Lecture by Scott Atran, “Talking to the Enemy” Click here to watch the video. His book Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists is available from Amazon. For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Philosophers of moral virtue suggest that moral values may be deontological or utilitarian. Deontic processing is defined by an emphasis on rights and wrongs, whereas utilitarian processing is characterized by costs and benefits. Models of rational behavior predict many of society’s patterns, such as favored strategies for maximizing profit or likelihood for criminal behavior in terms of opportunity costs and important aspects of conflict management. But the prospects of crippling economic burdens and huge numbers of deaths do not necessarily sway people from positions on whether going to war or opting for revolution is the right or wrong choice.

For example, in one series of studies, we confronted people in the United States and Nigeria with hypothetical hostage situations and asked them whether they would approve of a solution—which was either diplomatic or violent—for freeing the prisoners. When told that their action would result in all hostages being saved, both groups endorsed the plan presented to them. When asked how many hostages they required to be saved to ensure their support (from 1 to 100), those evaluating the military option said only one hostage needed to be rescued, showing a remarkable insensitivity to scope. In contrast, those evaluating the diplomatic option required a majority of hostages to be rescued.

Most theories and models related to violent intergroup conflict assume that civilians and leaders make a rational calculation. If the total cost of the war is less than the cost of the alternatives, they will support war. But in another set of studies, we found that when people are confronted with violent situations, they consistently ignore quantifiable costs and benefits, relying instead on sacred values. We asked a representative sample of 650 Israeli settlers in the West Bank about the dismantlement of their settlements as part of a peace agreement with Palestinians.

Some subjects were asked about their willingness to engage in nonviolent protests, whereas others were asked about violence. Besides willingness to violently resist eviction, subjects rated how effective they thought the action would be and how morally right the decision was. When it came to nonviolent options such as picketing and blocking streets, rational behavior models predicted settlers’ decisions. In deciding whether to engage in violence, the settlers reacted differently. Rather than how effective they thought violence would be in saving their homes, the settlers’ willingness to engage in violent protest depended only on how morally correct they considered that option to be.

Our research with political leaders and general populations shows that sacred values—not political games or economics—underscore seemingly intractable conflicts such as those between the Israelis and the Palestinians or between Iran and the Western allies that defy the rational give-and-take of businesslike negotiation. Consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where rational cost-benefit analysis says the Palestinians ought to agree to forgo sovereignty over Jerusalem or the claim of refugees to return to homes in Israel in exchange for an autonomous state encompassing their other pre-1967 lands because they would gain more sovereignty and more land than they would renounce.

They should support such an agreement even more if the United States and Europe sweetened the deal by giving every Palestinian family substantial, long-term economic assistance. Instead, research with psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin and political scientist Khalil Shikaki reveals that the financial sweetener makes Palestinians more opposed to the deal and more likely to support violence to oppose it, including suicide bombings. Israeli settlers also have rejected a two-state solution that requires Israel to give up Judea and Samaria or “recognize the legitimacy of the right of Palestinian refugees to return” (in an agreement not actually requiring Israel to absorb the refugees). But Israelis, too, were even more opposed if the deal included additional long-term financial aid or a guarantee of living in peace and prosperity.

To be sure, these studies involve mostly “emic” elicitations of willingness to act expressed by people from “the inside”. Nevertheless, “etic” or “outside” observations and measures of actual behavior that are not based on information elicited from informants tend to confirm the relevance of inside observations and measures of mental models to the prediction and interpretation of outside findings. For example, another series of studies—with psychologists Morteza Dehghani, Rumen Iliev, and Sonya Sachdeva—indicates that a relatively small but politically significant portion of the Iranian population believes that acquiring nuclear energy (but not necessarily nuclear weapons) has become a sacred value in the sense that proposed economic incentives and disincentives backfire by leading to increased and more emotionally entrenched support.

Here, it appears that sacred values can emerge for issues with relatively little historical background and significance when they become bound up with conflicts over collective identity—the sense of “who we are.” For a minority of Iranians (11%–13% in these experiments), the issue had become a sacred subject through association with religious rhetoric and ritual (e.g., Iranian women marching and chanting in favor of “nuclear rights” while waving the Quran).

This group, which tends to be religious, rural, and close to the previous presidential regime (Ahmadinejad), believes a nuclear program is bound up with national identity and Islam itself, so that offering material rewards or punishments to abandon the program only increases anger and support for it. Until the current round of nuclear negotiations with Iran (spring–summer 2015), the ratcheting up of sanctions had been accompanied by increases in construction of nuclear facilities, the level of nuclear enrichment, uranium output, and the total stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and this, in spite of the pressure on the country exerted by economic sanctions, with plans for 10 “new” enrichment sites touted shortly after the last round of sanctions.

