Thinking from God’s perspective decreases biased valuation of the life of a nonbeliever

Religious belief is often thought to motivate violence because it is said to promote norms that encourage tribalism and the devaluing of the lives of nonbelievers. If true, this should be visible in the multigenerational violent conflict between Palestinians and Israelis which is marked by a religious divide. We conducted experiments with a representative sample of Muslim Palestinian youth (n = 555), examining whether thinking from the perspective of Allah (God), who is the ultimate arbitrator of religious belief, changes the relative value of Jewish Israelis’ lives (compared with Palestinian lives). Participants were presented with variants of the classic “trolley dilemma,” in the form of stories where a man can be killed to save the lives of five children who were either Jewish Israeli or Palestinian. They responded from their own perspective and from the perspective of Allah. We find that whereas a large proportion of participants were more likely to endorse saving Palestinian children than saving Jewish Israeli children, this proportion decreased when thinking from the perspective of Allah. This finding raises the possibility that beliefs about God can mitigate bias against other groups and reduce barriers to peace.Many conflicts around the world have occurred between different religious groups, and many acts of violence have been carried out in the name of religious identity. Perhaps because religious violence seems so deeply embedded and recurrent in human history, the relationship between religious belief and violence is the subject of intense popular and scholarly debate (1–5). The recent surge of sectarian strife and violence, particularly in the Middle East and Europe, has reinvigorated the public debate on the link between religious belief systems and violence (with particular attention paid to Islam) and seems to lend credibility to the idea that religious belief promotes tribalism and violence toward nonbelievers. Despite the importance of the topic, controlled empirical studies of this relationship are scarce.Religious belief is often characterized as encouraging violence because it is said to have a divisive nature and to devalue the lives of nonbelievers (3). The narrative that religious belief promotes human conflict is complicated by the fact that religious mandates may have motivated action to alleviate the plight of others, as in the case of the abolition of slavery (6), in ways that demonstrate a respect for human life (7). The application of religious mandates is strongly dependent on fluctuating interpretations across contexts. Although major world religions believe in a form of the Golden Rule (8), which may decrease aggression (9), it is not clear whether such rules are seen as applying equally to nonbelievers (10), and religious texts often suggest intolerance toward nonbelievers or seemingly promote violence (11, 12). Debating the relationship between religious belief and violence via theological or historical inquiry is unlikely to yield a clear answer. Perhaps a more pertinent approach may be to ask how religious belief influences the judgments and decisions that ordinary people make about intergroup relations.Here, to address the role of religious belief in human conflict, we investigated relative valuation of the lives of members of other religious groups. Devaluation of the life of another is important because it places that person outside of the scope of moral concern (13), creating a moral distance that may facilitate the use of violence (14, 15). To investigate how one important aspect of religious belief may influence the relative valuation of human life, we asked people to infer the preference of God. Participants answered questions that probed the relative value given to the lives of members of their own group and those of members of a religious outgroup. They answered first from their own perspective, and then from the perspective of God. We chose this method because God is the ultimate arbitrator of religious belief. Whereas religious traditions include apparently contradictory statements about intergroup relations, asking about God’s preferences requires participants to think about what verdict God would give in a certain context. For religions such as Islam that believe in a moralizing God capable of punishing immoral behavior (16–18), thinking about God should invoke religious norms (19). If, on the whole, religious belief devalues the lives of nonbelievers, placing them outside the scope of moral concern, then people should believe that God prefers parochial choices that imply a decrease in the relative value of the lives of nonbelievers. However, if God is seen as promoting universal moral laws (20), and if those laws conflict with intergroup bias (21), participants should believe that God would prefer choices that more equally value human life regardless of religious identity.Our study builds on a small emerging body of work that investigated the relative roles of religious belief and religious affiliation on parochial attitudes and that offered suggestive evidence that people may believe that God promotes universal moral laws in intergroup contexts. For example, a study including samples of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis found that support for violent parochial altruism was positively related to attendance at collective religious services, but not related to individual prayer to God (22). The inference was that collective rituals promoted norms favoring self-sacrifice to the group, of which the suicide attack is one extreme example. In an important study, Preston and Ritter (21) demonstrated that college students in the United States primed with God were more likely to help an outgroup member than an ingroup member, whereas participants primed with thoughts of a religious leader or religious institutions showed the opposite pattern of helping behavior.Our study both complements and extends this prior research in three ways. First, whereas prior work compared the effects of different aspects of religion on altruistic or parochial behavior (21, 22), we focused on comparing personal preferences with those of God. Research in a different domain (indigenous forest management practices) showed that people’s beliefs about preferences of supernatural entities (God and forest spirits) can be different from their own preferences and can strongly constrain behavior toward implementation of those preferences (23). Here we were interested in whether God’s preferences encouraged or discouraged moral reasoning that may promote intergroup violence. Second, our study was carried out in a chronic violent conflict separated along religious lines and the beliefs we measured concerned religious groups directly involved in the conflict. Third, although a strength of Preston and Ritter’s (21) work was that they used diverse measures of prosocial behavior (hypothetical helping behavior, hypothetical donations to charity, and cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma game with real monetary outcomes), these were measures of benign acts of cooperation. We were interested in measuring moral decision making that might be more closely related to intergroup violence. To do this we used a set of artificial but morally challenging dilemmas designed to measure the extent to which people valued the life of ingroup and outgroup members equally (13–15).We ran experiments with a representative sample of Muslim Palestinian youth (n = 555, 50% female, aged between 12 and 18 y) living in the West Bank and Gaza. Thus, our experiments were carried out in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute, a chronic and violent conflict. This conflict is divided along religious lines and many violent actors on both sides are religious. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians seem partly motivated by attachment to sacred lands and sites (24). Our participants have grown up with persistent exposure to violence between Jewish Israelis and predominantly Muslim Palestinians (25). If religious belief promotes moral judgments associated with ingroup violence, they are likely to do so in the context of this dispute.The majority of our participants were very religious and prayed regularly (>80%). To investigate whether thinking about Allah (God) influenced the relative value of the life of Jewish Israelis, participants responded to variants of the classic “footbridge” problem (26), in the form of stories where a Palestinian man can be killed to save the lives of five children (15, 27). We ran two experiments simultaneously. In one experiment participants heard stories where the Palestinian man has to be pushed from a footbridge by another man to stop a truck that would otherwise kill five children. In the second experiment, participants heard stories where a Palestinian has to jump from the footbridge to save the children (SI Appendix). Responses to push and jump experiments were similar and were pooled in this analysis for brevity. In both experiments, participants judged whether the sacrificial act was preferred both from their perspective and from the perspective of Allah. All participants responded to two versions of this dilemma: one where the children to be saved were Palestinian, and one where the children were Jewish Israeli. The order was counterbalanced.Our primary dependent variable was ingroup bias in the valuation of human life. Ingroup bias would be present when participants approved (or thought God would approve) of the man on the footbridge jumping (or being pushed) to save the lives of Palestinian children but not Jewish Israeli children.

