How do we predict the terrorist ideology we never heard of?
I just watched a fascinating documentary on Ruby Ridge (you can currently find it on Netflix). Media misrepresentation aside, Randy Weaver was networked with the Aryan Nation, an extremist white supremacist group with an racially charged apocalyptic vision that Weaver showed many sympathies with. Most importantly, he was branded on occasion as a terrorist. The idea of white supremacist terrorism — a term only recently catching media attention — was later codified in the American mind by Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack. The attack on the Murrha Federal Building in Oklahoma City used a homemade car bomb, placed in a U-haul. To this day, he remains the only person executed for terrorism. This represented violence perpetuated in the name of an ideology to achieve political ends — the definition of terrorism.
Around the same time (1993), Al Qaeda first attacked the World Trade Center with a car bomb — also in a U-Haul truck. The more recent events of 9/11 have now codified Islamic terrorism in the American cultural schema. While the media is now increasingly discussing threat of white supremacy, this shift from one terrorist ideology to another has real repercussions on how we address threats as a nation. Key to that is, given current approaches to terrorism that largely focus on ideology as the root motivation for perpetuating violence, we have to ask ourselves: how can we try and address the next terrorist ideology when we don’t know what their beliefs are until after an attack is perpetuated?
This issue has, in a sense, a critical flaw for our safety. Namely, that if we are only ever able to address violent ideologies after we have suffered an attack purportedly motivated by a specific ideology, we will always be one atrocity behind history in any attempt to thwart terrorism. Additionally, this approach makes assumptions about members of ethnic and religious groups that simply do not hold for all members of the group[1], and by profiling all members of a group as if they were terrorists, we only increase animosity — and thus the likelihood that a member of that group will radicalise. Such an effect has had a serious impact on the radicalisation of young Muslim men in the UK for example.
Perhaps this approach of ideological motivation isn’t our only possible base for addressing extremism. I argue that if we focus on the structure of their motivation we can do more. By this I suggest that it might be more effective if we focus our attention to how the mind of an extremist processes and is motivated by concepts. Rather than the content of the concepts they say they believe in. By doing this, we can see how people are becoming radicalised by addressing how they process information. That is, we focus on how terrorists process ideas, not what ideas terrorists process.
This approach calls for a cognitive approach to extremism. One which looks at the developmental mechanisms of human minds. Recent patterns in anthropology and psychology have shown that humans of all cultures have similar psychological tools for processing ideas, even if the ideas they think about are different. This subtle distinction is similar to computer software. You can use a calculator to calculate any number with the mechanisms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So the number it calculates can change, but the mechanisms that process the numbers are the same. The human mind isn’t so different in this sense.
For example, cognitive psychologists have suggested that humans evolved the psychological ability to be preemptively afraid of threats to our security such as predators (lions, tigers, and bears), contagions (plagues, sicknesses, and diseases), natural disasters (earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods) and social threats (threats to job or lifestyle or social standing). The way we process this information is the same, and has predictable outputs — like performing more rituals). However, what we’re afraid of — that is to say, the information we process — changes culture to culture. (For the nerds, I’m talking about the work of researchers such as Pascal Boyer, Pierre Lienard, E. Thomas Lawson[2], Woody, Szcechtman[3,4], Mort, Elaim[5], Fux….).
A recent study[6] has shown that the things that activate this system are different in Northern Ireland than they are in South Africa. Their study found that while females, cross-culturally, worried more about predation/assault threats than males (a universal tendency), South Africans were more worried about predation/ assault and depletion of resources than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. This provides empirical evidence for how different environments interact with our psychology to have similar inputs. This demonstrates that we don’t need to assume that ideologies are the only thing we need to predict effects. Rather, we can take local biological and social environments as critical factors as well.[7] Doing so might explain why some people who identify with an ideology take to violence while others remain on the side-lines (or don’t participate at all).
Recently, my research team created (and published — to read the paper you can find it here) a computer model of this system.8 We tested the system individually as a dynamic cognitive model to ensure that its effects did seem to mimic the psychological effects that experimental psychologists and anthropologists have noted. We then created a multi-agent AI9 system, which lets many AI systems interact with one another, to experiment on the social effects of this system when it operates in populations — like humans do. What we found was that intense religiosity can be found in a variety of environments, but that the outputs of exactly which aspects of their religiosity increase is unique in different contexts. So in effect, in some circumstances belief in god increases, in others, belief that your group is the “chosen people” will increase.
Using this approach, it may be able to help us better identify the people and ideologies that will radicalize next, rather than waiting for
References:
1. Brubaker, R. Ethnicity without groups. Eur. J. Sociol. 43, 163–189 (2002).
2. Liénard, P. & Lawson, E. T. Evoked culture, ritualization and religious rituals. Religion 38, 157–171 (2008).
3. Hinds, A. L. et al. The psychology of potential threat: properties of the security motivation system. Biol. Psychol. 85, 331–7 (2010).
4. Woody, E. Z. & Szechtman, H. Adaptation to potential threat: The evolution, neurobiology, and psychopathology of the security motivation system. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 35, 1019–1033 (2011).
5. Eilam, D., Izhar, R. & Mort, J. Threat detection: Behavioral practices in animals and humans. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 35, 999–1006 (2011).
6. Mort, J., Fux, M. & Lawson, E. T. Rethinking Conventional Wisdom: Ecological Effects on Potential Danger Preoccupation Salience. Hum. Ecol. 43, 589–599 (2015).
7. Lane, J. E. Cognition in context: New approaches to new Islamist movements in the Middle East. Sacra 9, 22–33 (2011).
8. Shults, F. L. et al. Modeling Terror Management Theory: A computer simulation of the impact of mortality salience on religiosity. Religion. Brain Behav. (2017). doi:10.1080/2153599X.2016.12388646
9. Lane, J. E. Method, Theory, and Multi-Agent Artificial Intelligence: Creating computer models of complex social interaction. J. Cogn. Sci. Relig. 1, 161–180 (2013).
