The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,393

and may not be traded away for any other good, just as one may not sell one’s child for any other good. People inflamed by nationalist and religious fervor hold certain values sacred, such as sovereignty over hallowed ground or an acknowledgment of ancient atrocities. To compromise them for the sake of peace or prosperity is taboo. The very thought unmasks the thinker as a traitor, a quisling, a mercenary, a whore.

In a daring experiment, the researchers did not simply avail themselves of the usual convenience sample of a few dozen undergraduates who fill out questionnaires for beer money. They surveyed real players in the Israel-Palestine dispute: more than six hundred Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than five hundred Palestinian refugees, and more than seven hundred Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The team had no trouble finding fanatics within each group who treated their demands as sacred values. Almost half the Israeli settlers indicated that it would never be permissible for the Jewish people to give up part of the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (which make up the West Bank), no matter how great the benefit. Among the Palestinians, more than half the students indicated that it was impermissible to compromise on sovereignty over Jerusalem, no matter how great the benefit, and 80 percent of the refugees held that no compromise was possible on the “right of return” of Palestinians to Israel.

The researchers divided each group into thirds and presented them with a hypothetical peace deal that required all sides to compromise on a sacred value. The deal was a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees. Not surprisingly, the proposal did not go over well. The absolutists on both sides reacted with anger and disgust and said that they would, if necessary, resort to violence to oppose the deal.

With a third of the participants, the deals were sweetened with cash compensation from the United States and the European Union, such as a billion dollars a year for a hundred years, or a guarantee that the people would live in peace and prosperity. With these sweeteners on the table, the nonabsolutists, as expected, softened their opposition a bit. But the absolutists, forced to contemplate a taboo tradeoff, were even more disgusted, angry, and prepared to resort to violence. So much for the rational-actor conception of human behavior when it comes to politico-religious conflict.

All this would be pretty depressing were it not for Tetlock’s observation that many ostensibly sacred values are really pseudo-sacred and may be compromised if a taboo tradeoff is cleverly reframed. In a third variation of the hypothetical peace deal, the two-state solution was augmented with a purely symbolic declaration by the enemy in which it compromised one of its sacred values. In the deal presented to the Israeli settlers, the Palestinians “would give up any claims to their right of return, which is sacred to them,” or “would be required to recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel.” In the deal presented to the Palestinians, Israel would “recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Palestinians to their own state and would apologize for all of the wrongs done to the Palestinian people,” or would “give up what they believe is their sacred right to the West Bank,” or would “symbolically recognize the historic legitimacy of the right of return” (while not actually granting it). The verbiage made a difference. Unlike the bribes of money or peace, the symbolic concession of a sacred value by the enemy, especially when it acknowledges a sacred value on one’s own side, reduced the absolutists’ anger, disgust, and willingness to endorse violence. The reductions did not shrink the absolutists’ numbers to a minority of their respective sides, but the proportions were large enough to have potentially reversed the outcomes of their recent national elections.

The implications of this manipulation of people’s moral psychology are profound. To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle. The standard tools of diplomacy wonks, who treat the disputants as rational actors and try to manipulate the costs and benefits of a peace agreement, can backfire. Instead they must treat the disputants as moralistic actors, and