Expressed willingness to sacrifice need not predict actual willingness

Evidence

Thus far, discussion of our studies has focused mainly on expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices for fused groups and sacred causes. Although the enduring and seemingly intractable nature of the conflicts from which we have drawn our subject populations suggest a strong relationship between expressed and actual willingness to make costly sacrifices, here we have no direct measures to confirm the relationship (although we do have outcome measures that involve lesser material sacrifices). In what follows, however, the subjects are militants and frontline combatants whose expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices, including fighting and dying, is directly confirmed through participant observation of their actions. — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor, 67

Categorization

• QUESTION: This bears directly on the reader’s question of whether professed conviction predicts actual measured bias — here the authors acknowledge the gap and then bridge it via participant observation with combatants.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s core question: does stated devotion track actual costly action, echoing the conviction-vs-behavior divergence theme.