Hidden Brain - Episode 13: Terrorism

Episode Date: December 15, 2015

Why do young people join ISIS? Is it nihilism, or, as social scientists suggest, a perverse idealism? This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the psychology of terrorist groups, and why so many young people leave behind promising futures to join them.

Paris is in lockdown tonight after a series of bombings and gun attacks that killed more than 100 people at six separate scenes. We're learning more at this hour about a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, about an hour east of Los Angeles. We have two suspects, both dressed in black. It is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radicalization, embracing a perverted interpretation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West. It's stockpiled assault weapons, ammunition, and pipe bombs.

So this was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people. Every time there's a terrorist attack, we ask ourselves, what motivates people to do this? The attacks seem barbaric, nihilistic. But is it that simple? Is that what's really going on? On this week's podcast, we explore the psychology of international terrorist organizations

and why so many young people join them. Battlefield experiments, conducted with fighters for ISIS and al-Qaeda reveal patterns in the mental makeup of terrorists. We'll use the lens of anthropologist Scott Atron to explore the strange hold these organizations have on young minds. Once you lock into these values, they're immune to social pressures. They're not norms. That is, even if you your best friends, your family,

your loved ones are against you, you will not see an exit strategy. We'll also examine the phenomenon President Obama calls radicalization. Is it driven by shadowy recruiters? Or by what Israeli psychologist Ariel Morari would describe as pure pressure in university cafeterias. He says, hey, you know, I'm also willing to do it. I would also carry out this, so he's able to take it. And we'll explore the psychology of violence. What happens when brutality is practiced as a form of theater?

The spilling of blood, the brutality, accomplishes two things. First of all, it binds people together who are doing it. And the second thing it does is it scares the hell out of enemies and fence-setters. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Regularly on this podcast, we present counterintuitive thinking, researchers with analyses that challenge popular beliefs, well-held views or notions. This episode is no different.

I first came by the work of Scott Atron and Ariel Marari several years ago, I found their research on terrorism counterintuitive. Where something brainwashing is the sole cause of young people being recruited to ISIS and like-minded terror organizations, Atron and Marari suggests that pure networks matter more, much more. In the popular imagination, it is religious extremism that drives terrorists. But these social scientists argue that religion is often a secondary factor. Where many of us might say that terrorists are morally warped or purely evil, Atron and Marari would point to the role of hidden psychological forces.

I should say the views of these researchers are not universally shared, but especially in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, I felt their views might be useful to here. I got a call from the medical school in Cartoum the other day, where Professor at the medical school said that her best students have just gone on to found a medical unit for the Islamic State. And this was completely unexpected in what should she do about it. What should the school do about it? This is Scott Atrin.

He's an anthropologist who works at the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the French National Center for Scientific Research. He has traveled to the front lines of war zones to cafes in Morocco and housing projects in the Paris suburbs. He has spent many years trying to understand why people are drawn to join groups such as ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State. As I get a call saying, will you talk to us?

Our students, we don't understand this. They were our best students, our brightest students. And they went off to establish a medical clinic we found out with the Islamic State, their parents are hysterical, we don't know what to tell them, can you tell us what's going on? The students were of Sudanese ancestry and most had British passports. They came from well to do families, They had promising careers ahead of them. Families of the medical students were dumb struck. The heartbroken sister of one student spoke to the daily male in Britain.

And we just want her home, we want her safe. Her family love her more than anybody else in this world can. Nobody in this world can love her more than we do. My little sister, she's an A-star student. They're praying on young innocent girls and it's just, it's not right. Atron said he told the teachers of the medical school, the same thing he has been preaching for years

to governments and more recently at the United Nations. I said, listen, I can't give you the solution. The solution has to be for you to pay attention, to listen to what they're telling you. I mean, obviously if you had listened to them and engaged with them, you would have had indications of what was happening and you would have been able to talk to them, but like parents,

the older authorities, again, know nothing and again are preaching nonsense things like moderation or this isn't true Islam or whatever baloney they're giving them today. And of course it means nothing. Meaning it is an effective. It's falling on deaf ears. Atron believes these messages won't be effective because they fundamentally misunderstand why the young medical students were drawn to the Islamic state. The authorities painted the recruits as drawn to nihilism. Atron thinks it has more to do with a twisted idealism.

