision is in accordance with Millers hypothesis which states that a person can attend to 7 2 things at a time.5Decisionmakers here can attend up to 9 events, but the events with very high saliencies, i.e., 0.6 and above on a scale of 0-1, count as more than one event. Hence the actual size of the attention space on any particular day varies in accordance with the importance of the information received on that day.

The importance of an event is indicated by the most salient item of information belonging to its set. Thus an event category with a low placement in the attention space can move up to the top if a message with a very high salience value comes in for processing. The final salience of an information item is a function of its salience for the decision-makers and their countries, its reliability for the decision-makers, and its importance for their home public opinions. A subroutine calculates this final salience for each message, and this value governs its subsequent placement in a decision-makers mind.

178

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Decision-makers give greater attention to events with and more important events displace events with lesser salience down to the lower regions of the mind hierarchy, i.e., from Attention Space to Pressing Problems List to Put-aside List down to Memory and thence to final forgetting. The more important messages within an event space displace items of lesser importance in an analogous manner. The salience of an event is progressively reduced over time in an exponential manner until it is below a prespecified forgetting level, whereupon it is deleted from the memory and leaves the program.

higher salience,

Analysis of the output

The output is in the form of the contents of Attention Problems List, and Put-aside List for each of the decision-makers at the end of each simulated day. Affect matrices are likewise reproduced. Attention Spaces of both the decision-makers at the beginning and the end of the 10-day simulation period are given in the

Space, Pressing

appendix.
The simulation deals with an acute crisis period in which military action is already going on and the public opinion of both the countries is highly agitated. Decisionmakers have also serious internal problems such as, for example, a difficult food situation, and the Sikh demand for a linguistic province (i.e., Punjabi Suba), faced by Shastri, and the problem of separatist tendencies in east Pakistan confronting Ayub. However, these important problems are relegated to a secondary place in the minds of the actors as the crisis of Kashmir deepens. Crisis periods are characterized by a high rate of generation and exchange of information concerning the crisis situation. This is reflected in the contents of the attention space of the decision-makers, where events concerning Kashmir occupy almost the entire available space. In Shastris attention space at the end of the first day, 8 out of a total of 9 events deal with Kashmir, and among them the top place is occupied by a category concerning enemy military activity. Other categories of information in the same context deal with home public opinion, United Nations connection with the problem, happenings within the crisis area, relations with the enemy country, and military action by his own side. The only noncrisis event concerns the prevalent student unrest in India. The Pressing Problems List is occupied mostly with internal issues like economic planning and development, pricerise, black-market money, regionalism, the food situation, communist activities, and language policy. Ayubs attention space is exclusively occupied by the information categories related to the crisis situation, but reflects a differential treatment of identical information sets. This differention is governed by the operation of bias mechanisms. Ayubs attention space has, moreover, only six events, owning to the higher salience accorded

him to the first three events in his attention space. In consonance with the Miller hypothesis concerning 7 2 events, we assume that events having salience values higher than 0.6 on a scale of 0 to 1 count as two events, and those having salience values of higher than 0.75 as three events. This is because very important events claim most of the attention of an actor, relegating other relatively less important events to the lower ranks in the hierarchy of mind. Pressing problems for Ayub include economic development in eastern Pakistan, external economic aid to his country (the United States of America had at this time suspended her aid commitments to Pakistan in view of the latters growing relations with Red China), ties with CENTO, relations with the United States, and internal political events. The sharply deteriorating Kashmir situation displaces all other event categories from the decision-makers attention spaces. Even serious internal problems like food riots and the threat of self-immolation by the Sikh leader Fateh Singh over the Punjabi Suba issue are not attracting Shastris foremost attention, though they are high on his Pressing Problems List. Toward the end of the simulated period, on August 31, 1965, Shastris attention space discloses only four events. Pak military action involving a heavy tank attack on the Jammu front tops the list, followed by Indias own military action, a continuing review of relations with the enemy country, and a concern with the pressures of public opinion at home. His Pressing Problems List is headed by the happenings in Kashmir. This heavy tank attack marks the eruption of a full-scale war between the two countries. Ayubs attention space at this juncture also discloses only four events. However, for him Indias occupation of the strategic Hajipir pass and capture of 7 military posts in the Pak-held area are the most important information items, followed by his own massive military response. He follows these by a review of Indo-Pak relations, wherein the information piece concerning Indias intention to retain captured territory occupies first place. Next, he devotes attention to happenings within the Kashmir. Here, a news item relating to a visit by a Kashmir minister (Indian) to areas formerly under Pak occupation is deemed most salient. This item is followed by another, i.e., a realization that the failure of Pak-instigated revolt is now final. A comparison of the contents of the affect matrices for the two decision-makers reveals few changes. This is primarily because of the short time period and a relative lack of transactions pertaining to a crisis situation with external countries. The USA, USSR and UK confine themselves to expressions of concern and the urging of restraint on the parts of both sides. Affect changes between the two countries themselves are, however, dramatic, and mark the deterioration of relations to the point of explosion.

