Religious belief is often thought to motivate violence because it is said to promote norms that encourage tribalism and the devaluing of the lives of nonbelievers. If true, this should be visible in the multigenerational violent conflict between Palestinians and Israelis which is marked by a religious divide. We conducted experiments with a representative sample of Muslim Palestinian youth (n = 555), examining whether thinking from the perspective of Allah (God), who is the ultimate arbitrator of religious belief, changes the relative value of Jewish Israelis’ lives (compared with Palestinian lives). Participants were presented with variants of the classic “trolley dilemma,” in the form of stories where a man can be killed to save the lives of five children who were either Jewish Israeli or Palestinian. They responded from their own perspective and from the perspective of Allah. We find that whereas a large proportion of participants were more likely to endorse saving Palestinian children than saving Jewish Israeli children, this proportion decreased when thinking from the perspective of Allah. This finding raises the possibility that beliefs about God can mitigate bias against other groups and reduce barriers to peace.

No abstract

Why do individuals participate in weak-against-strong resistance, terror or insurgency? Drawing on rational choice theory, many claim that individuals join insurgent organizations for self-interested reasons, seeking status, money, protection, or rewards in the afterlife. Another line of research, largely ethnographic and social network based, suggests that prospective fighters are driven by social identity-they join out of an allegiance to communal values, norms of reciprocity, and an orientation towards process rather than outcome.This project tested these two lines of argument against each other by directly linking values orientations in a refugee camp to professed willingness to participate in resistance or rebellion in two different contexts. Professed willingness to participate in resistance, and especially in violent rebellion, is positively correlated with communal orientation and negatively correlated with self-enhancement values. The strength of correlation growsnegatively for self-enhancement and positively for communal orientations-as anticipated sacrifice increases. Results are discussed.

Results suggest that providing concise informed consent content, systematically developed from patients' self-reported information needs, may be more effective at engaging and informing clinical trial participants than the traditional consent approach, without detriment to trial comprehension, risk assessment, or enrollment.