Immersion Blog

Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on a study from the New School for Social Research, which surveyed 1,800 people picked from Jewish Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and Palestinian students, in Israel and the Palestinian territories. About half of the Palestinian students in the study were members of Hamas or related organizations. The study asked the participants to consider compromise over issues that were relevant to them (land for peace, giving up the right to land, claim to Jerusalem).

They found that participants on both sides fell into two groups- the moral absolutists and the non-absolutists. And the interesting part of the experiment came when they introduced incentives to sweeten the deal. Faced with the prospect of the same compromise, only with a rational or financial incentive to make it more attractive, the two groups behaved completely differently. The incentives included peace, resulting from the end of hostilities, and money in the form of donations from the EU or the US. Whilst the moderates responded well to these incentives, the absolutists reacted vehemently, with more of them recommending a violent response than before.

Symbolic gestures had the opposite effect. It didn’t matter if these symbolic gestures altered the costs or benefits of the compromise, and in fact it didn’t even matter if these deals would be successfully carried out.

The only thing the study doesn’t seem to have gone into, is whether or not violence itself constitutes a symbolic gesture. If you fire rockets blindly into Israeli territory, or take out Hamas targets and then post the results on YouTube, what are you actually doing? The videos and images of violence from these places are absolutely stuffed full of symbolism.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Psychology & Neuroscience, Research studies, Video, Violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.