Hammad Sheikh

Devoted actors sacrifice for close comrades and sacred cause

What inspires the willingness of humans to make their greatest exertions, to fight unto death with and for genetic strangers, a propensity to which no creature but humans seems subject? What determines the “fighting spirit” that enables one group of combatants to defeat another, all other things being equal? These are basic questions about human nature and warfare that an article by Whitehouse et al. endeavors to address (1). However, that article’s arguments also bear directly on some of the world’s current and most pressing crises. Thus, in recent remarks, President Obama (2) 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” (3). However, if Whitehouse et al.’s (1) measures and findings are reliable and right, predicting who is willing to fight and who isn’t could be ponderable indeed.

Affective Dimensions of Intergroup Humiliation

Despite the wealth of theoretical claims about the emotion of humiliation and its effect on human relations, there has been a lack of empirical research investigating what it means to experience humiliation. We studied the affective characteristics of humiliation, comparing the emotional experience of intergroup humiliation to two other emotions humiliation is often confused with: anger and shame. The defining characteristics of humiliation were low levels of guilt and high levels of other-directed outrage (like anger and unlike shame), and high levels of powerlessness (like shame and unlike anger). Reasons for the similarities and differences of humiliation with anger and shame are discussed in terms of perceptions of undeserved treatment and injustice. Implications for understanding the behavioral consequences of humiliation and future work investigating the role of humiliation in social life are discussed.

The devoted actor’s will to fight and the spiritual dimension of human conflict

Frontline investigations with fighters against the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS), combined with multiple online studies, address willingness to fight and die in intergroup conflict. The general focus is on non-utilitarian aspects of human conflict, which combatants themselves deem ‘sacred’ or ‘spiritual’, whether secular or religious. Here we investigate two key components of a theoretical framework we call ‘the devoted actor’—sacred values and identity fusion with a group—to better understand people’s willingness to make costly sacrifices. We reveal three crucial factors: commitment to non-negotiable sacred values and the groups that the actors are wholly fused with; readiness to forsake kin for those values; and perceived spiritual strength of ingroup versus foes as more important than relative material strength. We directly relate expressed willingness for action to behaviour as a check on claims that decisions in extreme conflicts are driven by cost–benefit calculations, which may help to inform policy decisions for the common defense.The study by Gómez et al. of frontline fighters and non-combatants shows that a willingness to fight and die in intergroup conflict is associated with the sacrifice of material concerns for sacred values, and the perceived spiritual strength of in-groups and adversaries.

Empirical Evidence for the Devoted Actor Model

This report presents two studies in very different contexts that provide convergent empirical evidence for the “devoted actor” hypothesis: people will become willing to protect nonnegotiable sacred values through costly sacrifice and extreme actions when such values are associated with groups whose individual members fuse into a unique collective identity. We interviewed and tested (on sacred values, identity fusion, and costly sacrifice) 260 Moroccans from two cities and neighborhoods previously associated with militant jihad, and we conducted a follow-up online experiment with 644 Spaniards fairly representative of the country at large (adding an intergroup formidability outcome measure). Moroccans expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices for implementation of strict sharia and were most supportive of militant jihad when they were fused with a kin-like group of friends and considered sharia law as sacred. Similarly, 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 jihadi terrorism, and they were also more likely to consider their own group more formidable and jihadis as weak.

Self‐rated competences and future vocational success: a longitudinal study

Today, a major goal in higher education is the advancement of students’ vocational competences. To assess the extent to which this goal is met, both competences acquired during university studies and later vocational success need to be measured. In our study, we collected self‐ratings of competences (t1) and indicators of vocational success (t2) in 210 alumni of the Freie Universität Berlin. Using structural equation models along with this longitudinal data, we found that self‐ratings of competences accounted for a substantial proportion of the variance in different measures of vocational success five years later.

Non‐cognitive abilities and early school dropout: longitudinal evidence from NELS

Educational success is often synonymous with attainment of academic qualifications. However for some students, simply continuing to attend school rather than dropping out may represent an important attainment, and completion of secondary school significantly reduces chances of subsequent chronic poverty. The longitudinal US NELS dataset was assessed to examine predictors of dropout. Results supported a differentiated perspective of student outcomes whereby dropout before Grade 12 was predicted far less by prior academic achievement in Grade 8 than academic achievement in Grade 12, and to a greater extent by non‐cognitive measures such as daily school preparation, planning and subjective peer perception. Cognitive ability measures are known to correlate well with academic achievement but “non‐cognitive abilities” may have an important role in the prediction of persistence, especially among marginalised students.

