Psychology can be used to combat violent extremism

This is based on the forecast several decades of research My colleagues and I at the University of Oxford set out to find out what motivates people to fight and die for their groups. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys and psychological experiments, to gather information from a wide range of groups, including tribal fighters, armed insurgents, terrorists, ordinary soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.

We have found that life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to intertwine. We call it “identity fusion”. Mixed individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their group, and this applies not only to acts of heroism that we would applaud—such as saving children from burning buildings or shooting 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 ordering pairs of such circles so that they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then a little, then a little more, etc. until the small circle is completely inside the big circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best represents their relationship with the group. People who choose someone where the small circle is inside the big circle are called “combined”. 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 will behave like a broken wing to scare predators away from their young. One species – Australia’s magnificent fairy shrew – lures predators away from its young by darting movements and chirping sounds to mimic the behavior of a tasty mouse. Humans will also go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children (except identical twins), who share more genes than other family members. But unusually in the animal world, humans go further, putting themselves in danger to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient times, such tribes were so small that everyone knew everyone. These local groups bonded through shared trials of painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.

Today, the merger is spreading to larger groups, thanks to the ability of the world’s media, including social media, to flood us with images of horrific suffering in distant regional conflicts.

When I met a former leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization in Indonesia, he told me that he was first radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of his Muslim brothers by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. But two decades later, 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 are shrinking the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be recreated on a large scale with the click of a button and broadcast to millions of people thousands of miles away.

Unity based on shared suffering can be powerful, but it is not enough on its own to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are needed to make a lethal cocktail: group intimidation, demonization of the enemy, and belief in the absence of peaceful alternatives. In regions like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly filmed and shared around the world, it is natural that the rates of fusion among horrified onlookers will increase. If people believe that a peaceful solution is impossible, violent extremism will spiral.