Psychology can be harnessed to combat violent extremism

This forecast is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I have undertaken at the University of Oxford to establish what makes people 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 insurgents, terrorists, conventional soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.

We have found that life-changing, group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to fuse together. We call it “identity fusion”. Molten individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts we applaud as heroic – like rescuing children from buildings burn or take a bullet for his companions – but also acts of suicidal terrorism.

Fusion is commonly measured showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of such 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 completely enclosed in the big circle. Then people are asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group. People who choose the one in which the small circle is in the big circle are said to be “fusion”. Those are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.

This is not unique to humans. Some species of birds feign a broken wing to ward off a predator from their young. One species – the superb Australasian fairy rock – lures predators away from its young by making darting movements and squeaking sounds to mimic the behavior of a delicious mouse. Humans also generally have to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children who (except identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But – unusually in the animal kingdom – humans often go further, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically independent members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everyone else. These local groups bonded through common trials such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.

Today, however, the fusion has escalated to much larger groups, thanks to the ability of the world’s media – including social media – to fill our heads with images of horrific suffering in far-off regional conflicts.

When I met with one of the former leaders of the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, he told me that he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of his comrades. Muslims by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, however, nearly a third of American extremists were radicalized through social media, and by 2016, this proportion had grown to about 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 widely recreated and spread to millions of people across thousands of miles at the click of a button.

Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but it is not enough by itself to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the deadly cocktail: the threat of the outgroup, the demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In regions like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly captured on video and shared around the world, it’s only natural that meltdown rates among those watching in horror will rise. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will spiral.