EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Phase Two: Failure of Rationalization

Rationalization is a critical psychological defense. It allows pilots and alliances to face adversity and keep fighting - and it is amazing how powerful rationalization can be in the face of evidence (cf. creationism). In internet space there are a bewildering variety of rationalizations for the pilot facing failure. By far the most common is to blame lag, followed by blaming CCP and accusing the enemy of exploits or hacking. These are so common in PvP games that they become universally understood jokes, and despite their humorous connotations they are still earnestly used in a time of need. One moment a pilot will be laughing about how his enemy 'didn't want that ship anyway' and how it has 'already been replaced'; after he explodes, suddenly he feels the need to brag in local about how many other of those ships he has fitted and ready to go, and so that loss didn't matter. Or it didn't count because his enemy 'blobbed', or behaved without following the precepts of e-honor, etc. These rationalizations tend to be hilarious when we aren't the ones making them, but our belief in them is genuine when we're the ones spouting them.

It is in this stage of the cascade that the propaganda war takes a deeper significance to all parties. It is usually during this phase, in the face of mounting failures, that there is the most forum blustering from both sides. At the beginning of a conflict, the aggressor is often restrained in their bragging in case the attacks do not go as planned; the defender has not yet experienced sustained adversity, so it is here that we see the most "good fight" rhetoric with each side congratulating the other. As soon as things turn bad for the victim, however, rationalizations are mustered with alarming vehemence. Accusations fly on the part of the victims as they try to explain their failures away. Similarly, the aggressor does his level best to force the victim to confront the cognitive dissonance between the facts and their defensive rationalizations. This is why there is almost never a 'clean' war, without accusations of impropriety - those accusations are part of a critical psychological defense mechanism that is ingrained in all of us. This is also why using espionage to leak negative commentary from within a victim alliance is such effective a propaganda method, as the dissident voice of a fellow alliance member is much more difficult to explain away.

Yet regardless of propaganda, if sustained and inescapable adversity is applied to an alliance it becomes difficult for the victims to rationalize their losses as failures mount. Say you trip and fall down the stairs once and break your leg.  Perhaps you were merely unlucky, had a bad day, slipped on a banana peel, were startled by a loud noise, or were wearing uncomfortable shoes. The broken leg hurts like hell and is certainly bad, but it doesn't mean that you are a clumsy person. However, if you stubbed your toe on something every single day, you would find it hard to deny that you were a klutz - even though your stubbed toe is far less painful than the broken leg. So it goes with alliances: dramatic, painful losses are easily written off, but repeated more mundane failures are difficult to rationalize. If your alliance keeps losing fleet fights and your small gangs are getting pasted, and you lost yet another R64 moon, it becomes difficult to maintain that your alliance is doing well. When rationalization fails, helplessness sets in.