Marie (forthcoming). Moral Rigidity and tribalism, in What is extremism?

Abstract

Cognitive processes of moral 'moral rigidity' or moral absolutization play a central role in coordinating individuals around common prosocial prescriptions, in particular in group conflict and extremism. This short article proposes to view sacralisation and moral objectivism as the two complementary facets of humans' propensity to moral rigidity, and as having evolved as parsimonious solutions to the joint challenges of reliably signaling trustworthiness while protecting oneself from exploitation in ancestral coalitions.

Moral rigidity as a proximate facilitator of group cohesion and combativeness

“…In terms of error management theory (Haselton et al 2015), evolution should therefore have selected for moral heuristics that are “biased” in favor of the most adaptive strategy: (1) making absolutely sure the individual will display the minimal level of prosocial commitment demanded by the contextual level of interdependence, while (2) showing automatic aversion to acts that could endanger the coalition's cooperative potential and combativeness in intergroup conflict. In this respect, intuitively sacralizing and objectifying core interpersonal obligations may constitute the most cost-effective computational way of completely isolating them from the temptation to trade them off with immediate self-interest (Marie & Fitouchi, in preparation).…”