Meir ultimately sided with her chief of staff and the Mossad. She ordered the military to make defensive preparations and, over the next month, the army readied itself for war. Soldiers built walls, outposts, and batteries along the hundred-mile-long bank of the Suez Canal. In the Golan Heights, which bordered Syria, platoons launched practice shells and tanks rehearsed battle formations. Millions of dollars were spent and thousands of soldiers were prevented from taking leave. But the attack never materialized. Meir’s government, chagrined at their overreaction, soon reversed their public declarations. In July of that year, Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defense minister, told Time magazine that it was unlikely a war would occur within the next decade. Zeira emerged from the affair, in the words of the historian Abraham Rabinovich, “with his reputation, and his self-confidence, greatly enhanced.
“With alarm bells going off all around him and the nation’s fate at stake, he had coolly maintained throughout the crisis that the probability of war was not only low, but ‘very low,’?” Rabinovich wrote. “It was [his] task, he would say, to keep the national blood pressure down and not sound alarms unnecessarily. Otherwise, the reserves would be mobilized every couple of months with devastating effect on the economy and on morale.”
By the summer of 1973, Zeira had established himself as one of Israel’s most influential leaders. He had assumed his new job with the goal of reducing needless anxiety, and had demonstrated that a disciplined approach could prevent wasteful second-guessing. The nation had wanted relief from the constant worries of an impending attack, and Zeira had provided it. His ascent to even more powerful positions seemed preordained.
II.
Imagine you have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Your assignment is to rate how strongly you agree or disagree with forty-two statements, including:
I believe orderliness and organization are among the most important characteristics.
I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.
I like to have friends who are unpredictable.
I prefer interacting with people whose opinions are very different from my own.
My personal space is usually messy and disorganized.
It’s annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind.
A team of researchers at the University of Maryland first published this test in 1994, and since then it has become a staple of personality exams. At first glance, the questions seem designed to measure someone’s preference for personal organization and their comfort with alternate viewpoints. And, in fact, researchers have found that this exam helps identify people who are more decisive and self-assured, and that those traits are correlated with general success in life. Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs.
But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality trait known as “the need for cognitive closure,” which psychologists define as “the desire for a confident judgment on an issue, any confident judgment, as compared to confusion and ambiguity.” Most people respond to this exam—which is called “the need for closure scale”—by demonstrating a preference for a mix of order and chaos in their lives. They say they prize orderliness but admit to having messy desks. They say they are annoyed by indecision but also have unreliable friends. However, some people—about 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the exam—show a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure.
The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers. An instinct to make a judgment and then stick with it forestalls needless second-guessing and prolonged debate. The best chess players typically display a high need for closure, which helps them focus on a specific problem during stressful moments rather than obsessing over past mistakes. All of us crave closure to some degree, and that’s good, because a basic level of personal organization is a prerequisite for success. What’s more, making a decision and moving on to the next question feels productive. It feels like progress.
But there are risks associated with a high need for closure. When people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision—when they require a sensation of being productive in order to stay calm—they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice. The “need for closure introduces a bias into the judgmental process,” a team of researchers wrote in Political Psychology in 2003. A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own,” the authors of the need for closure scale, Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, wrote in 1996.
Put differently, an instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.
Researchers describe the need for closure as having multiple components. There is the need to “seize” a goal, as well as a separate urge to “freeze” on an objective once it has been selected. Decisive people have an instinct to “seize” on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis.
However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we “freeze” on our goals and yearn to grab that feeling of productivity at the expense of common sense. “Individuals with a high need for cognitive closure may deny, reinterpret or suppress information inconsistent with the preconceptions on which they are ‘frozen,’?” the Political Psychology researchers wrote. When we’re overly focused on feeling productive, we become blind to details that should give us pause.
It feels good to achieve closure. Sometimes, though, we become unwilling to sacrifice that sensation even when it’s clear we’re making a mistake.
On October 1, 1973, six months after Zeira predicted that the odds of war were “very low”—and five days before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—a young Israeli intelligence officer named Binyamin Siman-Tov sent his commanders in Tel Aviv a warning: He was receiving reports from the Sinai that large numbers of Egyptian convoys were arriving at night. Egypt’s military was digging up minefields they had installed along the border, making it easier for them to move material across the canal. There were stockpiles of boats and bridge-making supplies on the Egyptian side of the border. It was the largest buildup of equipment that soldiers on the front lines had seen.