Daniel Silverman makes a major contribution to our understanding of how people process information during times of conflict with his book, Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better. The book seeks to explain the variation in factual beliefs that individuals may have in a conflict zone, as well as the vulnerability individuals may have to believing misinformation. Silverman argues that individuals who are relatively closer to the actual fighting are more likely to have factually accurate beliefs about what is happening in the zone of conflict compared to those who are farther away from the fighting.

Silverman’s model focuses on three independent variables to understand why those who are close to the fighting are more likely to form accurate beliefs about the nature of the combat and not believe misinformation as readily as those who are farther from the fighting. The first independent variable is the proximity of the individual to the fighting. The second independent variable is the source of information that an individual may use to form beliefs about the nature of the fighting. Those who are close to the fighting use “local” knowledge to form their factual beliefs. Those who are farther away from the fighting are more likely to use partisan media to inform themselves about the fighting, whose creators have an incentive to lead people to believe certain things, possibly inaccurate things, in order to achieve political goals. The final independent variable is the motivation of the individual when searching for information about the fighting. Those who are closer to the fighting have an “accuracy motive” to get the facts correct because their own and their loved ones’ safety and survival may depend on accurate information about the fighting. On the other hand, those who are farther from the fighting and do not feel the urgency to know the facts to survive are more likely to be driven by “directional biases” in their search for information sources. This means that individuals who are relatively far from the fighting are likely to look for information sources that will confirm their already held biases about the nature of the combatants and their behaviors.

Silverman applies this theoretical approach to explore three empirical cases: what Pakistanis believed were the facts regarding the US drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan, what Iraqis believed about the US aerial bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq, and what Syrians believed about the events of the Syrian civil war. Silverman uses a mix of quantitative data as well as qualitative data that he collected himself or that other scholars offered him for use in the book.

There are several important contributions that this book makes to our understanding of how individuals form beliefs. Silverman’s model helps clarify who is most susceptible to believing misinformation, but, even more importantly, it explains why some people are better targets for disinformation campaigns than others. For example, if one considers the US drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan, we now have a better sense of why anti-American elites were so successful in convincing their target audience of American malevolent intentions and behavior. The already prevalent anti-Americanism in Pakistan made it relatively easy to convince an audience that did not have access to the tribal areas where the combat operations were occurring to believe those who said the Americans were targeting people in the tribal areas indiscriminately with drone strikes.

There is another very important takeaway from this example. Elites need only plant the seed of doubt about the integrity and intentions of those they wish to demonize in the target audience to have a better chance of convincing the public that the target of the disinformation campaign is a malevolent actor. This means that more people can typically be convinced of disinformation than the truth if they have a bias against one of the combatants. This helps us understand why so many in the Global South are willing to believe Russian disinformation against the West. The historical memory of colonialism and political elites who fan anti-Western sentiment for their own purposes creates a biased environment that is ripe for Russian anti-Western disinformation. As Silverman points out, this has major implications for how much of the world views the war in Ukraine.

Perhaps the most important implication of Silverman’s study is what it implies for insurgencies. As insurgents are generally initially not strong enough to take power on their own, they must win at least a sizeable portion of noncombatants to their side to build the necessary conditions for victory. Insurgents need the noncombatant public for sanctuary, intelligence, material support, and recruits. As many studies of the outcomes of insurgencies have shown, counterinsurgents’ superior technology and firepower are not guarantees of victory if noncombatants side with the insurgents. Silverman’s research tells us that while insurgent propaganda may initially win noncombatant sympathies to the insurgents’ side, actual experience with the insurgents and the counterinsurgents may decide the conflict. Firsthand experience with abuse or indifference may be decisive in winning the noncombatant public to one side or the other. Silverman’s model helps understand why Sunni Arab Iraqis who had experienced ISIS occupation became much more favorable to the Iraqi government than the Sunni Arabs who had not experienced ISIS first-hand. The abusive and cruel ISIS occupation of Sunni-majority regions of Iraq was central to the eventual defeat of the physical ISIS Caliphate. All of the propaganda disseminated by ISIS would not trump the lived experience of what ISIS was really like when they occupied population centers in Iraq. ISIS’s treatment of those it occupied was the key to changing beliefs about the group, not only among those it occupied but in the wider world when those who were governed by the group told their stories.

The book does an admirable job of using data collected by the author himself, as well as using existing data sets collected by others. This allowed for the three cases to be explored using the theoretical framework developed for this study. While using existing data sets created for other purposes sometimes makes comparative research seem a bit disjoint, and there is a bit of that in this book, Silverman compensates for this with his own interviews of key informants and his masterful analysis of the data.

This book serves as a very solid foundation for future scholarship that focuses on the proximity to conflict zones, the motivations to develop beliefs about the conflict, and the propensity for individuals to believe disinformation or misinformation. Future scholarship should use the theoretical framework developed here and collect data using a uniform methodology across cases. It would also be advantageous to explore theoretically how various demographic factors, such as educational attainment, age, gender, and ethnic and religious identities, may interact with the main causal variables that Silverman identifies.