The Compassionate Instinct

Subjects’ tendency to exhibit altruism toward members of their own group might not seem surprising. But, as Briton points out, “we’re all members of lots of different groups at any given time.” Some people, she and Leaning found, were able to find common ground with people they could have easily dismissed as enemies. They seemed capable of transcending the ethnic or political divisions usually imposed by war: a Somali man said he rejected tribalism, choosing instead to identify with “the party of peace maintenance” a Bosnian journalist remembered how she could not hold hostilities against her Serbian neighbor because their children had grown up together.

Briton says she believes that the implications of this finding go far beyond the arena of war. “I think they extend to everyday behavior,” she said. “I think that if anyone can find that thread of similarity with another person, for whatever reason, they’re going to treat them as an in-group member rather than an out-group member. They’re little threads, but there are so many that are available to us.”

Finally, there were some people, Briton and Leaning report, who simply seemed sick and tired of war and sought to regain their moral identity that war had eclipsed. The authors found this group especially inspiring. “It’s nice when people can reach back into their psyches, into their pasts, and believe that they are moral beings, and be happier with that than being violent,” said Briton. For instance, one Christian ex-combatant from Lebanon said she never forgot her core values, because she had come from a decent family. When she once encountered a Muslim at a checkpoint, she helped him escape rather than hand him over to certain execution. After a former military official in Cambodia had given a displaced woman half his ration bag of rice, he was struck by her claim that she had never met a “good soldier” like him. He said he never forgot this statement, and he started to understand the tragedy of what he and other combatants in Cambodia were perpetuating.

But how can people be consistently reminded of their moral identities when they are stuck in the moral vacuum of war? Briton and Leaning say they noticed that the People on War interviews actually served an important function to this end. This is an observation echoed by Gilbert Holleufer, a communication advisor with the ICRC who was instrumental in launching the People on War project and later worked with Briton and Leaning analyzing the data.

To Holleufer, one anecdote sums up the effect of the People on War project. In South Africa, the ICRC conducted an interview with about a dozen members of a paramilitary group—“really dangerous people, violent men,” he said. They trusted the Red Cross enough to do the interview, but kept their weapons at their sides. After a while, they opened up and discussed how they had been swept up in combat, how they had killed women and children. At the end of the discussion, the group’s leader approached the ICRC delegate, patted him on the back, and told him, “You know, the outside world considers us as wild animals. My hands are stained with blood. But your discussion here has given me back part of my dignity.”

This story resonates deeply with Jennifer Leaning. From reading the People on War interviews, and through her own previous work in war zones, she learned to recognize that “people in these places are grateful for contact with the outside world. It makes them feel like human beings.” She says she feels strongly that one of the greatest services the ICRC and other NGOs can provide is “the external eye of the moral observer.” The mere presence of these groups can remind people of their own humanity, spurring them to recapture their moral identity through acts of compassion and altruism. If people in warfare have lost touch with their own moral voice, she says, “perhaps they’ll have a shock of recognition when they see someone coming out of a Land Rover and holding a white flag.”

This is one of several hypotheses that Briton and Leaning want to test in a follow-up study. They said their work so far provides a solid platform from which to launch further investigations, but they stressed that they have yet to prove definite connections between any of these factors and altruistic behavior. They’re currently seeking more funding to revisit many of the questions spawned by the People on War project, but want to conduct interviews that ask subjects explicitly about altruistic or compassionate motivations. Down the line, they hope that some of their research will inform intervention efforts.

Though they have no illusions that such research can ever stop wars, they think it could at least make conflicts less ugly. The key, says Leaning, lies in finding ways to strengthen people’s “moral musculature” before they ever find themselves in the midst of conflict, an objective she thinks “should be part of a common educational agenda across the world.”