Atran
Biographic Data
| ID | 3865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Atran |
| FAMILY NAME | Atran |
| SIGNATURE | ATRAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0796-7279 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 452 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Violent Extremism
Psychology, with its dedication to understanding human behavior and its complexities, is a key part in comprehending the underpinnings of violent extremism. This comprehensive resource encompasses all major psychological frameworks related to violent extremism, making it essential reading for scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students determined to enact positive change in this critical area. This handbook provides a state-of-the-art ove…
Group and personal rejection are similarly linked to extreme intergroup attitudes
Human rites: A commentary on The Ritual Animal
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Predicting radicalism after perceived injustice: The role of separatist identity, sacred values, and police violence
Perceptions of injustice are central to fueling violent political action, though not everyone within a social movement will support violence in response to collective grievances. So who supports violence and who doesn’t after perceived injustice? To address this question, we followed up on the same individuals (N = 805) before and after a court decision in Catalonia (Spain) sentencing nine separatist leaders to prison, an event that led to mass v…
Threat Enhances Aggressive Inclinations Among Devoted Actors Via Increase in Their Relative Physical Formidability
Devoted actors—those who share sacred values with a group with which they are fused—are particularly willing to self-sacrifice to defend their group or values when they are threatened. Here, we explore whether they are also prone to aggressive inclinations toward those who endanger their group or convictions. To that end, we examined the effect of threat and the two components of the devoted actor framework—identity fusion and sacred values—on ag…
Reginaldo Chayax Huex (1939-2020)
Fig. 1 – Reginaldo Chayax Huex (foto David Tiago Ribeiro, San José, Petén, Guatemala, 2015) Don Reginaldo Chayax Huex, líder del pueblo maya itza’ de San José, Petén, Guatemala, y fundador de la Reserva forestal y de la Escuela de lengua Bio-Itzá, falleció a la edad de 81 años el 1o de octubre de 2020 a consecuencia de la Covid-19. Casado con doña María Espectación Tesucún Chan, tuvo 10 hijos, 28 nietos y 17 bisnietos. Al dolor de su partida se a…
Intergroup Conflict
Interest in the dynamics of intergroup conflict continues to rise within and beyond anthropology. The cognitive and evolutionary sciences can help us better understand the ubiquity and causal dynamics of intergroup conflict by demonstrating the existence of, first, psychological adaptations for intragroup cooperation and intergroup conflict and, second, sociocultural adaptations for intragroup cooperation and intergroup conflict. Intergroup confl…
The devoted actor's will to fight and the spiritual dimension of human conflict
Empirical Evidence for the Devoted Actor Model
This report presents two studies in very different contexts that provide convergent empirical evidence for the "devoted actor" hypothesis: people will become willing to protect nonnegotiable sacred values through costly sacrifice and extreme actions when such values are associated with groups whose individual members fuse into a unique collective identity. We interviewed and tested (on sacred values, identity fusion, and costly sacrifice) 260 Mor…
The Devoted Actor: Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict across Cultures
Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today's global terrorism are in part driven by "devoted actors" who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costl…
Devoted Actors and the Moral Foundations of Intractable Intergroup Conflict
The Devoted Actor as Parochial Altruist: Sectarian Morality, Identity Fusion, and Support for Costly Sacrifices
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 religious backgrounds (Sunni, Shia and Christian) in Beirut and Byblos (Jbeil) in a time of heightened t…
For Cause and Comrade: Devoted Actors and Willingness to Fight
This report provides initial evidence that “devoted actors” who are unconditionally committed to a sacred cause, as well as to their comrades, willingly make costly sacrifices, including fighting and dying. Although American military analysts since WWII tend to attribute fighting spirit to leadership and the bond of comradeship in combat as a manifestation of rational self-interest, evidence also suggests that sacrifice for a cause in ways indepe…
Who Becomes a Terrorist Today?
