Devoted lower-power groups can beat materially stronger paid foes.
Evidence
Especially when a perceived outside threat to one’s primary reference group is very high and survival prospects are 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 who are less committed to disregarding the costs of action. Sacred values 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 (Atran and Ginges 2012). — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor, 10
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A tight counterintuitive mechanism: devotion, not resources, determines who wins asymmetric conflict — directly attacking standard material-incentive and rational-choice models.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: why rational correction and material incentives fail against threat-hardened devotion, and what that implies for conflict resolution.
- XREF: connects to: Sacred-value commitment produces costly sacrifice that lets weak groups beat stronger foes. — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor: Unconditional…, 1; The oppressed group’s apparent weakness becomes a revolutionary advantage against the enemy — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 14; In bargaining, seeming weakness can convert into strategic strength. — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 130 (+1 more)
Related
- Sacred-value commitment produces costly sacrifice that lets weak groups beat stronger foes. (similarity 0.88)
- Sacred-values-driven violence is insensitive to cost-benefit scope. (similarity 0.80)
- Moral commitment to sacred values leverages movements lacking material means against stronger opposition. (similarity 0.79)
- Sacred values resist material incentives and are best countered only by rival sacred values. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- The oppressed group’s apparent weakness becomes a revolutionary advantage against the enemy
#corroborates(0.92) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 14 - In bargaining, seeming weakness can convert into strategic strength.
#corroborates(0.85) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 130