The Cognitive Foundations of Civilian Responses to Violence : Evidence from Pogroms and Insurgency in India

When people are confronting violence, what determines the strategies they choose in pursuit of safety? Why do some people flee violence, while others try to fight back, adapt, or hide? Individual choices during conflict have real political consequences—from violence escalation to migration crises—but the way people make decisions about safety is poorly understood. I develop a new theory that explains individual behavior by focusing on variation in appraisals of how controllable and predictable violent environments are. I apply my theory, situational appraisal theory, to explain the choices of Indian Sikhs confronting violence during the 1980s–1990sPunjab crisis and1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. Testimony in original interviews plus qualitative and machine learning analysis of 509 video oral histories shows that individual appraisals of control and predictability influence strategy selection. People who perceive “low” control over violent threats prefer strategies that avoid rather than approach those threats. People who perceive “low” predictability in threat evolution prefer costly, drastic strategies instead of moderate risk-monitoring options. Evidence from India shows that situational appraisals explain variation in the survival strategies pursued by demographically similar people, and also provide new leverage to explain change in survival strategies over time