A garden experiment revisited: Inter-generational change in environmental perception and management of theMayaLowlands,Guatemala
This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in nativeItza'Maya and immigrant Ladino populations ofGuatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dramatic changes in understanding ecological relationships and the perceived role of forest spirits.Itza'…
Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict
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 God or a collective cause, signal group identity and operate as moral imperatives that inspire nonrati…
The Peacock’s Tale: Lessons from Evolution for Effective Signaling in International Politics
Author(s): Blumstein, Daniel T.; Atran, Scott; Field, Scott; Hochberg, Michael; Johnson, Dominic; Sagarin, Raphael; Sosis, Richard; Thayer, Bradley; Fearon, James; Morin, Olivier; Sear, Rebecca; Geller, Armando | Abstract: This is a Focus Article with Commentaries that was published on the Social Evolution Forum
Who Becomes a Terrorist Today?
Since the invasion of Iraq, and with the rapid spread of Internet access, the world has witnessed a more egalitarian, less-educated and less materially well-off, and more socially marginalized wave of would-be jihadi martyrs. Although millions of people support violent jihad, very few are willing to do it. Those who do pursue violent jihad usually emerge in small groups of action-oriented friends. They come from the same neighborhood and interact…
Psychology out of the laboratory: The challenge of violent extremism
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 identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into confli…
Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists
Looks at the root causes of terrorism; discusses the psychological, social, and religious aspects of terrorism; and offers practical solutions on ways to identify and prevent future terrorists
A Question of Honour: Why the Taliban Fight and What to Do About It
The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature
An analysis of the cognitive consequences of diminished contact with nature examines the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it, and how these are affected by cultural differences. Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little commonsense knowledge about nature—are unable, for example, t…
Jemaah Islamiyah's radical madrassah networks
Using our Global Transnational Terrorism (GTT) database, we examine the importance of radical madrassahs for Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Southeast Asia, both for the overall JI network and for individual attack networks. We argue that madrassah networks serve multiple purposes – ideological indoctrination, focal point creation, and leadership training – and are an important policy issue that should not be ignored. We conclude that unraveling terrori…
Humiliation and the Inertia Effect: Implications for Understanding Violence and Compromise in Intractable Intergroup Conflicts
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-group compromise. In Study 1, Palestinians who felt more humiliated by the Israeli occupation were less…
Connecting Terrorist Networks
This article highlights initial findings from the authors’ Global Transnational Terrorism (GTT) Project, which began in August 2006. The case study draws on the database work for Southeast Asia and charts the rise of a militant minority within Jemaah Islamiyah, which was directly responsible for a series of attacks from 2000–2005. The important but restricted role of radical madrassahs and the importance of kinship emerge clearly from the study. …
Folkecology, Cultural Epidemiology, and the Spirit of the Commons: A Garden Experiment in the Maya Lowlands, 19912001
Using a variation on an experimental approach from biology, we distinguish the influence of sociocultural factors from that of economic, demographic, and ecological factors in environmental management and maintenance. This is important to issues of global environmental change, where there is little empirical research into cultural effects on deforestation and land use. Findings with three groups who live in the same rainforest habitat and manifes…
The Devoted Actor: Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict across Cultures
Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today's global terrorism are in part driven by "devoted actors" who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costl…
Itza Maya Tropical Agro-Forestry [and Comments and Replies]
Evolution and devolution of knowledge: A Tale of Two Biologies
Anthropological enquiry suggests that all societies classify animals and plants in similar ways. Paradoxically, in the same cultures that have seen large advances in biological science, practical knowledge of nature has dramatically diminished. Here we describe historical, cross-cultural, and developmental research on the ways in which people ordinarily conceptualize organic nature (folk biology), concentrating on cognitive consequences associate…
Psychology out of the laboratory: The challenge of violent extremism
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 identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into confli…
The surrogate colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939