The Islamic State Revolution is a revolution. There really isn't much difference I see in the impulse or the impetus to the Islamic State Revolution, then to the French Revolution or to the Bolshevik Revolution or to the National Socialist Revolution. And it appeals to the same sorts of people. Comparing the Islamic State to the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution doesn't mean it will succeed, lots of revolutions fail, but if Actron is right it does mean that it would be a big mistake to underestimate the draw of the Islamic State. In one ISIS video a young British man looks into the camera. He has a status

scope around his neck. He leans in with an earnest expression. All the people in England ask you again. All the Muslims over there, to Allah, leave the land of England and come to make it to here and we'll like to hear and endure to this land and help your brothers and sisters out here. Well, Allah, he there, there is a great cause being fought here and the caravan is leaving. George Orwell in his review of Mein Kampf back in 1939, I'm not crazy about that, Hitlerians, but this was a particularly insightful piece. He said, what is it about Mr. Hitler that appeals?

What is the essence of the problem? Look at our societies, capitalist societies, offer their people, ease, avoidance of risk and pain, security, and short the good life. And what is the result? Well, the Oxford Student Union, the cream of our intellectuals, votes they will never fight again. And Mr. Hitler, what is he offering his people? Glory, adventure, even death and destruction, but most of all transcendence and a feeling of self-sacrifice. So Mr. Hitler has understood the essence of human beings. Human beings need not just short working hours,

and comfort, and security, and avoidance of pain. They need at least intermittently a feeling of transcendence and self-sacrifice. And so 80 million people now fall down at his feet. And in fact, the German soldiers in World War II outfought on any measure the allied soldiers be they Russian or American or Brits. Scott Atron says he sees the same conviction among Islamic state fighters. He was recently talking with Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers, a short distance from the front lines in the battle with ISIS.

The Islamic state came in June of 2014 in about 80 trucks of four to five people at truck, about 350 people, to free a prison by the way of prison. Because freeing prisoners gains your recruits, they also massacred 600 Shia in that prison. But the Iraqi army trained by the United States, armed by the United States to the tune of billions of dollars, simply ran away. Now, there was one unit on the Mahmur Front in a place called Karamidi, where we had a few Iraqi soldiers embedded with the Peshmerga, and the reason they stayed was because their families actually lived in villages close by. And I asked them, why is it that your fellow soldiers And I ask them, why is it that your fellow soldiers simply ran away or melted into the city? And one said to me, they simply didn't want their heads cut off.

When we hear reports of beheadings or prisoners being set on fire, the Islamic states seemingly in discriminant violence shock us. But the shock can keep us from seeing that such theatrical displays of brutality actually serve psychological goals. The spilling of blood, the brutality, accomplishes two things, and usually has done that throughout human history and across cultures. First of all, it binds people together who are doing it, and the second thing it does

is it scares the hell out of enemies and fence centers. Coming up, we'll hear about a parent of a British medical student who left a promising career to join the Islamic State. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. When British engineer Ahmad Mutana realized his medical student son had left the family home in Cardiff in the United Kingdom to join the Islamic State, he was enraged. Police came to his home and showed him a video of his son, Nasir, trying to recruit others to join ISIS.

I feel sick and devastated that my son is caught up in this. He told Daily Mail. He was brought up to love and respect my country, which is Britain. I am his father, and naturally I am worried about his safety while he is out there, but I am also worried about the evil messages he is spreading in this video. Muthana said he rid his house of photographs of NASA, saying, it's a Muslim thing, you don't keep the devil in your house. Atron thinks it's understandable that parents would express shock, disbelief, and anger.

But he thinks a more productive approach is to look at the young people drawn to terrorist groups with a measure of empathy. By empathizing, I mean listening to people, trying to understand where they're coming from, why they believe what they do and act the way they do, without necessarily sympathizing in the sense that you don't have to agree with them. In fact, you may have to fight them, but it's always better to understand where they're coming from, even in order to fight them. Atron says his approach was inspired by the great anthropologist Margaret Mead and the dictum of an ancient Roman playwright. In recent testimony that you provided at the United Nations, you talked about something that you had learned

from Margaret Mead whom you worked with in New York many years ago. What exactly did Margaret Mead teach you? Well, she taught me that anthropology is basically a response, at least it was then, basically a response to Terence's dictum, nothing human is alien to me. Violent people, members of militant political groups and religious groups are people, just like everyone else. I want to take you back to something you told me a second ago. I just want to go back to this issue

of empathizing versus sympathizing, because when I look at the behavior of the Islamic state, and you sort of see this wanton disregard for human life, the deliberate cruelty, the beheadings, the rape, the enslavement of people, it's hard to bring yourself to think about empathizing with people who do this. Yes it is and that's why being an anthropologist often requires a special commitment to that sort of empathy. In the conventional narrative of how young people get recruited to groups such as ISIS, shadowy recruiters go and search of vulnerable people.

