People with extreme views appear to have fixed positions, but actually reflect calculations unlikely to be swayed by wartime information. The Evaluative Public, whose valuations are not in the tails, use wartime information to form their conflict approval. Evaluators are sensitive to changes in beliefs about observed casualty levels and expectations of likely future casualties. The Evaluative Public represents those who change positions in war, from support to opposition, depending on their ETC and RP. Using historical data and innovative experiments, we demonstrate that people’s personal experience with war drives their estimates of total casualties. Holding goals constant, higher costs yield higher opposition while lower costs increase support. Holding costs constant and allowing goals to change leads to opinion change. Geographically and temporally proximate casualties strongly influence estimates of a war’s total costs. Thus, we see that casualty patterns affect people’s estimates of a war’s costs and that these costs, when contextualized with the value of a conflict and expected costs, shape wartime support, even in the face of strong individual-level characteristics.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.