Uniquely Human: Cultural Norms and Private Acts of Mercy in the War Zone

ABSTRACT War‐zone mercy—sparing of one's culturally constructed enemies in the midst of organized group violence—is a political act but also a potentially empathically motivated one that has contributed to shared expressive gestures across cultural boundaries and to international laws of war. This article elucidates historical and cross‐cultural norms for war‐zone mercy in order to provide a theoretical framework for scholarly research examining this behavior and offers a case study with systematically collected data about war‐zone mercy during Kenyan pastoralist Samburu experiences of coalitional lethal violence (low‐intensity chronic warfare). As a whole, this article presents evidence from human and nonhuman animal studies that war‐zone mercy is a uniquely human form of empathy‐produced altruism. Humans may be trained or culturally conditioned to kill, and yet widely available historical and cross‐cultural examples of war‐zone mercy underscore the ways in which prosocial emotions like empathy reveal and pervade the human. [ war, agency, prosocial emotion, altruism, Kenya ]