Jeremy Ginges

• Professor (Associate) at New School

Recent research documents that thinking about God encourages intergroup prosociality among believers. An open question is whether such increased prosociality is dampened by intergroup conflict. We conducted preregistered field experiments with two ethno-religious populations in Fiji: indigenous Christian iTaukei ( N = 324) and Hindu Indo-Fijians (...

Recent research documents that thinking about God encourages intergroup prosociality among believers. An open question is whether any such increases are dampened by intergroup conflict. We conducted preregistered field experiments with two ethno-religious populations in Fiji: indigenous Christian iTaukei (N = 324) and Hindu Indo-Fijians (N = 280)....

Moral foundations theory proposes that there are two types of moral domains: the individualizing domain, which relates to individual welfare (comprised of harm and fairness foundations), and the binding domain, which relates to communal and spiritual welfare (comprised of loyalty, authority, and purity foundations). In this paper, we demonstrate th...

How does religious belief influence intergroup conflict? Research addressing this question generally focuses on how individuals’ own beliefs influence intergroup behavior. However, intergroup cooperation may also be influenced by second-order beliefs; in this case, perceptions about how outgroup members’ religious beliefs influence their intergroup...

Most humans believe in a god or gods, a belief that may promote prosociality toward coreligionists. A critical question is whether such enhanced prosociality is primarily parochial and confined to the religious ingroup or whether it extends to members of religious outgroups. To address this question, we conducted field and online experiments with C...

In seven studies, six with American Christians and one with Israeli Jews (total N = 2,323), we examine how and when belief in moralizing gods influences dehumanization of ethno-religious outgroups. We focus on dehumanization because it is a key feature of intergroup conflict. In Studies 1-6, participants completed measures of dehumanization from th...

Two lines of research in the psychology of religion have developed independently of each other: why people are religious and how they are religious. Leveraging theories of goal constructs, we propose that these two lines of research are connected, such that religious expressions are the manifestation of religious motivations. In Part I, we build an...

Do employers have a responsibility to treat their workers equally or do employees have a right to be treated equally? In common discourse, rights and responsibilities are often used as substitutable framings for the same event, but they may differentially shape judgment. In this investigation, we develop an experimental manipulation of rights versu...

Diversity of religious belief and identity is widely believed to be a source of intergroup conflict. Yet, emerging research challenges the notion that belief in God promotes parochialism. Because inaccurate and negative intergroup perceptions often underlay conflict, we theorized that negative perceptions about outgroup members’ religious beliefs m...

In seven studies, six with American Christians and one with Israeli Jews (total N = 2,323), we systematically examine how and when belief in moralizing gods influences dehumanization of ethno-religious outgroups. We focus on dehumanization because it is a key feature of intergroup conflict. In Studies 1-6, participants completed measures of dehuman...

Does God want people to favor coreligionists or to treat in-group and out-group members equally? To test people’s beliefs about God’s moral preferences, we conducted three preregistered studies. Study 1 was a field study with Christian and Muslim Fijians (N = 188). Study 2 was an online study with Jewish Israelis (N = 384). Study 3 was a field stud...

Does God want people to favor co-religionists or to treat in-groupand out-groupmembers equally? To test people’s beliefs about God’s moral preferences, we conducted three preregistered studies. Study 1 was a field study with Christian and Muslim Fijians (N= 188). Study 2 was an online study with Jewish Israelis (N= 384). Study 3 was a field study w...

Transgender rights and discrimination against transgender people are growing public policy issues. Theorizing from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology suggests that beyond attitudes, discrimination against transgender people may derive from folk theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Transgender identity is met with hosti...

How do people understand what makes a person Muslim, Hindu, or Christian? Social categories are sometimes viewed as natural kinds, where category membership is believed to derive from an underlying biological essence. Current theorizing posits this tendency to be motivated by contextual features such as saliency of categories, or quality of intergr...

Violent intergroup conflicts are often motivated by commitments to abstract ideals such as god or nation, so-called ‘sacred’ values that are insensitive to material trade-offs. There is scant knowledge of how the brain processes costly sacrifices for such cherished causes. We studied willingness to fight and die for sacred values using fMRI in Barc...

Willingness to fight and die (WFD) has been developed as a measure to capture willingness to incur costly sacrifices for the sake of a greater cause in the context of entrenched conflict. WFD measures have been repeatedly used in field studies, including studies on the battlefield, although their neurofunctional correlates remain unexplored. Our ai...

The role of ideas and beliefs is generally underplayed in Whitehouse's account. However, just as people may feel that their identity is fused with a collective, they may also feel that their identity is fused with an idea (god, history, justice), which can motivate the same type of behaviors that Whitehouse seeks to explain.

Violent extremism is often explicitly motivated by commitment to abstract ideals such as the nation or divine law—so-called “sacred” values that are relatively insensitive to material incentives and define our primary reference groups. Moreover, extreme pro-group behavior seems to intensify after social exclusion. This fMRI study explores underlyin...

Primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal, and the way context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. Yet most research published i...

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to under- stand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most...

