Exploratory Research on Devotional Values Among Jihadist Suicide Terrorists

圣战自杀恐怖分子虔诚价值观的探索性研究

• 批准号: 0446738
• 负责人: Scott Atran
• 金额: $ 2.48万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-04-01 至 2006-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0446738&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Exploratory; Research; Devotional; Values; Among

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.

这一小笔探索性研究补助金是对虔诚价值观在文化冲突中的作用的初步调查。重点是采访支持自杀式袭击的伊斯兰圣战组织的成员，以评估虔诚价值观(DV)在激励自杀式恐怖主义方面的贡献。这个假设是，宗教价值观--包括政治学家、社会学家、人类学家和心理学家所说的非工具性、神圣或受保护的价值观的各个方面--在产生和维持看似难以解决的文化冲突方面至关重要。采访以色列/巴勒斯坦、土耳其、新加坡、菲律宾和印度尼西亚的被俘和自由活动的激进伊斯兰圣战分子将探索极端虔诚价值观的本质。采访将获得一些信息，以便进行更全面、更长期的研究，涉及一组更有针对性的问题，可以分析这些问题的模式，包括权衡不情愿、数量不敏感、搭便车担忧的免疫力、框架效应、道德愤怒的证据，以及更广泛地说，哪些认知因素会让自杀式恐怖行动难以实施，甚至根本不值得做。智力上的功绩。这项研究有助于提供所需的理论框架和经验信息，以了解承诺在什么时候变得绝对和不可谈判，以便找出在人们达到承诺之前需要什么。它提供了一种跨文化的方法，可以从圣战激进分子那里获得虔诚的价值观，这些价值观可以很容易地转移到其他宗教和意识形态驱动者群体中。它揭示了认知和情感判断如何在虔诚的价值观中相互作用，从而影响决策和风险。更广泛地说，这项工作清楚地表明，了解球员在特定情况下的心理和动机结构对于预测和理解他们的行为是多么重要。更广泛的影响。目前用于解决种族冲突或打击出于宗教动机的恐怖主义的风险评估方法往往假定对手通过不同文化之间可相称的理性选择来塑造世界。这种假设在美国外交、军事和情报机构的冲突和风险建模中很常见。这项研究表明，文化上截然不同的价值框架以一种不容易在框架之间翻译的方式限制了偏好和选择。这项研究能够更好地评估出于宗教动机的自杀式恐怖主义的动机--这是最致命、最不稳定和发展最快的恐怖主义形式。这一结果将引起寻求更好地了解杀人性政治行为性质的政策制定者、官员和公众的极大兴趣。