Sacred Bounds on Rational Conflict Resolution: The Middle East and Beyond

Increasingly across the world, political conflict is as a moral clash between different sets of sacred values, which a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that precludes comparisons or tradeoffs with instrumental values of realpolitik or the marketplace. In experiments with Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and Hamas students we found that violent opposition to compromise over issues considered sacred is (a) increased by offering material incentives to compromise but (b) is decreased when the adversary makes materially irrelevant compromises over their own sacred values. This suggests that peace between clashing moral communities cannot be achieved by instrumental calculations alone. Current approaches to resolving resource conflicts (1) or countering political violence (2) tend to assume adversaries make instrumentally rational choices. When antagonists treat the issues under dispute as fungible resources this assumption is likely to hold. In such a situation we could reasonably expect that violent opposition to political compromise over important issues would decrease as the cost of the compromise is defrayed by instrumental benefits. However, adversaries can transform the issues under dispute into sacred values as is the case when land ceases to be a mere resource and becomes “holy” or when structures of brick and mortar become “sacred sites.” We argue that when resources are transformed into sacred values, standard political and economic proposals for resolving longstanding conflicts such as material compensation for suffering may be less than optimal. Nowhere is this issue more pressing than in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which people across the world consistently view as the greatest danger to world peace (3). Instrumental decision-making involves strict cost-benefit calculations regarding goals, and entails abandoning or adjusting goals if costs for realizing them are too high. Although the field of judgment and decision-making has made enormous progress (4), much more is known about economic decision making than about morally motivated behavior. There is relatively little knowledge, study or theoretical discussion of sacred values, which differ from instrumental values by incorporating moral (including religious) beliefs (5, 6) that may drive action (7)“independently of its prospect of success” (8). In laboratory experiments, people asked to trade-off sacred values for instrumental rewards tend to react with outrage and anger, although they are able to accept trading off one sacred value for another (9, 10). We believe that these findings imply that reasoning about sacred values involves deontological rather than consequentialist rules. Moreover, one such deontological imperative appears to treat as morally unacceptable or taboo any attempt to measure sacred values along an instrumental metric, just as religion forbids any mingling of the sacred with the profane (11). This reasoning led us to predict that adding instrumental benefits to compromise over important issues in a violent political conflict would increase outrage of those antagonists who have transformed these issues into sacred values. While people may violently resist any attempt to buy off their moral commitments to sacred values, this should not be taken to mean that sacred values are closed to compromise. Clearly, people are able to measure the relative worth of sacred values they hold and trade-off these values when they come into conflict (9-11). We investigated the possibility that antagonism to compromise over sacred values might be mitigated by equitable losses over sacred values by both sides in a dispute. People appear to have a desire for equitable outcomes that is pursued with a disregard to instrumental consequences (12) and will often be willing to incur a loss due to the pleasure gained from punishing another party (13). Thus, we predicted that those who hold sacred values would be less antagonistic to compromise over those values if the adversary suffers a similar loss over their own sacred values, even if the adversaries’ loss does not instrumentally alter the compromise deal at hand. We tested these hypotheses in field experiments integrated within surveys of three populations living in the West Bank and Gaza: 601 Jewish Israeli “settlers”, 535 Palestinian refugees, and 719 Palestinian students (half of whom identified themselves with Hamas or its smaller Islamist ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad). We measured emotional outrage and propensity for violence in response to hypothetical peace deals involving compromises over issues integral to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (14, 15): exchanging land for peace (in experiments with settlers); Jerusalem (in experiments with Palestinian students); the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their former lands and homes inside Israel (in experiments with Palestinian refugees); and recognition of the validity of the adversary’s own sacred values (in each sample). In our experiments all participants were opposed to compromises over these issues. In addition, a subset of participants had transformed this preference into a sacred value, opposing any trade-off over the relevant issue in exchange for peace no matter how great the benefit to their people. Our aim was to compare reactions to different types of deals amongst these two subsets of participants: (1) moral absolutists who had transformed a significant issue in dispute into a sacred value; and (2) non-absolutists who had strong preferences with respect to the issue, but did not regard it as a sacred value. Amongst settlers, 46% of the sample believed that it was never permissible for the Jewish people to “give up” part of the “Land of Israel” no matter how great the benefit. This group contained moral absolutists with respect to the “Land of Israel” and may be distinguished from the remainder of settlers who, while opposing ceding land, did not rule out treating land as a fungible resource under extreme circumstances. Amongst Palestinian students 53.5% treated both the right of return and Jerusalem as sacred values. In the refugee survey, 80% of participants were moral absolutists with respect to the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees (16). In each experiment one third of our participants were randomly selected to respond to a peace deal (see supporting online material) that involved a significant compromise over an important issue in exchange for peace. For example, Israeli settlers responded to deals that entailed Israeli withdrawal from 99% of the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for peace, Palestinian refugees responded to deals that violated the Palestinian “right of return” and Palestinian students responded to a deal that called for the recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel. For the moral absolutists, these deals then involved a taboo trade-off (17) over sacred values. While for the non-absolutists, deals involved compromise over strong preferences. Another third of our participants were randomly selected to respond to the same taboo deal with an added instrumental incentive, such as money (“taboo+”). The remainder of our participants responded to the “taboo” deal without an added instrumental incentive but where the adversary also made a “taboo” trade-off over one of their own sacred values in a manner that was designed to not add instrumental value to the deal (18) nor detract from the taboo nature of the deal (“tragic”). From a rational perspective, the added instrumental incentive in the taboo+ deal means that those responding to the taboo+ deal should show less outrage and lower preferences for violent opposition compared to those responding to the taboo deal. In fact, Israeli settlers, Palestinian students and refugees who had transformed the issue under dispute into a sacred value showed the opposite response (see Fig 1). For these participants, enhancing the instrumental value of the trade-off increased rather than decreased their emotional outrage and their support for violent opposition to the deal (18). In contrast, non-absolutists for whom deals violated a preference reacted rationally to the instrumental enhancement of Taboo+ deals by showing less support for violence and less emotional outrage (19). Although added instrumental benefits increased opposition to compromises over sacred values, we generally (20) found that opposition to the same compromise decreased when the deal involved the adversary making a similar compromise over one of their own sacred values (see Fig 2). This was the case even though the tragic clauses added no instrumental value. For example, in one experiment Palestinian students were told in a taboo peace deal that if they compromised on Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, a Palestinian state would be created in the West Bank and Gaza. In the tragic version, Israel in turn agreed to “formally declare that it gives up what it believes is its sacred right to the West Bank” (21). Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and students (mainly Hamas) who had transformed issues in the dispute into sacred values reacted non-instrumentally to compromise over those values. Although the statistical effect sizes between experimental conditions are moderate, the practical consequences of small changes in the popularity of peace deals and the leaders who promote them are significant. For example, a shift in popularity by a few percentage points of a political leader who advocates political compromise over violence can determine the results of an election. This has persistently been the case in the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (22). These results reveal that in political disputes where sources of conflict are cultural, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or emerging clashes between the Muslim and JudeoChristian world, violent opposition to compromise solutions may be exacerbated rather than decreased by insisting on instrumentally-driven tradeoffs, while non-instrumental symbolic compromises may reduce support for violence (23).