Award Abstract #0446738
Exploratory Research on Devotional Values Among Jihadist Suicide Terrorists

NSF Org:	BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences
Initial Amendment Date:	March 31, 2005
Latest Amendment Date:	March 31, 2005
Award Number:	0446738
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Deborah Winslow BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences
Start Date:	April 1, 2005
Expires:	March 31, 2006 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$24822
Investigator(s):	Scott Atran satran@umich.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	University of Michigan Ann Arbor 3003 South State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 734/764-1817
NSF Program(s):	CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, DECISION RISK & MANAGEMENT SCI
Field Application(s):	0116000 Human Subjects
Program Reference Code(s):	OTHR, 1321, 0000
Program Element Code(s):	1390, 1321

ABSTRACT

This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is a preliminary investigation of the role of devotional values in cultural conflicts. The focus is on interviewing operatives from Islamic Jihadist organizations that sponsor suicide attacks in order to evaluate the contribution of devotional values (DVs) in motivating suicide terrorism. The hypothesis is that devotional values - which encompass aspects of what political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists call non-instrumental, sacred or protected values - are critical in generating and sustaining seemingly intractable cultural conflicts. Interviews with captured and freely-operating militant Islamic Jihadists in Israel / Palestine, Turkey, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia will probe the nature of extreme devotional values. The interviews will elicit information that permits a more comprehensive and longer-term study, involving a more a pointed set of questions that can be analyzed for patterns showing tradeoff reluctance, quantity insensitivity, immunity from free rider concerns, framing effects, evidence of moral outrage and, more generally, which sorts of cognitive entailments make a suicide terrorist action difficult to carry out and perhaps even not worthwhile to do at all.

Intellectual Merit. This research helps to provide the theoretical framework and empirical information needed to understand the point at which commitment becomes absolute and non-negotiable, in order to find out what is needed to reach people before they come to it. It furnishes a cross-cultural methodology for eliciting devotional values from Jihadist militants, which can be readily transferred to other populations of religiously and ideologically-driven actors. It informs how cognition and emotional judgments interact in devotional values to affect decision making and risk. More generally, the work makes clear how important understanding the mental and motivational structure of players in a given situation is for predicting and understanding their behavior.

Broader Impacts. Current risk assessment approaches for resolving ethnic conflicts, or for countering religiously motivated terrorism, often assume that adversaries model the world through rational choices that are commensurable across cultures. Such assumptions are prevalent in conflict and risk modeling by U.S. diplomatic, military and intelligence services. This research suggests that culturally distinct value frameworks constrain preferences and choices in ways not readily translatable across frameworks. This research enables a better of assessment of the motivations of religiously-motivated suicide terrorism - the most deadly, destabilizing and rapidly developing form of terrorism. The results will be of immense interest to policy makers, officials and members of the public seeking to better understand the nature of homicidal political acts.

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