Atron and psychologist Aria and Marari think this isn't the way it usually happens. In a study he has conducted in Israel among captured prisoners, Marari has interviewed a number of would-be suicide bombers. For various reasons, these recruits didn't carry out their missions, their equipment didn't work, or they were caught before they could carry out an attack. Marari finds religious extremism is rarely a central motivator for these young people. He says most are driven by the political goal of ending the Israeli occupation. Now the political goals of Palestinian recruits fighting the Israeli occupation are different

than the political goals of ISIS recruits. But Marari's research shows there are underlying similarities in the psychological appeal of these groups. As in the case of ISIS, many Palestinian recruits report they are radicalized, not in mosques, but in university cafeterias well just imagine a young Palestinian 16 17 18 20 years old if it's with his friends in the universities cafeteria they are talking about yesterday suicide attack that took place in Jerusalem and everybody saying

What the great the guy that did it how brave he was how patriotic a hero and One of the guys there or perhaps more than one is that I'm an important young man Marginal in his own social circle, but he wants to be recognized as somebody. He wants to be appreciated. So he says, hey, you know, I would also carry out this, so he's at a tech. Someone over here is the boast, and word gets back to the commander of a group looking for

recruits. The commander sends for the young man. This 17, 18, 19 years old youngster stands in front of this elder commander, revered, famous, admired commander in the commander, and the commander has seen, I heard that you were willing to carry out a suicide attack. They don't call it suicide, of course. They call it a martyr, I mean, is that true? Now, what would the other, that young guy say? No, I was just bragging. He says oh yes of course and he thinks our wealth perhaps something will happen and they won't have to to carry it out eventually. The single best predictor of whether someone gets involved in a

terrorist organization is if their friends and peers are also involved. In the case of the medical students, waves of British Sudanese students have headed out to Syria. Akron told me that ISIS has explicitly laid out a path to gaining younger recruits from around the world. The strategy of the Islamic State is quite simple and very well spelled out. And it is, first of all, take advantage wherever there is chaos in the world.

Create chaos wherever the enemy allows us to do and how do we do that? Well in places like Europe what we're going to do is attack tourist centers, cafes, theaters, stadiums, why? Because these types of places cannot possibly be defended. There are just too many of them, there are too few security agencies and law enforcement, so it will terrorize the population and cause the states against us to disperse their resources in reckless ways that cannot possibly help them in the end. Second, we will appeal to the youth, the rebelliousness, the idealism, the adventure, the rebelliousness, the idealism, the

adventure, the search for glory, the desire for change that youth have. While the fools, they say, will preach moderation, wasatia, which is exactly what's been happening. We will offer them something great. And so what the Islamic State does and this explains why many of those people in Europe, young people are coming and from many other countries in the world, including the United States, is we will find out who in our enemy populations have grievances, have frustrated personal aspirations, have a need for something glorious, something that transcends themselves. We will draw that out and we will wed it to the story we have of how the world should change and why.

Over and over, Atron says, he finds that foreign recruits to the Islamic State are often marginal members of their own societies, people who feel like outsiders. Again, the Islamic State's message, why they're so good at it, is they take each of these personal stories, which will invest hundreds of hours in, and try to show why my personal frustration, your personal frustration, at this moment in your life. It's not because you couldn't get this job

or that you failed in this, your team lost or whatever. The reason that happened, you see, is because of this larger set of factors, of this larger world, a set of forces that have been arrayed against you, of which this is just a trivial part and forget about the trivial parts that affecting your life. Go now and deal with the real causes of the unhappiness. Not only of you, but of people like you around the world, the oppressed. When families of students who join the Islamic State appeal to them to come to their senses, the pleas are often ineffective because the young people have found the cause they think is greater than their parents, greater than their families, greater even than themselves.

