People have lower levels of activity in brain in areas related to cognitive control and reasoning when they are focusing on sacred values.

"An international team of researchers has found that people have lower levels of activity in brain in areas related to cognitive control and reasoning when they are focusing on sacred values. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study involving brain scans of terrorist sympathizers and what they found.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence have shown that once a person develops sacred values regarding a particular topic, it is difficult to get them to change their minds. Prior research has also shown that people who have certain sacred values are often more willing to fight and die for a cause than others. In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn more about what goes on in the minds of people who have expressed a willingness to die for a cause that is based on sacred values—in this case, sympathizers of an Al-Qaeda offshoot called Lashkar-et Taiba."

Anthropologist Scott Atran, one of the study authors, has been investigating the motivation behind the "will to fight" for several years. He noted that in 2016, former President Barack Obama said one of the mistakes made in the war with Iraq was to underestimate militant extremists' will to fight. Understanding why and to what extent people will fight for causes could be linked to the level of their sacred values.

Over the last few years, research has suggested people with sacred values are more willing to fight and die, but that peer pressure could reduce that desire. But understanding the social motivation is difficult, with the problem of posturing—where participants could behave in a way that is misleading—potentially skewing results.

"The neuroimaging studies were meant to rule out posturing—you can't consciously control these brain processes—and to show that the behavioral results of willingness to sacrifice for sacred values is truly rooted as deep-down as it goes in human cognition and brain processes," Atran told Newsweek.

The study was organized by Artis International and published in the Royal Society Open Science. Behavioral and neuroscientists designed studies that radicalized people would eventually be willing to voluntarily enter an fMRI machine.

While in the machines, participants were asked about their willingness to fight and die for their sacred values, and values not held sacred to them. Findings showed that when discussing their sacred values, there was a lower level of activity in the area of the brain related to cognitive control and reasoning—"regions that have previously been implicated in calculating costs and consequences," they wrote.

Researchers also found that when participants were told their peers were less willing to fight and die, their own willingness dropped.

The findings indicate there are distinct processes that take place in the brains of people who have an extreme commitment towards sacred values. It does not, however, suggest extremists are more prone to radical behavior because of their brain wiring.