The "surrogate colonization" of Palestine had a foreign power giving to a non-native group rights over land occupied by an indigenous people. It thus brought into play the complementary and conflicting agendas of three culturally distinguishable parties: British, Jews and Arabs. Each party had both "externalist" [those with no sustained practical experience of day to day life in Palestine] and "internalist" representatives. The surrogate idea was…
The moral logic and growth of suicide terrorism
Despite common misconceptions, suicide terrorists today are not motivated primarily by foreign occupation, are not directed by a central organization, and are not nihilistic. Better understanding the phenomenon can help devise better solutions on at least three different levels
Humiliation and the Inertia Effect: Implications for Understanding Violence and Compromise in Intractable Intergroup Conflicts
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-group compromise. In Study 1, Palestinians who felt more humiliated by the Israeli occupation were less…
Connecting Terrorist Networks
This article highlights initial findings from the authors’ Global Transnational Terrorism (GTT) Project, which began in August 2006. The case study draws on the database work for Southeast Asia and charts the rise of a militant minority within Jemaah Islamiyah, which was directly responsible for a series of attacks from 2000–2005. The important but restricted role of radical madrassahs and the importance of kinship emerge clearly from the study. …
Empirical Evidence for the Devoted Actor Model
This report presents two studies in very different contexts that provide convergent empirical evidence for the "devoted actor" hypothesis: people will become willing to protect nonnegotiable sacred values through costly sacrifice and extreme actions when such values are associated with groups whose individual members fuse into a unique collective identity. We interviewed and tested (on sacred values, identity fusion, and costly sacrifice) 260 Mor…
Folkbiology doesn't Come from Folkpsychology: Evidence from Yukatek Maya in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA chi…
The Nature of Folk-Botanical Life Forms
Original work by Brent Berlin, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown, and other ethnoscientists has produced significant findings pertaining to claims of universality for folk-biological ranks, in general, and folk-botanical life forms, in particular. These findings implicitly call into question conventional wisdom in the history of biology, which tends to consider life forms as the outworn vestiges of scholastic tradition or as merely socially practical ways…
Essentialism and Folkbiology: Evidence from Brazil
Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias (Atran et al. 2001). This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning abou…
The devoted actor's will to fight and the spiritual dimension of human conflict
Hamula Organisation and Masha'a Tenure in Palestine
The thesis is examined that nontribal masha'a villages in Palestine were inherently socially fragmented and, therefore, susceptible to outside intervention and land expropriation. Some general features of the village patronymic group, or hamula, are explored. It does indeed appear that few, if any, such groups are, or were in the recent past, genealogically integrated patrilineages. There is a short treatment of the agricultural routine in the lo…
The Essence of Folkbiology: A Reply to Randall and Hunn
The trouble with memes: Inference versus imitation in cultural creation
Why Folkbiology Matters: Resource Conflict Despite Shared Goals and Knowledge
A Failure of Imagination (Intelligence, WMDs, and “Virtual Jihad”)
Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make people less secure even if they predict most harmful events. The U.S. presidential commission on WMDs, the 9/11 commission, and Spain's comisión 11-M have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's “current operations” and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ran…
Théorie cognitive de la culture: Une alternative évolutionniste à la sociobiologie et à la sélection collective
Les théories sociobiologiques postulent des normes comme unités fonctionnelles de la sélection naturelle et culturelle. Mais ces théories ignorent la façon dont elles sont représentées dans l'esprit et comment elles influent sur les comportements. Faute de contenu ou de limites fiables, elles ne peuvent se répliquer de manière telle qu'elles satisfassent la sélection darwinienne. Aussi la notion d'un ensemble de normes régissant une société, ou s…
Covert Fragmenta and the Origins of the Botanical Family
A garden experiment revisited: Inter-generational change in environmental perception and management of theMayaLowlands,Guatemala
This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in nativeItza'Maya and immigrant Ladino populations ofGuatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dramatic changes in understanding ecological relationships and the perceived role of forest spirits.Itza'…
Thinking about biology. Modular constraints on categorization and reasoning in the everyday life of Americans, Maya, and scientists
Stones against the Iron Fist, Terror within the Nation: Alternating Structures of Violence and Cultural Identity in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The framework of Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over last half century through an instrumentalization of by parties concerned. Two of violence have emerged to define this instrumentality: one Israeli, other Palestinian. I call these structures of alternating rather than merely reciprocating because one not only feeds off other and actually practices on other that which is merely fancied and projected as other's intention but also be…
