Do you believe that some principles are sacred If you do, it could make you a hawk rather than a dove in time of war. A new study suggests that most societies have "sacred rules" for which their people would die rather than compromise. If people perceive one such rule to have been violated, they may feel morally obliged to retaliate (报复) against the wrongdoers—even if the retaliation does more harm than good. Psychologist Jeremy Ginges and anthropologist Scott Atran presented 50 US students with a hypothetical crisis in which a foreign country captured 100 US citizens and was expected to kill them. Half the volunteers were asked to consider a military response to the kidnapping, and half a diplomatic response. When told that their action would result in all hostages(人质) being saved, both groups approved the plan presented to them. Told that one hostage would die, however, most "diplomats" became reluctant to approve the proposed response. "Militarists" had no such doubts. In fact, the most common response suggested that they would support military action even if 99 hostages died as a consequence. Similar results were found in studies of Nigerian and Palestinian volunteers. "People are much more willing to accept grievous losses during violence than in diplomacy," Atran says. "It doesn’t make any sense." Atran has a theory to explain the unusual results. The diplomats considered the costs and benefits of their decision but the military-thinkers apparently ignored such considerations, he thinks. He concludes that their decision must have been governed by their society’s sacred rules instead. In the hostage situation, the abductors(绑架者) were threatening to violate the sacred rule against killing innocent people. That rule was so strong for the participants that they felt morally obliged to meet violence with violence, regardless of the outcome. "Their ideas are immensely plausible," says David Livingstone Smith, a philosopher at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine—although he points out that the experiments only reveal what people say they would do, not what they actually would do. A reliance on sacred rules may have been beneficial in humans’ distant past, which might explain how the rules emerged, says Dominic Johnson, who studies global conflict and cooperation at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Early groups of humans who cemented themselves together with a shared set of such sacred rules would have had an advantage over less cooperative groups, he thinks. How relevant these results are to the behaviour of political or military leaders is still up for debate. According to Dominic Johnson, sacred rules were useful in the past in that ______.
A. many conflicts were avoided by them B. people could take advantage of them C. they governed the society as the law D. they made people more cooperative