Our research indicates that when people act to defend sacred values, they behave in ways that cannot be predicted by assessing material risks and rewards.

Our empirical studies indicate that Humans make their greatest sacrifices, including killing or dying, not just to preserve their own lives or kin and kith but for ideas—sacred values.

Since the rise of chiefdoms and state-level societies, religion has been the locus of the "privilege and power of absurdity." Core religious ideas, such as belief in a sentient but bodiless deity, are immune to empirical or logical verification or falsification.

Religious consensus over values does not involve fact checking or reasoned argument but ensues from ritual communion and emotional bonding. Costly commitment to apparently absurd beliefs and values identify cooperators and galvanizing group solidarity.

While the term “sacred values” denotes religious belief, sacred values refer to any preferences regarding objects, beliefs, or practices that people treat as both incompatible or nonfungible with profane issues or economic goods. 

This includes the “secularized sacred,” for example political notions of “human rights” or transcendent ideological “-isms” that have dominated political life ever since the Enlightenment’s universal religious mission to redeem and save “humanity” through political revolution (liberalism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, etc.).