Psychology can be used to counter violent extremism

Based on this prediction Decades of research That my colleagues and I at Oxford University are committed to makes people willing to fight and die for their party. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys and psychological testing, to collect data from a wide range of groups such as tribal fighters, armed insurgents, terrorists, conventional soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.

We found that life-changing and group-defining experiences coalesce our individual and collective identities. We call this “identity fusion”. Mixed individuals will stop at nothing to advance their group’s interests, and this applies not only to acts we would hail as heroic—such as rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for one’s comrades—but also to acts of suicidal terrorism.

Fusion is usually measured By showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group), and placing pairs of such circles in an order in which they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then a little, then some more, and so on until The smaller circle is completely enclosed in the larger circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group People who choose the smaller circle within the larger circle are called “mixed”. They are people who love their clan so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.

It is not unique to humans. Some species of birds will display a broken wing to lure a predator away from their young. One species—Australasia’s magnificent fairy wren—draws predators away from their young by making frantic movements and screeching sounds to mimic the behavior of a graceful rodent. Humans also generally go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children who (except for identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But – unusually in the animal world – humans often go further, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everyone else. These local groups share ordeals such as painful initiation, hunt dangerous animals together, and fight bravely on the battlefield.

These days, though, the fusion is scaled to much larger groups, thanks to the power of the world’s media—including social media—to fill our heads with images of the horrific agony of distant regional conflicts.

When I met one of the former leaders of the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamia in Indonesia, he told me that he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of fellow Muslims by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, however, nearly a third of American extremists were radicalized through social media feeds, and By 2016 that proportion had risen to nearly three quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting shrink the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and spread to millions across thousands of miles with the click of a button.

Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but is not enough by itself to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three more ingredients are needed to create a deadly cocktail: outgroup threats, enemy mobilization, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In a region like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is routinely captured on video and shared around the world, it’s only natural that the rate of assimilation will increase among those who watch in horror. If people believe that a peaceful solution is impossible, then violent extremism will spread.