Sacred values do not make people opposed to any sort of compromise. Instead, they appear to invoke specific taboos protecting these values against material trade-offs. Offering people materially irrelevant symbolic gestures can work where material incentives do not. For example, Palestinian devoted actors were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli settlers were less disapproving of compromising sacred land for peace if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups symbolically recognized Israel.

Our survey results were mirrored by interviews with political leaders conducted with political scientists Robert Axelrod and Richard Davis. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy chairman of Hamas, said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: “No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount.” But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he said: “Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.”

His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues rather than the reverse. We obtained a similar reaction from Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. We asked him whether he would seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region. He answered, “OK, but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their anti-Semitic textbooks.”

Making these sorts of wholly intangible symbolic but possibly sincere gestures, like recognition of a right to exist or a sincere apology, simply does not compute in any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science suggests that these gestures may be the best way to cut through the world’s symbolic knot.

More systematic understanding of what kinds of symbolic gestures involving sacred values are likely to be effective in conflict prevention and resolution, including signatures of emotional sincerity, could provide novel possibilities for breakthroughs to avoid or lessen conflict. In a meeting of senior Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Americans, and British arranged by members of our team and Lord John Alderdice (Convenor, UK House of Lords) at the University of Oxford on the nuclear issue in early September 2013, we informally monitored expressions of devotion to values, including emotional attachment, and suggested opening negotiations via a symbolic gesture evoking sacred values rather than political positions. In response we received a message that Iran’s President Rouhani would publicly acknowledge the Holocaust in New York (which US and Israeli officials told us would be a positive development for negotiations).

Sociopolitical groups often have “sacred rules” for which their people would fight and risk serious loss/death rather than compromise. In another study with a representative sample of more than 700 adults (no gender differences) in the West Bank and Gaza, we asked,

What if a person wanted to carry out a bombing (which some … call suicide attacks) against the enemies of Palestine, but his father becomes ill, and his family begs the chosen martyr to take care of his father; would it be acceptable to delay the attack indefinitely?

What if a person wanted to carry out a bombing (which some … call suicide attacks) against the enemies of Palestine, but his family begs him to delay martyrdom indefinitely because there was a significantly high chance the chosen martyr’s family would be killed in retaliation; would it be acceptable to delay the attack indefinitely?

Palestinians tended to reason about political violence in a noninstrumental manner by showing more disapproval over a delay of a martyrdom attack to rescue an entire family than over a delay of a martyrdom attack to take care of an ill father. These findings indicate that when people are reasoning between duty to war or to family, they are not making instrumental decisions but decisions based on perceptions of moral obligations that can change as a result of instrumentally irrelevant alterations in context.

If people perceive that a sacred rule was violated, they may feel morally obliged to retaliate against the wrongdoers even if the retaliation does more harm than good. But such moral commitment to sacred values ultimately can be the key to the success or failure of insurgent or revolutionary movements with far fewer material means than the armies or police arrayed against them.

Ever since the nineteenth-century anarchists, science education in engineering and medical studies has been a frequent criterion of leadership for these movements because such studies demonstrate hands-on capability and potential for personal and costly sacrifice through long-term commitment to a course of study that requires delayed gratification. Al-Qaeda, like other revolutionary groups, was initially formed and led by fairly well-off and well-educated individuals, the majority of whom studied engineering and medicine.

The Importance of Identity Fusion and Group Dynamics

Our fieldwork with captured and would-be suicide terrorists and political and militant leaders and supporters in violent conflict situations suggests that some behaviors that punctuate the history of human intergroup conflict do indeed go beyond instrumental concerns. Historical examples include the self-sacrifice of Spartans at Thermopylae, the Jewish Zealots in revolt against Rome, defenders of the Alamo, the Waffen SS “volunteer death squads” during the Soviet siege of Budapest, some cohorts of Japanese Kamikaze, and the jihadi pilot bombers of 9/11. Such events exemplify that humans fight and kill in the name of abstract, often ineffable values such as God, national destiny, or salvation. Ever since World War II, on average, revolutionary movements have emerged victorious with as little as 10 times less firepower and manpower than the state forces arrayed against them.

Although sacred values may operate as necessary moral imperatives to action, they are not sufficient. Group morality does not operate simply from ideological canon or decontextualized principles that drive decisions and actions, but it is almost always embedded and distributed in social groups, most effectively in intimate networks of “imagined kin.” Knowledge of the moral imperatives that drive people to great exertions toward one political goal or another as well as the group dynamics that bind individuals to sacrifice for one another in the name of those values both appear indispensable to extreme actions where prospects of defeat and death are very high, as with terrorism and revolution.

Thus, our working hypothesis is that extreme parochially altruistic action occurs and devoted acts are created when self-identity becomes fused with a unique collective identity and when identity itself is fused with sacred values that provide all group members a similar sense of significance. Important values may influence extreme behavior particularly to the extent that they become embedded or fused with identity and internalized. When internalized, important moral values lessen societal costs of policing morality through self-monitoring and blind members to exit strategies.

