Moral outrage, not instrumental reasoning, drives extreme commitment among armed groups in civil war

<p>Sociopsychological models identify moral outrage, perceived efficacy, and group identification as predictors of collective action. However, these pathways remain largely untested in contexts of violent conflict, limiting their capacity to explain more extreme forms of commitment to political action. Here we examine these hypotheses among a sample of combatants in armed opposition groups in northwest Syria, during the civil war (N=150), roughly evenly sampled either before or after the late-stage offensive that overthrew the Assad regime in December 2024. In study 1 (pre-offensive), convergent frequentist and Bayesian testing showed that moral outrage strongly predicted combatants’ willingness to fight and die (d=0.49) and to make costly sacrifices for the revolution (d=0.52), with limited support for an identity pathway that was fully mediated by moral outrage, and no effect for perceived collective efficacy. Supplementary checks confirm the statistical power and robustness of these findings. By study 2, retrospective perceptions had markedly shifted upwards for identification with the revolution—producing a ceiling effect—and for perceived efficacy, following the successful offensive in which some participants were actively involved. While this prevented a like-for-like comparison of the associations observed in study 1, exploratory tests among inactive combatants replicated the strong and null effects of moral outrage and efficacy, respectively. Together, these studies advance a psychological discourse of moral versus instrumental motives for high-risk political action during violent conflict, while highlighting the importance of temporal context when collecting sensitive field data in hard-to-reach research populations.</p>