Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra

We embed a real-time enlistment notification system in the human-resources division of a major eastern-Congo armed group fighting a foreign enemy, surveying joiners and matched civilians at enlistment, documenting five facts about the social motivations behind violence. First, well over half of civilians report a family member harmed by the enemy in decades of war, leaving deep, war-specific fear and anger. Second, killing the enemy is widely seen as right — 76% endorse it, a share essentially unchanged whether the killing is at scale or targets a vulnerable civilian — justified chiefly as retaliation, and most strongly endorsed by the victimized and the war-angry. Third, civilians are not just parochial: they withhold empathy from the enemy — partly by perceiving its pain as less intense, mainly by being unmoved by pain they recognize, and most of all among the victimized and the war-angry; 58% enjoy their pain and 80% choose to kill it in a video game when given the chance. Fourth, those who enlist are no angrier, no more approving of killing, no more victimized — if anything less. They instead care more about their district and suppress empathy toward the enemy further through belief alone — seeing its pain as less intense, not growing more numb than other civilians — while also holding violence against it to be more morally justified; and they judge enlisting moral more than the two-thirds of civilians who already do, viewing it as a contribution to district security. Fifth, enlisting then hardens recruits: within a year their empathy for the enemy fades by more than half—a numbing to pain they now see clearly. Together, these findings suggest that victimization-related fear and anger can sustain a morality and a withholding of empathy that together sanction lethal violence — yet those who act are not its angriest victims but its most committed to the district, most prone to convince themselves the enemy suffers less—a perception enlistment then replaces with numbing.