Sacred values and conflict over Iran’s nuclear program
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 7
Abstract
Conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, which involves a US-led policy to impose sanctions on Iran, is perceived by each side as a preeminent challenge to its own national security and global peace. Yet, there is little scientific study or understanding of how material incentives and disincentives, such as economic sanctions, psychologically affect the targeted population and potentially influence behaviour. Here we explore the Iranian nuclear program within a paradigm concerned with sacred values. We integrate experiments within a survey of 1997 Iranians. We find that a relatively small but politically significant portion of the Iranian population believes that acquiring nuclear energy has become a sacred value, in the sense that proposed economic incentives and disincentives result in a “backfire effect” in which offers of material rewards or punishment lead to increased anger and greater disapproval. This pattern was specific to nuclear energy and did not hold for acquiring nuclear weapons. The present study is the first demonstration of the backfire effect for material disincentives as well as incentives, and on an issue whose apparent sacred nature is recent rather than longstanding.
Authors and Affiliations
Morteza Dehghani, Scott Atran, Rumen Iliev, Sonya Sachdeva, Douglas Medin and Jeremy Ginges
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677773
- DOI -
- Views 150
- Downloads 0
Direct and indirect effects of pathological gambling on risk attitudes
We study individual decision making in a lottery-choice task performed by three different populations: gamblers under psychological treatment (äddicts"), gamblers' spouses ("victims"), and people who are neither gamblers...
Construal levels and moral judgment: Some complications
Eyal, T., Liberman, N., & Trope, Y., (2008). Judging near and distant virtue and vice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1204–1209, explored how psychological distance influences moral judgment and found tha...
Learning affects top down and bottom up modulation of eye movements in decision making
Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making ca...
Cognition in the woods: Biases in probability judgments by search and rescue planners
A type of emergency decision-making which has not received research attention is the police search for a lost person in a rural or wilderness area. For many such incidents, decisions concerning where to search for the lo...
The relationship between cognitive style and political orientation depends on the measures used
The present research investigated the reason for mixed evidence concerning the relationship between analytic cognitive style (ACS) and political orientation in previous research. Most past research operationalized ACS wi...