Psychology can be harnessed to combat violent extremism

This prediction is based on Several decades of research My colleagues at Oxford University and I have identified the reasons why people are willing to fight and die for their groups. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys and psychological experiments to collect data from a wide range of groups, such as tribal warriors, armed rebels, terrorists, traditional soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.

We have found that life-changing, group-defining experiences cause our personal and group identities to blend together. We call it “identity fusion.” Integrated individuals will do nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to actions that we hail as heroic – such as rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for our comrades – but also acts of suicide terrorism.

Fusion is usually measured By showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of these circles in a sequence so that they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then just a little, then a little more and so on until the small circle is completed in the large circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best depicts their relationship to the group. People who choose the small circle within the large circle are said to be “integrated.” These are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.

This is not unique to humans. Some bird species feign a broken wing to keep a predator away from their chicks. One species – Australia’s adorable fairy wren – lures predators away from its young by making darting movements and shrill sounds to mimic the behavior of a tasty mouse. Humans also usually go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children, who (with the exception of identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But – unusually in the animal kingdom – humans often go so far as to put themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of tribe members who are not genetically related. In ancient prehistoric times, these tribes were small enough that everyone knew each other. These local groups were bonded through shared ordeals such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.

But nowadays, integration has expanded to include much larger groups, thanks to the ability of global media – including social media – to fill our heads with images of horrific suffering in distant regional conflicts.

When I met a former leader of the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, he told me that he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about Russian soldiers’ treatment of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. But twenty years later, nearly a third of American extremists have become radicalized via social media By 2016, this proportion had risen to about three-quarters. Smartphones and overwhelming reports are shrinking the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and disseminated to millions of people across thousands of miles at the click of a button.

Integration based on shared suffering may be powerful, but it is not in itself sufficient to stimulate violent extremism. Our research He suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the lethal cocktail: external threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that there are no peaceful alternatives. In areas like Gaza, where civilian suffering is regularly captured on video and shared around the world, engagement rates naturally rise among those who watch this suffering in horror. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will escalate.