by

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179

Decision-makers

as

the transducers of Bayesian

probabilities making.
In the

probabilities

in different relevant contexts can be evaluated for the actors and serve as inputs for their decision-

processing is logically meaningful in the decision-making. Decisions of an actor serve as an informational input to the attention space of the other interacting actor, who then responds by making his own decisions; and so the interaction process cycles back and forth. Decision-making is, however, an openended process governed by the singularities of constraints
Information
context of
an actors situation and his assessment and of various alternative actions. The range of appraisal courses of action in a situation is potentially possible finite. A relative balancing of costs and benefits of the main alternatives in the context of subjectively appraised probabilities of various outcomes enables a decisionmaker to chart his course in response to the situational pressures. The latter are reflected in the contents of his attention space and the imbalance of high negative values in the affect matrix. These premises lead to a view of man as a transducer of Bayesian probabilities.* Assignment of probabilities to various possible outcomes for a decision-makers courses of action is a matter of empirical research and experienced judgment. Bayesian decision theory then leads to an algorithm suitable for manmachine gaming. The conditional probability of an event D, given another H, is

present crisis situation, when military action is

on, three

already going
makers :

options

are

open to decision-

present in

(i) Large-scale military action ( a 1 ) (ii) Limited military action continued scale (a2) (iii) No military action (a3).

on

the

present

Associated with each course of action are three possible outcomes: (i) Objectives are attained (<91) (ii) A stalemate develops, i.e., no material change occurs in the situation (02) ( iii) The situation worsens ( 93 ) . Associated with each of the outcomes is its probability. One may hypothesize that decision-makers choose a course of action only when they adjudge at least 0.5 probability of a successful outcome, i.e., P(91 ) = 0.5. In this case, P ( e2 ) and P ( B3 ) might be accorded values of 0.3 and 0.2, respectively. Each course of action is, however, also characterized by its own utility and cost. Large-scale military action is a high-risk and high-gain decision, limited action is a relatively low-risk and lowgain decision tending to maintain the status quo, while the null-action course is a high-risk and no-gain decision. The utility of the courses of action and their corresponding outcomes, i.e., U (a, 8), may be represented as under:

where P(D n H) is the probability of the joint occurrence of two events regarded as one event and P(H) is greater than zero. For example, let P(H), the probability that the Pak army is superior and better armed than the Indian army, be 0.8. Let P ( D n H ) , the joint probability that the Pak army can cut off Indias access to Kashmir through quick victory and also that the Pak army is superior and better armed than Indian army be 0.5. According to equation 1, P(D/H) or the probability that the Pak army can cut off Indias access to Kashmir through quick victory, given that the Pak army is superior and better armed than Indian army, is 0.5 = 0.625. * * In this way, conditional

Flow charting the processes A flowchart of the processes operating within the computer simulation program is given in Figure 1. The values of the various courses of action for the decision-makers are then given by:

