People weigh sacred duty over family via moral perception, not cost-benefit calculation.
Evidence
Palestinians tended to reason about political violence in a noninstrumental manner by showing more disapproval over a delay of a martyrdom attack to rescue an entire family than over a delay of a martyrdom attack to take care of an ill father. These findings indicate that when people are reasoning between duty to war or to family, they are not making instrumental decisions but decisions based on perceptions of moral obligations that can change as a result of instrumentally irrelevant alterations in context (Ginges and Atran 2009). — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor, 45
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s devoted-actor research: moral obligation outranks even the many-lives-saved frame, evidence that sacred-value reasoning is not cost-benefit — directly bearing on whether rational/moral correction can weaken threat-hardened belief. — connects to: Sacred values are processed as unconditional rules, not cost-benefit calculations. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 270
- QUESTION: The counterintuitive inversion (whole-family rescue rejected more than ill-father care) suggests the sacred value treats deliberate rescue as a desecrating trade. Worth probing what specific ‘instrumentally irrelevant’ cues flip other sacred reasoning.
Related
- Sacred values are processed as unconditional rules, not cost-benefit calculations. (similarity 0.83)
- Sacred-values-driven violence is insensitive to cost-benefit scope. (similarity 0.81)
- Sacred values resist cost-benefit correction unlike ordinary preferences (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Sacred values are processed as unconditional rules, not cost-benefit calculations.
#corroborates(0.95) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 270