The factors that contribute to a person's willingness to give his or her life for altruistic or nationalistic reasons is the focus of this research. In this study, the PI will interview 75-100 Janbaz - Iranian soldiers who volunteered for repeated suicide missions, and survived. Autobiographical reports, trait measures, and other inter- and intrapersonal assessments should yield some very interesting and potentially useful insights into behavior under extreme environmental stress. Equally of interest will be the soldiers' rationalizations of their "failure," along with their retrospective accounts of their contribution to their country. This population offers a very rare opportunity to study first-hand the antecedents of exceptional altruism. Most populations of this type do not survive the activity for which they volunteered, of course, and thus, the Janbaz offer a rare and important opportunity for research. This study has the potential to contribute to the store of fundamental knowledge about behavior under extreme stress, and the antecedents of this form of selfless altruism. It promises to enrich the insights of researchers across many of the social sciences.
