The target article provides a framework for how identity fusion leads to terroristic self-sacrifice. The introduction cites football hooligans, insurgents, religious fundamentalists, and assorted tribes as brokers of violent action. However, the likelihood of committing self-sacrifice varies drastically between these groups. The difference, we argue, is that fundamentalists and people in tribes are more likely segregated into homogeneous enclaves where they can more readily develop radicalized and moralized beliefs that buffer them from worldview-threatening others and information. That is, fundamentalists actually segregate themselves from out-group members (as opposed to going to a football match where people exist on both sides), and this segregation leads worldviews to go unchecked and to be radicalized and leads to violence in defense of these beliefs (Motyl et al. Reference Motyl, Rothschild and Pyszczynski2009).

This distinction between groups with members that share highly moralized attitudes as a result of self-segregation and groups with members that share nonmoralized attitudes is an important boundary condition for when identity fusion leads to self-sacrifice. Groups that are exposed to out-group members in a humanizing context support more peaceful solutions to conflict than those who do not see these out-group members (Motyl et al. Reference Motyl, Hart, Pyszczynski, Weise, Maxfield and Siedel2011). We believe this occurs, in part, because exposure to ideologically congenial information polarizes us on typically moralized issues (Mason Reference Mason2015). We know that when a person hears in-group members express their attitudes on an issue multiple times, that person's attitude tends to be more extreme compared with someone not exposed to these attitudes as much (Brauer et al. Reference Brauer, Judd and Gliner1995). If people continue to live in networks with in-group members that polarize the attitudes that demarcate one group from the other, the inevitable contact between the two groups could be seen as a threat to the values they cherish. We see that when these values are threatened, people are more likely to resort to hostility and violence (Motyl & Pyszczynski Reference Motyl and Pyszczynski2009). Therefore, worldview enclavement can create circumstances in which value conflicts become more and more likely to result in violence, maybe even self-sacrifice.

Although the target article claims “it would seem to be attachment to a collective, forged through shared rituals or other identity markers, and not beliefs per se that motivate pro-group action” (sect. 2, para. 5), evidence from the moral conviction literature further corroborates our claim that certain characteristics of beliefs – characteristics that are more likely to be present in worldview enclaves versus more heterogeneous networks – are important motivators of action. Individuals who moralize particular beliefs are more likely than people who do not moralize these beliefs to punish and engage in hostile collective action against people who violate their beliefs (Skitka & Houston Reference Skitka and Houston2001; Zaal et al. Reference Zaal, Laar, Ståhl, Ellemers and Derks2011). There are meta-characteristics about our beliefs and attitudes that may affect our willingness to engage in pro-group action, meta-characteristics that may develop as a function of our decreased contact with dissenting worldviews. We see that people with moralized attitudes prefer greater social distance from attitudinally dissimilar others than people for whom these attitudes are not moralized (Skitka et al. Reference Skitka, Bauman and Sargis2005). This further exacerbates the cycle of enclavement, whereby people sort themselves into ideologically congenial enclaves and are then further polarized in these enclaves and are more likely to behave in a hostile manner toward out-group members. The scope of this problem is even greater than this article anticipates, as conservatives and liberals in America are geographically segregating themselves, potentially leading to a political climate in which peaceful solutions to ideological conflict become less possible (Motyl Reference Motyl, Valdesolo and Graham2016; Motyl et al. Reference Motyl, Iyer, Oishi, Trawalter and Nosek2014). Indeed, we are seeing the early warning signs of violent political conflict in the United States, where even presidential candidates endorse the infrahumanization of dissimilar others as “deplorables” and the use of violence at rallies against those with whom they disagree (Kirk & Martin Reference Kirk and Martin2017). Left unchecked, the creation of worldview enclaves that increase polarization of moralized attitudes poses a serious threat not only to typically war-torn countries, but to countries where political violence was not previously the norm.