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Psychology Can Be Used to Fight Violent Extremism

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Psychology Can Be Used to Fight Violent Extremism

This prediction is based on decades of research conducted by my colleagues and colleagues at Oxford University to assess what makes people willing to fight and die for their group. We used a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys, and psychological experiments to collect data from various groups, such as tribal warriors, armed rebels, terrorists, conventional soldiers, religious fundamentalists, and violent football fans. life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to become one. We call it “identity fusion.” Organized individuals will stop at nothing to pursue the interests of their group, and this applies not only to actions that we would appreciate as heroic—such as saving children from burning buildings or taking bullets for their friends—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 the pairs of circles in order. until they overlap in different degrees: not at all, then only a little, then a little, and so on until the small circle is completely covered by the big circle. Then people were asked which pair of circles best described their relationship with the group. The person who chooses the small circle inside the big circle is called “united”. This is a man who loves his group so much that he will do anything to protect it. This is not just for humans. Some species of birds will feign damaged wings to lure predators away from their young. One species—Australasia’s finest fairy wren—fools predators away from children with darting movements and squeaky sounds to mimic the playful behavior of mice. Humans will also usually go to great lengths to protect their relatives, especially their children who (except for identical twins) have more genes than other family members. But—unusually in the animal kingdom—humans often go further by self-destruction to protect a group of unrelated tribal members. In ancient prehistory, the tribes were small enough that everyone knew everything. These local groups are bound together through shared trials such as painful initiation, by hunting dangerous animals together, and by fighting bravely in battle. But now, the fusion has scaled up to a vastly larger group, thanks to the ability of the media world – including social media – to fill our heads with images of terrible suffering in distant regional conflicts. When I met with one of the former leaders of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization in Indonesia, he told me that he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of fellow Muslims by the Russian army in Afghanistan. However, two decades later, nearly a third of American extremists were radicalized through their social media feed, and in 2016 that proportion had risen to about three-quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting have shrunk the world to such an extent that shared suffering in face-to-face groups can now be recreated and spread to millions of people thousands of miles away at the click of a button.Fusion is based on shared suffering. it may be powerful, but not enough to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also needed to produce a lethal cocktail: outgroup threats, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that there is no peaceful alternative. In an area such as Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly captured on video and shown around the world, it is only natural that the level of fusion between viewers in horror will increase. If people believe that a peaceful solution is impossible, violent extremism will spiral.

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