Does War Give Meaning to Human Life? Investigating the Endlessness of Human Wars from a Social Cognition Viewpoint

According to history, humans have never stopped fighting with each other and this endlessness and permanence of wars cannot have only external causes (threats) rather, it also has internal and psychological causes and identifying these causes is essential to reducing wars. The present study aimed to identify one of the psychological causes of the endlessness of human wars and assumed that war gives meaning to human life and therefore, humans do not like to end it. In order to test this hypothesis, 397 participants (190 males) with a mean age of 35 years were employed for this study among 30,000 subscribers of Hamrahe Aval and Irancell in Tehran and Karaj. In an experimental study, participants were randomly assigned to experimental group (which the Iran-Iraq war was highlighted in their minds) and control group (which the scientific advances of the Iranians were highlighted in their minds) and then meaning making from wars (mediating variable) was measured by Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) test and agreement with militarism/permanence of wars (dependent variable) was measured by Vail and Motyl (2010) test. ANOVAs showed that experimental group makes meaning from wars and agrees with militarism/permanence of wars more than control group, and conditional process modeling showed that the salience of war in the minds of the subjects has led to agreement with the militarism/permanence of war "through" the meaning making from wars. So, humans get the meaning of life from war, and this is one of the reasons why human wars are endless.