Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
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Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. · Sep 2013
ReviewSacred values in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: resistance to social influence, temporal discounting, and exit strategies.
Conflicts over sacred values may be particularly difficult to resolve. Because sacred values are nonfungible with material values, standard attempts to negotiate, such as offering material incentives to compromise, often backfire, increasing moral outrage and support for violent action. ⋯ We show that devoted actors (1) were less amenable to social influence, (2) perceived conflict-related events in the past as well as expected events in the future to be temporally closer, and (3) were blind to individual opportunities to escape the conflict. These results suggest that sacred values may affect decision making in a number of ways, which, when combined, contribute to common defense and continuation of conflict.