Perceptual Gestalt at War

Abstract

One tragedy of human warfare lies in the paradox that, even when both sides suffer immensely, achieving peace remains challenging1. Mainstream game theories model the decision of war and peace by analyzing the Nash Equilibrium of a game’s pay-off matrix2,3. Here, we explore whether perceptual Gestalt, even when completely irrelevant to the payoff matrix of a multiplayer war game, can nevertheless constrain the progress of war by providing perceptual focal points mutually acknowledged by rivalries. We demonstrated that compared to the Non-Grouping condition where all grids shared the same color, task-irrelevant perceptual gestalts formed by distinctive colors influenced war dynamics in several ways: First, they reduced the number and intensity of wars. Second, they constrained strategic decisions: Despite having the freedom to develop troops in any direction, participants overwhelmingly fought along the direction of the perceptual border. Third, they altered the type of war: While wars resembled Blitzkrieg in the Non-Grouping condition, with fast troop movements and a high annihilation rate, perceptual Gestalts led to Trench Warfare along the perceptual border, resulting in a much lower annihilation rate. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of perceptual grouping biased how three players formed alliances, with powers residing in sibling color groups of the perceptual hierarchy more frequently allying against the non-sibling power. Collectively, these results demonstrate that non-social visual perception—by parsing and organizing the battlefield into distinctive groups—can shape conflicts between rivalries by constraining their war strategies, thereby transforming a structure of perception into a structure of peace.