Can You Have It Both Ways? Plausible Deniability and Attribution in Anonymous Coercive Bargaining

Abstract

States and nonstate actors often conduct unclaimed coercive attacks. It is common for analysts to note both that targets know the identity of the perpetrator, allowing the coercive message to go through, and that anonymity grants perpetrators plausible deniability, shielding them from retaliation by targets and third parties. The literature has failed to tackle the puzzle of actors reaching diverging assessments about the identity of the perpetrator of anonymous attacks while having the same information. We address the puzzle by theorizing that targets of unclaimed attacks and third parties reach different attribution judgments due to distinct emotional reactions: targets are more likely to feel angry, which induces a sense of certainty and a desire to blame someone, prompting confident attribution to a plausible culprit despite objective evidentiary gaps. We test our argument with a vignette experiment describing a fictional attack, randomizing whether the attack was claimed by a terrorist organization or remained unclaimed, and whether the respondents’ country or some other country was targeted. The analysis confirms that anonymity suppresses confident attribution for subjects from another country but not for those from the target; anger mediates the tendency for subjects from the target country to attribute anonymous attacks more frequently.

Keywords: Coercive bargaining, plausible deniability, anonymous attacks, attribution, emotions, anger