Interesting BM...
Having never deployed, and only having spent 4 years as PRes... my thoughts are "outside the box" - more or less ramblings for thought ...
This reminds me of another discussion I had once: (looking from the other side...)
How does the suicide bomber bring him/herself to detonate?
How did the Kamikaze Pilot intentionally fly his plane down into enemy ships?
Could the answer be altruism? A genuine desire to put the needs of others before yourself?
Is someone who is willing to put themselves in harms way and possibly die in combat just as likely to step in front of a bus to save a child? Is someone who would step in front of a bus to save a child, likely willing to die in combat?
I have heard a counter theroy to Congnative dissonance based on Reductionism that argues a simpler motivation - incorporating altrusim and it's affect on choices made in the past influencing choices made in the future, such as selfless physical actions being praised, causing chemical reactions that lead to a "warm fuzzy" feeling, leading to a further seeking of praise. Too me, this sounds too animalistic - too primal. I think it must be more complex than that.
Howard Rachlin of the Psychology Dept of the state university of New York published in the Cambridge University Press:
http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/21/35/bbs00002135-00/bbs.rachlin.html
How are patterns of behavior learned and how are they maintained? Consider the following set of cases. Four soldiers are ordered to advance on the enemy. The first and second advance; the third and fourth do not. Of the two who advance, the first is just obeying orders; he advances because he fears the consequences of disobedience more than he fears the enemy. The second is not just obeying orders; he advances because he believes it is his patriotic duty to advance. Of the two who do not advance, the third soldier remains in his foxhole out of fear of the enemy; he weighs the aversive consequences of disobeying orders less than the aversive consequences of advancing. The fourth soldier does not advance because he believes that the orders are immoral.
No one, neither the biologist, the cognitivist, the Skinnerian behaviorist, nor the teleological behaviorist, denies that there are important differences between the two soldiers who advance and between the two soldiers who do not advance. But the biologist and cognitivist alike see all the differences in thought, feeling, moral sentiment of the soldiers, as contemporary with their current behavior. Behaviorists do not disagree that internal differences exist but their focus is rather on non-contemporary events; the Skinnerian behaviorist is concerned to discover crucial differences in the soldiers’ extrinsic reinforcement histories. The teleological behaviorist is concerned to discover the patterns of behavior of which each soldiers’ present act forms a part (intrinsic reinforcement). Note, however, that even the concept of extrinsic reinforcement must rely at some point on intrinsic reinforcement. According to Premack’s theory, for example, eating reinforces lever pressing because eating is (intrinsically) of high value and lever pressing is (intrinsically) of lower value. I am claiming here that an abstract pattern of behavior may be (intrinsically) of high value while the sum of the values of its particular components are of (intrinsically) lower value. Value, in either case, would be determined by a choice test.
Let us first consider extrinsic reinforcement. By careful selection, with humans, it is possible to reinforce members of a set of particular acts belonging to a wide or abstractly defined class of acts (a rule) so that particular acts that have never been reinforced, but that obey the rule, are performed. That is, humans are able to generalize across instances of complex rules and, with simple rules, nonhumans are also able to do so. Behavior thus learned is said to be rule-governed. Imitation (of certain people) and following orders (in certain circumstances) are two such kinds of rules. There is no space here to discuss the several techniques developed for generating rule-governed behavior with extrinsic reinforcement (see Hayes, 1989, for a collection of articles on the subject), nor to discuss current disputes about whether language precedes complex rule-following or whether rule-following precedes language (Sidman, 1997).
The behavior of the first soldier, who advances because he fears the consequences of disobeying orders more than he fears the enemy, and that of the third soldier, who fails to advance because he fears the enemy more than the consequences of disobeying orders, may be explained in terms of conflicting rules. Regardless of the complexity of the relation between the consequences of the present act and those of past acts, it is the weighting of the extrinsic consequences of the present act (the magnitudes, probabilities, and delays of enemy fire versus those of punishment for disobedience) that determines the behavior of these two soldiers.
Moreover, it may be possible to account for the initial learning of ethical rules and principles, such as those that govern the altruistic behavior of the second and fourth soldiers, in terms of extrinsic social reinforcement at home or school or church. But extrinsic reinforcement cannot account for the maintenance of altruistic behavior. An altruistic act may never be reinforced. The second and fourth soldiers (as well as the woman who runs into the burning building to save someone else’s child) are as capable of weighing the immediate consequences of their acts as are the first and third soldiers. But those consequences are ignored by these two soldiers. The second and fourth soldiers, both of whose behavior has been brought under the control of highly abstract principles (we are assuming), are surely capable of discriminating between the extrinsic consequences of their present acts and the extrinsic social approval or disapproval of their past behavior at home, school or church where the principles were learned. A person capable of bringing his or her behavior into conformance with an abstract principle by means of extrinsic reinforcement, and of transferring the application of that rule across situations, could not fail to discriminate the present context (where social approval is dwarfed by the possibility of death) from situations where the rule-governance may have been initially learned. Yet the altruistic act is performed anyway.
Such acts must be maintained not by extrinsic reinforcement but by intrinsic reinforcement. The patterns of those acts (patriotic, ethical, altruistic), perhaps supported during their formation by a scaffold of extrinsic reinforcement, must be highly valuable in themselves. If they depended on extrinsic reinforcement for maintenance they would not be maintained.
In Premack’s terms, valuable patterns would be chosen if offered as whole patterns in a free choice situation. In cases such as the patriotic and ethical soldiers and the woman saving a child, imagine a giant concurrent-chain schedule with years-long terminal link alternatives: heroism versus timidity, reverence for life versus toleration of killing, kindness versus cruelty. Because of their intrinsic value the chosen patterns are final causes of their component acts and may themselves be effects of still wider final causes: a coherent concept of self; living a happier life, living a better life.
Most of us would indeed choose to be heros rather than cowards, to revere life rather than to kill, to be kind rather than cruel. We realize that the former alternatives of each pair are actually patterns of happy lives and the latter, of unhappy lives. But these alternatives are rarely offered to us as wholes. Rather, we are faced with a series of particular choices with outcomes of limited temporal extent. The altruists among us, however, have chosen such more extended patterns as wholes; they are the patterns most of us would choose if we could choose them as wholes. But to do this we would need to evaluate particular alternatives not by their particular consequences but rather by whether or not they fit into the larger patterns. This of course is a problem of self-control.
Cognitive dissonance ... a sort of self brain washing... a higher cognative theory, and somewhat of a survival instinct. As I understand it, your mind's attempt to make sense of conflicting beliefs and actions - "developping an aquired taste"
The problem I have with cognative dissonance is that personally, I know that I don't enjoy my job - but won't leave because of the responsability I have to my family to help put a roof over their head, and food on the table. Following the cognative dissonance theroy - by now I should have convinced myself that I love my job completely! If someone were to tell me (true or not) that all other jobs in my field were much worse, and other people envied my position... would I enjoy it more?
I don't think cognative dissonance could exist without some sort of outside influence - no one is going to do something they don't want to unless someone else says they should, or they must.
In the case of something like the military would this create "groupthink".
http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/FIS/Courses/LIS2149/Groupthink.html
You certianly got me thinking BulletMagnet! There are many theories on why you do what you do... but who's to say which one is right, or if there is one answer for all.
muffin