Liver transplant recipients with portal vein thrombosis receiving an organ from a high‐risk donor are at an increased risk for graft loss due to hepatic artery thrombosis

We hypothesize that recipients with pretransplant portal vein thrombosis (PVT) receiving organs from high‐risk donors (HRD) are at an increased risk of HAT. Data on all liver transplants in the United States from February 2002 to March 2015 were analyzed. Recipients were sorted into two groups: those with PVT and those without. HRDs were defined by donor risk index (DRI) >1.7. Multivariable logistic regression models were constructed to assess the independent risk factors for HAT with the resultant graft loss ≤90 days from transplantation. A total of 60 404 candidates underwent liver transplantation; of those recipients, 623 (1.0%) had HAT, of which 66.0% (n = 411) received organs from HRDs compared with 49.3% (n = 29 473) in recipients without HAT (P < 0.001); 2250 (3.7%) recipients had pretransplantation PVT and received organs from HRDs. On adjusted multivariable analysis, PVT with a HRD organ was the most significant independent risk factor (OR 3.56, 95% CI 2.52–5.02, P < 0.001) for the development of HAT. Candidates with pretransplant PVT who receive an organ from a HRD are at the highest risk for postoperative HAT independent of other measurable factors. Recipients with pretransplant PVT would benefit from careful donor selection and possibly anticoagulation perioperatively.     

