Article

Sacred values as index signals of trustworthy character

2026-08-14

Abstract excerpt

<p>Sacred values are moral commitments held to be non-negotiable: their bearers refuse to trade them for material gain at any price. This rigidity is puzzling, because behavioral flexibility is a critical human adaptation. We argue that a sacred value enables cooperation by being a hard-to-fake signal of trustworthy character. In particular it indexes the ability to internalize moral rules in general. Observers ex...

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Literature Corpus work: 8baadef2-6e17-52d8-bcad-d0d736966498
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/w6fmu_v1

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