Basic Conceptual Domains
Natural classification
L’âme rationnelle
Constraints on a Theory of Hominid Tool-Making Behavior
Atran Scott. Constraints on a Theory of Hominid Tool-Making Behavior. In: L'Homme, 1982, tome 22 n°2. pp. 35-68
Theories of knowledge and culture
Thick Interpretation in The Middle East
Rendons au sens commun
Covert Fragmenta and the Origins of the Botanical Family
Démembrement social et remembrement agraire dans un village palestinien
Atran Scott. Démembrement social et remembrement agraire dans un village palestinien. In: L'Homme, 1985, tome 25 n°96. pp. 111-135
Managing Arab kinship and marriage
The Nature of Folk-Botanical Life Forms
Original work by Brent Berlin, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown, and other ethnoscientists has produced significant findings pertaining to claims of universality for folk-biological ranks, in general, and folk-botanical life forms, in particular. These findings implicitly call into question conventional wisdom in the history of biology, which tends to consider life forms as the outworn vestiges of scholastic tradition or as merely socially practical ways…
Hamula Organisation and Masha'a Tenure in Palestine
The thesis is examined that nontribal masha'a villages in Palestine were inherently socially fragmented and, therefore, susceptible to outside intervention and land expropriation. Some general features of the village patronymic group, or hamula, are explored. It does indeed appear that few, if any, such groups are, or were in the recent past, genealogically integrated patrilineages. There is a short treatment of the agricultural routine in the lo…
The Essence of Folkbiology: A Reply to Randall and Hunn
Le Masha'a et la Question Foncière en Palestine, 1858-1948
Le système du masha'a qui prévaut dans les plaines de Palestine jusque vers 1930 est un régime agraire communautaire de redistribution périodique de la terre entre les paysans. Quoique, dans la pratique, il varie beaucoup d'un village à un autre et d'une époque à une autre, les études sur la question ont généralement accepté la thèse de l'administration du Mandat britannique : le ' village masha'a ' est intrinsèquement fragmenté, socialement et é…
Basic Conceptual Domains
The surrogate colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939
The "surrogate colonization" of Palestine had a foreign power giving to a non-native group rights over land occupied by an indigenous people. It thus brought into play the complementary and conflicting agendas of three culturally distinguishable parties: British, Jews and Arabs. Each party had both "externalist" [those with no sustained practical experience of day to day life in Palestine] and "internalist" representatives. The surrogate idea was…
Des pierres contre la Main de Fer: L'Alternance Des Structures De Violence Dans Le Conflit Israélo-Palestinien (1939-1989)
Stones against the Iron Fist, Terror within the Nation: Alternating Structures of Violence and Cultural Identity in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The framework of Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over last half century through an instrumentalization of by parties concerned. Two of violence have emerged to define this instrumentality: one Israeli, other Palestinian. I call these structures of alternating rather than merely reciprocating because one not only feeds off other and actually practices on other that which is merely fancied and projected as other's intention but also be…
L'ethnoscience aujourd'hui
Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science
This article explores the cognitive underpinnings of folk biological classification, arguing that humans possess a universal, evolved "natural history" module that structures our understanding of the living world. Morris and Atran challenge the relativistic perspectives prevalent in anthropology at the time, suggesting that folk taxonomies, while culturally influenced, are constrained by underlying cognitive structures. They present evidence from…
Whither ‘ethnoscience’?
‘Ethnoscience’, far from portending the arrival of the anthropological millennium, may well turn out to be another and perhaps minor ‘school’. (Roger Keesing) Culture is something I put in the same category as unicorns. (Noam Chomsky in response to Lawrence Hirschfeld, Royaumont Conference, 1975) Introduction In the 1950s a new way of doing cultural anthropology emerged in the United States, variously called ‘ethnoscience’, ‘ethnolinguistics’, ‘e…
Itza Maya Tropical Agro-Forestry [and Comments and Replies]
The Bio-Itza
Folk Biological CognitionEthnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies.Brent Berlin
Core domains versus scientific theories: Evidence from systematics and Itza-Maya folkbiology
Introduction This chapter is intended to be an anthropological contribution to two areas of central interest to this volume: (1) the nature of specific cognitive domains common to ordinary folk, and (2) the relationship between the structure of the most basic of these commonsense domains to the structure of corresponding scientific theories. The claim is that for one such domain – folkbiology – conceptual categories exhibit high internal cultural…
Categorization and Reasoning among Tree Experts: Do All Roads Lead to Rome?
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (39 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (20 works) · Law (16 works)