Self-inflicted long bone fractures for insurance fraud

International Journal of Legal Medicine - Self-inflicted fractures simulating traffic accident represent a new social fraud opportunity for criminality. Recognising scams through an increase of...     

Sudden death in adolescence caused by cardiac haemangioma

Primary tumors of the heart in infants and children are rare. The types of heart tumors in pediatric age groups are generally different from those in adults. Cardiac myxoma is by far the most common tumor in adults, but in infants and adolescents the prevalent tumor of the heart is rhabdomyoma. Among benign cardiac tumors, cardiac hemangiomas are rare and often diagnosed post-mortem due to the lack of specific clinical symptoms and signs.We report a case of sudden death due to cardiac hemangioma in an apparently healthy 15-year-old adolescent. The autopsy revealed a cardiac hemangioma located at the apex of the heart; the histopathological examination showed the tumor was a mixed capillary and arteriolar hemangioma, a very rare type of primary tumor in adolescents.     

Laparoscopic versus open approach for implantation of the peritoneal catheter during ventriculoperitoneal shunt placement

Background  Ventriculoperitoneal shunt (VPS) is the mainstay of therapy for hydrocephalus. The aim of this study is to compare outcomes of laparoscopic (LVPS) versus open (OVPS) techniques for placement of distal VPS catheters. Methods  All patients undergoing new VPS placement at a tertiary care center between January 2004 and August 2007 were included. Univariate analysis was performed. Wilcoxon rank-sum, chi-square, and Fisher’s exact tests were used to make comparisons between LVPS and OVPS groups. Stepwise backward logistic regression was performed to predict complications requiring operative intervention. A Kaplan–Meier estimate of the survival function was calculated for shunt survival. All data is presented as median and range unless otherwise specified. Results  Five hundred thirty-five consecutive patients underwent 579 VPS (258 LVPS, 321 OVPS). Median age (52.0 years) and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score (3) were similar in LVPS and OVPS groups. Body mass index (BMI) [27.8 (17.0–64.9) kg/m² versus 25.9 (12.3–44.4) kg/m², p = 0.007], previous operations [0.8 ± 0.9 versus 0.6 ± 0.7, p = 0.004 (mean ± standard deviation)], estimated blood loss (EBL) [20 (0–175) ml versus 25 (0–500) ml, p < 0.001], operating room (OR) time [37.5 (17.0–152.0) min versus 52.0 (20.0–197.0) min, p < 0.001], and length of stay (LOS) [11 (1–77) days versus 14 (1–225) days, p = 0.016] were statistically different between the LVPS and OVPS groups, respectively. LVPS abdominal complication rate of 5.8% and OVPS rate of 6.9% were similar (p = 0.611). Previous abdominal operation [odds ratio (OR) 1.673, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.100–2.543, p = 0.016] and previous VPS (OR 1.929, 95% CI 1.147–3.243, p = 0.016) were significant predictors of complications requiring operative intervention. Kaplan–Meier analysis demonstrated no difference in survival between LVPS and OVPS groups (p = 0.538), with overall shunt survival of 86.4% at 6 months and 83.0% at 1 year. Conclusions  LVPS is associated with decreased OR time, less blood loss, and shorter LOS with no difference in complication rate when compared OVPS. The laparoscopic approach for VPS is a safe, effective, and readily reproducible alternative to the traditional open approach.