The role of ideas and beliefs is generally underplayed in Whitehouse’s account. However, just as people may feel that their identity is fused with a collective, they may also feel that their identity is fused with an idea (god, history, justice), which can motivate the same type of behaviors that Whitehouse seeks to explain.

Nationality governs almost every aspect of our lives, including where we may live and travel, as well as our opportunities for education, healthcare and work. It is a common-sense social category that guides us in making inferences about the social world1–4. Nationalism has been extensively studied within the social5–16 and cognitive sciences17–25,...

Pepper & Nettle argue that the more present-oriented behavior associated with a low socioeconomic status is an adaptive response to having relatively little control over the future. However, a study of fasters during Ramadan shows that self-imposed deprivation, which carries no implications regarding the ability to realize deferred rewards, is asso...

Frontline investigations with fighters against the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS), combined with multiple online studies, address willingness to fight and die in intergroup conflict. The general focus is on non-utilitarian aspects of human conflict, which combatants themselves deem ‘sacred’ or ‘spiritual’, whether secular or religious. Here we invest...

Drawing on past research on judgment and decision making, as well as preference reversal, we investigated the impact of question framing on support for military versus diplomatic conflict resolution strategies. In three studies with two heterogeneous samples from the United States and one representative sample from Israel, preferences for military...

Every year, more than a billion Muslims around the world fast by refraining from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset for an entire month. This practice is likely to produce a host of physiological and psychological effects. Here we focus on how it influences risk behavior. Fasting can be viewed as a form of resource scarcity, which has b...

Intergroup boundaries are often associated with differences in moral codes. How does the perception of similarity and dissimilarity in moral worldviews influence tolerant relationships between members of different groups? We theorized that the relationship between perceived moral similarity and intergroup tolerance is domain specific. Specifically,...

Religious belief is often seen as a key cause of human conflict because it is said to promote preferential treatment of adherents and to harden group boundaries. Here, we examined a critical aspect of this link in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a multigenerational violent conflict with significant religious aspects. We find that a...

International political negotiations that include sacred values often fall apart or, when concluded, prove unsustainable. Why? What can be done to make these settlements more sustainable? This chapter reviews the literature on sacred values and sacred rhetoric, focusing on why sacred values cannot be mixed with material trade-offs, how regular valu...

An overview of the latest interdisciplinary research on human morality, capturing moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms. Over the past decade, an explosion of empirical research in a variety of fields has allowed us to understand human moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration o...

We explore how Darwinian notions of moral virtue and parochial altruism may relate to the emerging cognitive framework of the devoted actor who undertakes extreme actions in defense of group values. After a brief discussion of the theoretical framework, we present exploratory data resulting from interviews of 62 Lebanese individuals of varying reli...

Significance Political conflict between American Democrats and Republicans and ethnoreligious conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seem intractable, despite the availability of reasonable compromise solutions in both cases. This research demonstrates a fundamental cognitive bias driving such conflict intractability: Adversaries attribute thei...

Conflicts over sacred values may be particularly difficult to resolve. Because sacred values are nonfungible with material values, standard attempts to negotiate, such as offering material incentives to compromise, often backfire, increasing moral outrage and support for violent action. We present studies with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza...

The desire for justice can escalate or facilitate resolution of intergroup conflicts. Two studies investigated retributive and restorative notions of justice as the mediating factor of the effect of perceived outgroup sentience-an aspect of (mechanistic) dehumanization referring to the emotional depth attributed to others-on intergroup conflict res...

Most current approaches to negotiation of resource and political conflicts assume that parties to these conflicts are rational actors that weigh the costs and benefits of their choices, treat values as though they are fungible, and then act in a way that maximizes their benefits. However, recent research suggests that this is not the case. In other...

Despite the wealth of theoretical claims about the emotion of humiliation and its effect on human relations, there has been a lack of empirical research investigating what it means to experience humiliation. We studied the affective characteristics of humiliation, comparing the emotional experience of intergroup humiliation to two other emotions hu...

This study was based on the theory that adolescents view scenes of violent ethnic conflicts in the mass media through the lens of their own ethnicity, and that the resulting social-cognitive reactions influence their negative stereotypes about similar ethnic groups in their own country. We interviewed 89 Jewish and 180 Arab American high school stu...

Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model proposes that events in higher order social ecosystems should influence human development through their impact on events in lower order social ecosystems. This proposition was tested with respect to ecological violence and the development of children's aggression via analyses of 3 waves of data (1 wave yearl...

Religion, in promoting outlandish beliefs and costly rituals, increases ingroup trust but also may increase mistrust and conflict with outgroups. Moralizing gods emerged over the last few millennia, enabling large-scale cooperation, and sociopolitical conquest even without war. Whether for cooperation or conflict, sacred values, like devotion to Go...

We examine the role of family- and individual-level protective factors in the relation between exposure to ethnic-political conflict and violence and posttraumatic stress among Israeli and Palestinian youth. Specifically, we examine whether parental mental health (lack of depression), positive parenting, children's self-esteem, and academic achieve...