Sacred values in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: resistance to social influence, temporal discounting, and exit strategies

Conflicts over sacred values may be particularly difficult to resolve. Because sacred values are nonfungible with material values, standard attempts to negotiate, such as offering material incentives to compromise, often backfire, increasing moral outrage and support for violent action. We present studies with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza demonstrating three other ways sacred values may make conflict more intractable, focusing on what we call devoted actors, people who regard issues central to the Israel–Palestine conflict as sacred values. We show that devoted actors (1) were less amenable to social influence, (2) perceived conflict‐related events in the past as well as expected events in the future to be temporally closer, and (3) were blind to individual opportunities to escape the conflict. These results suggest that sacred values may affect decision making in a number of ways, which, when combined, contribute to common defense and continuation of conflict.

Thinking from God’s perspective decreases biased valuation of the life of a nonbeliever

Significance Religious belief is often seen as a key cause of human conflict because it is said to promote preferential treatment of adherents and to harden group boundaries. Here, we examined a critical aspect of this link in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a multigenerational violent conflict with significant religious aspects. We find that although Muslim Palestinian participants valued Palestinian over Jewish Israeli lives when making difficult moral choices, they believed that Allah preferred them to make moral decisions that valued the lives of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis more equally. Beliefs about God may promote more equal valuation of human life regardless of religious identity, encouraging application of universal moral rules to believers and nonbelievers alike. Religious belief is often thought to motivate violence because it is said to promote norms that encourage tribalism and the devaluing of the lives of nonbelievers. If true, this should be visible in the multigenerational violent conflict between Palestinians and Israelis which is marked by a religious divide. We conducted experiments with a representative sample of Muslim Palestinian youth (n = 555), examining whether thinking from the perspective of Allah (God), who is the ultimate arbitrator of religious belief, changes the relative value of Jewish Israelis’ lives (compared with Palestinian lives). Participants were presented with variants of the classic “trolley dilemma,” in the form of stories where a man can be killed to save the lives of five children who were either Jewish Israeli or Palestinian. They responded from their own perspective and from the perspective of Allah. We find that whereas a large proportion of participants were more likely to endorse saving Palestinian children than saving Jewish Israeli children, this proportion decreased when thinking from the perspective of Allah. This finding raises the possibility that beliefs about God can mitigate bias against other groups and reduce barriers to peace.

Dangerous Terrorists as Devoted Actors

Recent cross-cultural experiments and fieldwork related to violent extremism in hotspots around the world suggest that the most dangerous and effective terrorists today are “devoted actors.” Devoted actors are chiefly motivated by “sacred values” (SVs), which are operationally identified in terms of immunity or resistance to material trade-offs, to normative social influence, and to exit strategies. Devoted actors are particularly likely to make costly and extreme sacrifices in defense of SVs when their personal identities are “fused” with the collective identity of a primary reference group, such as a tight-knit religious “brotherhood” of imagined kin. There is an evolutionary rationale for the willingness to make costly sacrifices (e.g., death) for the group. When a perceived outside threat to one’s primary reference group is very high, and survival prospects very low, then only if sufficiently many members of a group are endowed with such a willingness to extreme sacrifice can the group hope to parry stronger but less devoted enemies. SVs mobilized for collective action by devoted actors enable outsize commitment in low-power groups to resist and often prevail against materially more powerful foes who depend on standard material incentives, such as armies and police that rely on pay and promotion. Recent changes in the composition of some terrorist groups from fairly well-educated and well-off founders to increasingly marginalized youth in transitional stages of life follow this evolutionary rationale.

Negotiating Cultural Conflicts Over Sacred Values

Most current approaches to negotiation of resource and political conflicts assume that parties to these conflicts are rational actors that weigh the costs and benefits of their choices, treat values as though they are fungible, and then act in a way that maximizes their benefits. However, recent research suggests that this is not the case. In other words, people do not treat all values as amenable to tradeoffs, but rather they distinguish between material values having to do with resource pricing and markets and sacred values that reside in the moral realm. Moreover, people seem to apply different reasoning to sacred vs. material values. Even more crucially, what is considered sacred and what is considered material varies among cultures. In this chapter we discuss research by us and others into the nature of sacred values in real world conflicts and the implications of the findings for ongoing political conflicts.