Mellon University. He has published articles on international security, peace, and conflict in a number of leading scholarly journals including International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research, along with public-facing outlets such as The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, National Interest, and Political Violence at a Glance.
Silverman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Seeing is Disbelieving drops the reader in front of a graph showing the core finding of the book’s chapter on Iraq and Iraqi belief in misinformation about the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the country. To quote the first paragraph (which starts on the page before) beneath the graph:Visit Daniel Silverman's website.55 percent of respondents with no personal experience living in the targeted areas believe each of the factual misperceptions, while the percentage of those who spent more than a year in the targeted areas that embrace the falsehoods is only about 35. People’s exposure to the relevant events thus tracks with a substantial decline in their susceptibility to false perceptions of them.The page continues by setting up additional tests that the chapter runs with the same data, including efforts to pin down some of the mechanisms that drive Iraqis’ thinking about the bombing and how they shift with personal exposure to the violence.
The results of the Page 99 Test here are decidedly mixed. Being thrust right into the middle of a discussion of the quantitative results of the analyses in this chapter without a word about the theory, methods, and context behind them would of course be somewhat disorienting and confusing for a reader. And yet, the book’s central argument – that war is rife with falsehoods, but those closer to the relevant events can typically see through them – is clear.
This speaks to the fact that Seeing is Disbelieving is not written in the style of a book that surveys a broad range of explanatory variables that contribute in some way to a phenomenon. No, it is one of those that makes a forceful central argument about the key explanation for the phenomenon and threads it through the book’s chapters rather relentlessly. While the book takes readers to a variety of contexts – from Pakistan to Iraq to Syria and much beyond – page 99 does provide insight into the primary argument about the depths and limits of factual misinformation and misperception in war that it aims to advance and push out into the world.
--Marshal Zeringue
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