Negotiating Cultural Conflicts Over Sacred Values

Abstract

Most current approaches to negotiation of resource and political conflicts assume that parties to these conflicts are rational actors that weigh the costs and benefits of their choices, treat values as though they are fungible, and then act in a way thatmaximizes their benefits. However, recent research suggests that this is not the case. In other words, people do not treat all values as amenable to tradeoffs, but rather they distinguish between material values having to do with resource pricing andmarkets and sacred values that reside in themoral realm. Moreover,people seem to apply different reasoning to sacred vs.material values. Even more crucially,what is considered sacred and what is considered material varies among cultures. In this chapter we discuss research by us and othersinto the nature of sacred values in real world conflicts and the implications of the findings for ongoing political conflicts.