There is more to group dynamics than just collections of people, their behavior, and ideas. There is also the web of relationships that make the group more than the sum of its individual members; White and Johansen). It is this networking among members that distributes thoughts and tasks that no one part may completely control or even understand. Case studies of suicide terrorism and related forms of violent extremism suggest that “people almost never kill and die [just] for the Cause, but for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers—their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland.”

In this vein, the theory of “identity fusion” (Swann et al.) holds that when people’s collective identities become fused with their personal self-concept, they subsequently display increased willingness to engage in extreme progroup behavior when the group is threatened. As such, fusion can help us better understand part of the complexity of group dynamics that leads to action when privileged values are threatened.

Fusion theory differs from various social identity theories in emphasizing group cohesion through social networking and emotional bonding of people and values rather than through processes of categorization and association, thus empowering individuals and their groups with sentiments of exceptional destiny and invulnerability. In recent cross-cultural experiments, Swann et al. find that when fused people perceive that group members share core physical attributes and values, they are more likely to project familial ties common in smaller groups onto the extended group. This enhances willingness to fight and die for a larger group that is strongly identified with those values, such as a religious “brotherhood.”

We have preliminary evidence collected in Lebanon regarding the way priorities among sacred values translate the relationship between fusion with a group and parochial forms of self-sacrifice for that group. We surveyed a convenience sample of Sunni, Shia, and Christian Maronites, measuring fusion with their religious group, their attitudes toward sacrifices for the group (e.g., risking safety of the family to fight for the group or risking one’s job to fight for the group), and scores on a version of the moral foundations questionnaire that we adapted for use in previous research in Lebanon and Morocco and informed by moral foundations theory.

We found that the effect of fusion with religious group on willingness to engage in parochial sacrifice for that group was moderated by different moral concerns: fused participants who valued parochial values (e.g., purity, respect for authority and tradition) more so than universal values (e.g., concern for welfare of others, fairness) showed greater willingness to make parochial sacrifices, but fused participants who valued universal values over parochial values showed less willingness to make parochial sacrifices. We anticipate that in times of threat, morals of loyalty to the group and deference to authority gain over other basic morals such as care and fairness.

Considerations of commitment to comrades and cause bear directly on some of the world’s most pressing concerns. Indeed, in recent remarks, President Obama endorsed the judgment of his US National Intelligence director: “We underestimated the Viet Cong … we underestimated ISIL [the Islamic State] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. … It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable”. Yet if the methods and results suggested by our research ultimately prove reliable, then predicting who is willing to fight and who is not and why could be ponderable indeed and important to the evaluation and execution of political strategy.

In this regard, Whitehouse et al. provide evidence that fusion with a family-like group of comrades in arms, which can be felt as even stronger than genetic family ties, may have underpinned the willingness of recent revolutionary combatants in Libya to fight on even in the face of death and defeat. But apart from this single study of fighters in the field, fusion studies have concerned mostly student populations in hypothetical scenarios rather than populations in actual conflict zones and have neglected the role of sacred values in generating devoted actions.

Accordingly, in our companion article, we present empirical studies with Moroccans and Spaniards to assess the relationship between sacred values, identity fusion, and costly sacrifices, including willingness to fight and die. In these companion studies, people expressed “parochial altruism” the most when they were fused with a kin-like group of like-minded friends and felt that a cherished value they considered sacred was under threat. Specifically, we interviewed and tested Moroccans in two neighborhoods where we had earlier carried out anthropological fieldwork and that had previously been associated with terrorist actions and were currently associated with high volunteer rates for the Islamic State.

Subjects expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices for the implementation of strict sharia when they were fused with a kin-like group of friends and considered sharia law as sacred. They were also most supportive of militant jihad. Complementing this experimental study in the field, an online study showed that Spaniards who were fused with a kin-like group of friends and considered democracy as sacred were most willing to make costly sacrifices for democracy after being reminded of acts of jihadi terrorism (although overall level of willingness to sacrifice among Spaniards was significantly lower than among Moroccans supportive of militant jihad).

They were also more likely to consider their own group more formidable and jihadis as weak, which may facilitate costly actions against the “enemy.” These results corroborate previous findings among Americans and Palestinians that devoted actors are most likely to commit themselves to extreme actions of parochial altruism if they perceive themselves to be under existential threat from outside groups.

In the sweep of cultural evolution, movements that develop psychological mechanisms to promote devoted actors are more likely to succeed because they exploit evolved psychology (e.g., kin selection) in evolutionarily novel ways. The interaction of identity fusion and sacred values seems to be one such case, where the psychology of kin selection combines with bonding rituals (e.g., sacred oaths, bayat, to the brotherhood, ikhwaniyah, of jihad and its leaders) to inextricably cement individuals to the group via a shared spiritual and moral mission.