Perceived supernatural moral imperatives can compel groups to kill

Evidence

The Dani believed that when a dead warrior was cremated, a ghost was released that had the power to cause accidents, sickness, crop damage, and other mis-fortunes for living relatives until it was avenged by the taking of an enemy’s life. Another method of placating malicious ghosts involved the amputation and burning of a finger of a little girl. In addition to the threats of unavenged ghosts, goading by women who sought retaliation for family deaths and the status rewards bestowed on adept fighters also motivated fighting. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 165

Categorization

• XREF: This parallels the sacrifice literature connecting ritual obligation to lethal violence against outsiders, and echoes vault claims about how transcendent or collective demands license ordinary people to harm. — connects to: Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 68; Context makes some killing morally required rather than wrong; Mass murder does not require extreme, demonic emotions in its perpetrators (+2 more)
• SHARE: War-fighting not for land or resources but to appease ancestral ghosts, plus girl-finger amputation as an parallel placation — someone into Dani ethnography or institutionalized-violence studies would love this.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 165