Many historical battles have a large component well modeled as a game of chicken, where whichever side’s morale breaks first loses. You can get a locally cheap boost to morale if your soldiers have internalized a cultural imperative to seek death in honorable combat, because they’ll be less deterrable. There’s plenty of credible literary evidence that many soldiers in cultures connected to ours were so acculturated. I am not claiming that it is a human universal, merely that it happens often enough to be an important example of preference inversion.
This cleared it up for me. So this isn’t really about a preference for “warfighting” or “danger”, this is about a preference for death in battle, as in Norse Vikings, Japanese Samurai, and Spartan and Aztec Warriors. This is more clearly analogous to a preference for chastity in terms of direct reproductive success. Preferences for death by martyrdom could be another example.
Many historical battles have a large component well modeled as a game of chicken, where whichever side’s morale breaks first loses. You can get a locally cheap boost to morale if your soldiers have internalized a cultural imperative to seek death in honorable combat, because they’ll be less deterrable. There’s plenty of credible literary evidence that many soldiers in cultures connected to ours were so acculturated. I am not claiming that it is a human universal, merely that it happens often enough to be an important example of preference inversion.
This cleared it up for me. So this isn’t really about a preference for “warfighting” or “danger”, this is about a preference for death in battle, as in Norse Vikings, Japanese Samurai, and Spartan and Aztec Warriors. This is more clearly analogous to a preference for chastity in terms of direct reproductive success. Preferences for death by martyrdom could be another example.