ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Neuroimaging 'will to fight' for sacred values: an empirical case study with supporters of an Al Qaeda associate.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Role of Flexibility in the Formation and Maintenance of Extreme Beliefs: A Narrative Scoping Review.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2026Article
- Prestige, Pride, and Belief: A Hypothesized Neural Integration Framework for Status, Identity, and Modern Polarization.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- LLMs Can Fuel Extremist Attitudes Using Universal Moral Framings.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- What Sustains Wars: Will to Fight Versus Military Might.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- The Dark Side of Moral Conviction-Integrating Political Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Transcultural pathways to the will to fight.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Paramilitaries, parochialism, and peace: The moral foundations and personality traits of Slovenskí Branci.PloS one · 2023Article
- Social norms (not threat) mediate willingness to sacrifice in individuals fused with the nation: Insights from the COVID-19 pandemic.European journal of social psychology · 2022Article
- Willingness to sacrifice among convicted Islamist terrorists versus violent gang members and other criminals.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Grievance-fueled violence can be better understood using an enactive approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- TheInternational journal of disaster risk reduction : IJDRR · 2020Article
- EEG distinguishes heroic narratives in ISIS online video propaganda.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Why People Enter and Embrace Violent Groups.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal interactions underlie will to fight and die for a cause.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
- Neuroimaging 'will to fight' for sacred values: an empirical case study with supporters of an Al Qaeda associate.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 Barcelona, Spain, among supporters of a radical Islamist group. We measured brain activity in radicalized individuals as they indicated their willingness to fight and die for sacred and non-sacred values, and as they reacted to peers' ratings for the same values. We observed diminished activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), inferior frontal gyrus, and parietal cortex while conveying willingness to fight and die for sacred relative to non-sacred values-regions that have previously been implicated in calculating costs and consequences. An overlapping region of the dlPFC was active when viewing conflicting ratings of sacred values from peers, to the extent participants were sensitive to peer influence, suggesting that it is possible to induce flexibility in the way people defend sacred values. Our results cohere with a view that 'devoted actors' motivated by an extreme commitment towards sacred values rely on distinctive neurocognitve processes that can be identified.
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