Common approaches to resource and political conflicts often assume adversaries understand the world on the basis of rational choices. Given this assumption, one can predict the behavior of potential allies and adversaries by analyzing the costs and benefits of a given action from their perspective. In prior research involving psychological experiments, anthropological fieldwork and political science surveys relating to political and resource conflicts, the PIs have found that that when sacred or protected values (e.g. "My values are not for sale"; "Do the right thing regardless of the consequences") are in play, the assumption that the values people place on different actions is simply the sum of the values of their consequences may be wrong. As a result, the practice of providing incentives to increase the attractiveness of certain courses of action and/or penalties to make other courses of action less attractive to try and achieve a desired outcome in a conflict may backfire. Planning and acting in ignorance of or disregard for non-consequentialist value frameworks may exacerbate conflict, with grievous loss of treasure and lives.
In the proposed research, the PIs examine how different moral frames, with different types and uses of sacred values, shape personal and collective identity, influence cultural and political decision making, and sustain inter-group conflict. The studies will broaden theoretical and empirical analyses of moral cognition, including how protected or sacred values (SVs) affect people's lives and play out in diverse cultural contexts. SVs are distinct from secular values because of their association with transcendental beliefs, relative immunity to tradeoffs with instrumental values, emotional salience, and significance for personal and collective identity. The project will examine how SVs operate in real-world contexts, identifying those circumstances where they result in decision makers ignoring material consequences and distance in time or place and produce paradoxical results as well as those where they produce outcomes that track those that follow from the consequentialist assumption. The methodology integrates basic and applied research, combining laboratory and field experiments, surveys and interviews in a number of different cultural settings (North America, the Middle East, and India) in order to provide "real-world" relevance.
The results will contribute to a comprehensive theoretical framework and wide-ranging empirical analysis of the psychological and cultural mechanisms underlying moral reasoning and decision making, the formation of cultural identity, and the nature of sacred values.
Project Overview. Sometimes people make decisions by assessing pluses and minuses (so-called cost-benefit analysis) but at other times we follow rules and principles and refuse to assign a monetary value to the object or entity in question. It is common to hear people say "you can’t put a price on a human life" and many people hold their liberties to be priceless and worth dying for. An important characteristic of sacred values is that the people who hold them sometimes fail to consider, much less maximize, consequences. This runs counter to most normative models of rational choice, and has obvious implication for understanding cross-cultural conflict in cases where one or both adversaries make decisions that appear contrary to their own interests. Our goal has been to understand how strong values affect people’s lives and play out in diverse cultural contexts in seemingly paradoxical ways, sometimes ignoring material consequences and distance in time or place, while on other occasions tracking them closely. We have used a combination of lab studies and field research with a wide range of cultural groups (Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees, people in positions of power in the Middle East, Indigenous populations in Guatemala, Panama, Chile and the US, Evangelical Christians and hunters from rural Wisconsin, Kurds living in Turkey, Persians living outside of and in Iran, etc.) and our understanding of sacred values and modes of decision making has been considerably broadened and deepened. Here are some of our key results: 1. Instrumental (e.g. monetary) incentives associated with proposed settlement of disputes involving sacred values may trigger moral outrage and backfire, 2. Support for actions putting humans lives at risk differs dramatically as a function of context (e.g., diplomatic versus military action) or roles (police versus physicians; in India different castes have different roles), 3. There are large cultural differences in which modes of decision making are considered acceptable for different kinds of decisions as well as cultural differences in how sacred values affect decision making, 4. The decision modes likely to be employed vary with psychological distance (which varies with physical, social and temporal distance), 5. Different ways of framing the same objective decision trigger modes of decision making. Here are two concrete examples of why is it important to understand sacred values and decision making. 1.Sacred Values and the Ganges River. For Hindus the Ganges River is a goddess. While it may seem reasonable to expect that its sacred status may protect it from pollution and overconsumption, some have argued that its very status as a goddess licenses increasingly serious resource mismanagement (because the Ganga "can heal herself"). We find that perceptions of pollution are context-specific. Hindu participants are more likely to acknowledge pollution in the Ganges in a secular context than in a religious context. Mental models of the causes of this pollution also appear to be context-specific, implying that conservation interventions need to take modes of engaging with the Ganges into account. It is worth noting as well that while perception of sacredness reduces acknowledgement of pollution, rating data show that it does NOT diminish the sense of responsibility to keep the Ganges clean. We also find that judgments of sacredness decrease with distance Hindus live from the Ganges, a counter-intuitive finding from the point of view that proximity reinforces a pragmatic stance. 2. Donations and quantity insensitivity. A truly striking finding from decision making research is that people are willing to donate more money to help one child than to help five children and donate no more to save 1000 acres of old growth forest than 1 acre. We have found, however, that when psychological distance is increased people are willing to donate more to save more--that is, they do show sensitivity to quantity. These findings suggest that strong emotional appeals (decreasing psychological distance) may paradoxically decrease peoples’ willingness to help groups. Important practical implications follow from the observation that some apparent SVs -- land, language, "history," etc. -- have very different properties and significance in different cultural groups with respect to basic psychological processes: emotion, identity, decision making, moral reasoning, knowledge structures, relation to the surrounding social and natural world. At the very least, this requires greater awareness of cultural variation than is currently the case among national-level and international law, policy and peace makers. Our work in India on the Ganges River is not only correcting misconceptions about the relation between sacred values and action but also has the potential for policy implications in the area of environmental decision making.