You can see the same behavior among followers and other groups, and not just terrorist organizations, even non-violent groups fighting for social justice. What we find, and this is not just true for the Islamic State, this is true for people who are willing to sacrifice their lives and kill others at the same time across the board. And it's also true for movements that are peaceful, but where the people who are driving these movements are willing to shed their own blood. For example, the civil rights movement or movements like Gandhi's movement in India, they are committed to a set of values which are sacred. That means values which are immune to trade-offs. For example, you would not change your children,

or your religion, probably, or your country for all the money in China. And when you have these kinds of values which you will not trade off, and which are not subject to the standard constraints of material life, things that occurred in the distant past, or in distant places that are sacred are actually more important than things in the here and now. They're also oblivious to quantity. It doesn't matter if I kill one or I attract one or a thousand or no one as long as my intention is good and righteous. And once you lock into these values, they're immune to social pressures.

They're not norms. That is, even if you're best friends, your family, your loved ones are against you, you will not see an exit strategy. Scott Atron has conducted psychological experiments with captured Islamic state fighters on the battlefield. We were in Kierkuk. So there's a front there, mud walls that extend for a thousand kilometers.

And about every kilometer there's a mud turret with about twenty fighters inside. And that's where we were working. And we got a hold of some captured Islamic State fighters. And we ran these experiments. In one set of experiments, Atron evaluated how much a fighter had adopted the identity of the group over all the other identities the person might have. Atron and his colleagues found that when a fighter's identity fuses with the identity of the group, there is a psychological change that occurs.

We have many identities. We may be American or Indian or Red Sox fans or Yankee fans or lawyers or doctors or whatever we are today or tomorrow, but they have only one identity and they will fight and die not just for that group but for every single individual in that group. And once this happens we also have other measures which show they develop a sense of invincibility and actually perceive themselves, their own bodies, to be much bigger than they actually are, and they perceive the other group to be much weaker.

This idea has a lot of support elsewhere in the social sciences. In some ways, being part of a group is a way of creating an immortal version of yourself. When you remind people of their mortality, for example, they express stronger support for the groups to which they belong. You may die, but your identity in the group will outlive you. I asked Atron and Marari about how they would apply what they have learned to doing battle with the Islamic State. I think it's very important if you want to fight effectively against a militant Islam

you have first of all to defeat it physically. Despite what people say about hearts and minds, you know, in the second world war there was a Russian Soviet ambassador in London. His name was Maiski, Ivan Maesky. And once somebody asked Ambassador Maesky, what is a good psychological warfare, talking about cards and minds? What's a good psychological warfare? And Maesky replied, a good psychological warfare

is facts and figures. Facts being victories and figures being dead Germans. And I think in a bit more moderate sense, this applies also to the current situation. If you want to effectively fight ISIS, first of all, the, ISIS in the territory that has occupied successfully. That's the first thing you have to do, and I don't understand why the West hasn't died yet. Atron says psychological weapons might also be needed to fight ISIS. Preaching the virtues of moderation isn't going to work.

They think things will work out and telling them again and again this is in the true Islam. That alone isn't going to do it. You've got to get into their networks. You've got to befriend them. You've got to get the friends of it's like smoking. It's not showing them pictures of cancerous esophagy that are going to stop people from smoking. It's young people getting other young people to stop smoking. Of course, there can be constraining laws and barriers to smoking, but what will really stop them is if their friends have stopped. Two brothers, Ibrahim and Muhammad Ajid, I thought to be among the British medical students who left Sudan to join the Islamic State in Syria.

They left right before they were supposed to take their final exams in their last year of medical school. The last post on Muhammad's Facebook page is from December 30th, 2014. Most of his posts are of funny videos, pictures of his brother and friends, and soccer teams. Muhammad has 480 friends, likes cold play, and the fresh prints of Bel Air. Abraham has 546 friends. He likes Manchester United, Beyonce and Eminem, and the TV shows, The Boondocks, and Everybody Hades Chris. News reports show that recruits are not allowed to leave the Islamic State if they dislike

what they find when they get to Syria. The disloyal are often executed. The British medical students who left Sudan are in touch with their parents through social media apps. They offer few details of what they are doing except to say they are using their medical training. Sometimes they send texts which short audio messages. To their waiting families, these messages feel

turs and uninformed. They don't sound like the young people they used to be. Their parents say they sound different. Hidden Brain is produced by Karam Agar Kalasin, Max Nestrak, Maggie Pennman, Chris Banderayf, and Jenny Schmidt. Special thanks this week to Walter Ray Watson and Daniel Schuchin. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also listen to my work on your local public radio station. If you liked this episode, consider giving us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It'll help others find the show.

I'm Shankar Vedantan and this is NPR.