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 134
- Downloads 0
Strategy selection during exploratory behavior: sex differences
This study was designed to assess sex-related differences in the selection of an appropriate strategy when facing novelty. A simple visuo-spatial task was used to investigate exploratory behavior as a specific response t...
Cognitive ability and risk aversion: A systematic review and meta analysis
Are highly intelligent people less risk averse? Over the last two decades scholars have argued the existence of a negative relationship between cognitive ability and risk aversion. Although numerous studies support this,...
To give or not to give: Parental experience and adherence to the Food and Drug Administration warning about over-the-counter cough and cold medicine usage
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against administering over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children under 2. This study evaluated whether experienced parents show poorer adherence to the FDA warning...
Prospect theory, reference points, and health decisions
In preventative health decisions, such as the decision to undergo an invasive screening test or treatment, people may be deterred from selecting the test because its perceived disutility relative to not testing is greate...
Performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test is stable across time
A widely used measure of individual propensity to utilize analytic processing is the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of math problems with intuitively compelling but incorrect answers. Here, we ask whether scores...