0.8
*&dquo;Men are effective transducers for probabilities; that is, men examine relevant information, base probabilistic judgments on it, and communicate those judgments in such a way that quantities of the form P(D/H) can be recovered. The resulting numbers are appropriate guides to action.&dquo;6
can

* *There is some evidence to support such a viewpoint on the part of Pakistan. Commenting on Sino-Indian War of 1962, Ayub states: &dquo;The basic reason for the collapse of the Indians was that their military thinking had not advanced with the times and they fought the war on the 1939 pattern.... The Indians failed because of poor leadership and inadequate training. The Indians lacked skill and experience, and their method of fighting was inferior to that of the Chinese.&dquo;7

180

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Figure

Message input flow for a decision maker on a decision day (third approximation)

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181

This procedure represents a possible way of understanding the present actors decisions to escalate and counter-escalate the conflict rapidly. This type of experimental man-machine gaming can explore many possible variants of a decision-making situation in an interactive
environment.

REFERENCES
1
POOL I S KESSLER A

"The Kaiser, the Tsar and the computer"

American Behavioral Scientist vol 8 pp 31-38
no

May 1965

POOL I S

KESSLER A

Conclusion Studies like the present one are useful both in a theoretical and in a practical sense. Theoretically, they exemplify the potentialities of a new methodological approach, i.e., computer simulation to explore the logical sequences of a set of hypotheses. The dynamic course of an artificial system in the time dimension helps an investigator achieve the practical goals of foresight and prediction. This, of course, depends on the adequacy of problem representation and the validity of the premises underlying the simulation model. Experiments concerning decisionmaking processes can make it possible to examine various alternatives for managing a conflict and predicting its outcome before a crisis situation becomes explosive.

a computer simulation of human information processing during a crisis"

"Crisiscom:

IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and vol SSC-1 no 1 November 1965 pp 52-58

Cybernetics

LEISS A C

BLOOMFIELD L P

"The Kashmir conflict: 1947-1957 "

Control of local conflict vol 3 Center for International Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge Massachusetts June 1967 pp 205-346

DASGUPTA J B

Jammu and Kashmir Martinus Nijhoff The Hague

forthcoming

MILLER G

some

"The magical number seven plus or minus two: limits on our capacity for processing information"
Review vol 63 1963 pp 81-97
PHILLIPS L

Psychological
6
EDWARDS W

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Work reported in this paper was made possible by a visiting post-doctoral fellowship at MIT. The writer is deeply grateful to Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool for his constructive criticisms and suggestions. Simulation was carried out on CTSS system of Project MAC at MIT. Mr. Raymond Sommer served as the programming assistant.

"Man as transducer for probabilities in Bayesian command and control systems" Human judgment and optimality Shelly M & Bryan G, editors Wiley New York 1964 p 377 7
KAHN MOHAMMED AYUB

Friends
Oxford

not masters: a

political autobiography

University

Press New York 1967

APPENDIX 1 Table 1
11 .
:w x

> ,
~

~&dquo; ~

partial listing

of the initial

(I) and final (F) affect matrix values of Shastri

182 182

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APPENDIX 2 The attention spaces of the decision-makers at the end of

day

183
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184
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185

sample

of messages

presented

to

the decision makers

on

Day TWO

7th No.-Salience of the message for the

public opinion opinion

of Pakistan of India

Explanation of coding
1 st No.-Number of the event i.e. 7 is the event number for Indias Food Problem 2nd No.-Effect of the message between the two countries on a scale of -1 to + 1

8th No.-Salience of the message for the public [Salience scale ranges from 0-1] ]
9th of the message

No.-Ayubs attitude toward the reliability of the source

10th No.-Shastris attitude toward the reliability of the source of the message [Reliability scale from

0-1 ]

3rd No.-Salience of the message for country One

11 th No.4th No.-Salience of the message for country Two 5th No.-Salience of the message for decision maker One, i.e.,

0 - nonsecret message 1 secret message

-

Ayub

12th

No.-Country No. (31 is for India)

(32 is for Pakistan)

6th No.-Salience of the message for decision maker Two, i.e., Shastri

13th No.-Country No.

186

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