We examine cumulative and prospective effects of exposure to conflict and violence across four contexts (ethnic-political, community, family, school) on posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms in Palestinian and Israeli youth. Interviews were conducted with 600 Palestinian and 901 Israeli (Jewish and Arab) children (ages 8, 11, and 14) and their parent...

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespectiv...

Sacred or protected values have important influences on decision making, particularly in the context of intergroup disputes. Thus far, we know little about the process of a value becoming sacred or why one person may be more likely than another to hold a sacred value. We present evidence that participation in religious ritual and perceived threat t...

The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group id...

We present findings from one survey and five experiments carried out in the USA, Nigeria and the Middle East showing that judgements about the use of deadly intergroup violence are strikingly insensitive to quantitative indicators of success, or to perceptions of their efficacy. By demonstrating that judgements about the use of war are bounded by r...

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespectiv...

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 aff...

The paper extends research on fixed-pie perceptions by suggesting that disputants may prefer proposals that are perceived to be equally attractive to both parties (i.e., balanced) rather than one-sided, because balanced agreements are seen as more likely to be successfully implemented. We test our predictions using data on Israeli support for the G...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding the sociocultural contexts and risk factors for domestic violence in the Arab world. This study provides an analysis of the religious, legal, and familial contexts of domestic violence in Lebanon and assesses contemporary attitudes toward women and wife beating in a sample of 206 L...

Despite extensive literatures on the impact on children of exposure to violence in families, neighborhoods, and peer groups, there has been relatively little effort evaluating their cumulative impact. There also has been less attention to the effects of exposure to political conflict and violence. We collected data from a representative sample of 6...

We present evidence of noninstrumental reasoning over sacred values from field experiments in real world conflicts. We argue that claims to sacred or protected values are not claims to infinite utility, as people can and do order their preferences for different values they hold sacred. Instead, sacred values are defined by a taboo against measuring...

AS diplomats stitch together a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Rational calculation suggests that neither side can win these wars. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence...

Sacred values are different from secular values in that they are often associated with violations of the cost-benefit logic of rational choice models. Previous work on sacred values has been largely limited to religious or territorial conflicts deeply embedded in historical contexts. In this work we find that the Iranian nuclear program, a relative...

In standard models of decision making, participation in violent political action is understood as the product of instrumentally rational reasoning. According to this line of thinking, instrumentally rational individuals will participate in violent political action only if there are selective incentives that are limited to participants. We argue in...

In the years since 9/11, much has been written about the alleged bias and lack of professionalism in the Arab media. The first cross-border survey of Arab journalists finds that they have a mixed view of their own industry. They are frank about the lack of independence, fairness and professionalism among Arab news organizations. They admire the pro...

In four studies carried out across different cultural, religious, and political contexts, we investigated the association between religion and popular support for suicide attacks. In two surveys of Palestinians and one cognitive priming experiment with Israeli settlers, prayer to God, an index of religious devotion, was unrelated to support for sui...

We investigated the influence of humiliation on inter-group conflict in three studies of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. We demonstrate that experienced humiliation produces an inertia effect; a tendency towards inaction that suppresses rebellious or violent action but which paradoxically also suppresses support for acts of inter-gro...

In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration repeatedly charged that the Arab media are biased against the United States. A cross-border survey of 601 Arab journalists found that much of the conventional wisdom that has shaped U.S. public diplomacy policy toward the region lacks substance.Arab journalists see their mission as that of driving po...

We report a series of experiments carried out with Palestinian and Israeli participants showing that violent opposition to compromise over issues considered sacred is (i) increased by offering material incentives to compromise but (ii) decreased when the adversary makes symbolic compromises over their own sacred values. These results demonstrate so...

Hart, Atkins, Markey, and Youniss (2004) reported an investi-gation of the ‘‘youth-bulge’’ phenomenon: the historical linkbetween communities highly saturated with children and polit-ical upheaval. In Studies 1 and 2, they analyzed U.S. nationalsurvey data and found that neighborhoods with relatively highproportionsofchildrentoadultstendtocontain(a...

Prior research on reactive devaluation has consistently and convincingly shown that negotiators devalue objectively identical offers when they are made by the other party rather than by one's own party. However, in many or most real world negotiation contexts, authorship of specific offers and proposals cannot be attributed to one or the other of t...

This study examines the dynamics of non-cooperation in the context of an intractable ethnic conflict. Arab Israeli participants interacted with members of their own ethnicity or with Jewish Israeli participants in a mixed-motive decision task. In each case, participants were given a monetary incentive to not cooperate, but if both parties were non-...

This paper reports a study that examines how Australians are responding to the policy of multiculturalism. The aim of the study was to define different social representations of the policy. Multiple scalogram analysis (MSA) yielded 3 facets of social representations of multiculturalism (active/passive, substantial/minimal, and threat/benefit). Usin...

This article seeks to evaluate different anti‐terrorism strategies from a psychological perspective. Two major deterrent strategies are identified: the Denial Strategy and the Reintegrative Strategy. It is the contention of this article that both these strategies may be thought of as practical applications of different theories of crime deterrence....