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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Together we can. 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 in the West. It's not piled assault weapons, ammunition, and pipe mops.
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 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 Atrin to explore the strange hole 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 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 Marari would describe as peer pressure in university cafeterias? 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 outsiders. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vetantam.
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 my DeTere organizations, Atron and Marari suggest that peer 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 hear. I got a call from the medical school in Cartouma 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 was completely unexpected in what she'd do about it.
What should the school do about it? This is Scott Atron. 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, the 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. 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 that 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 a 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 dumbstruck.
The heartbroken sister of one student spoke to the Daily Mail 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 help her more than we do. My little sister, she's an ASAR student. They're praying on young innocent girls and it's just not right. Atran 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 isn't effective. It's falling on deaf ears. Atran 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. Atran 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 than 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 Atran 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, talk a lot, leave the land of England and come to make it to him and we like to hear them and indulge with Islam and help your brothers and sisters out here.
Well, why are there? There is a great cause being fought here. And the caravan is leaving. George Orwell in his review of Minkumph back in 1939, I'm not crazy about that, his larry almost, 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 there, 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 out fought on any measure, the allied soldiers, be they Russian or American or Brits.
Scott Atran 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 45 people, about 350 people, to free a prison by this prison, because freeing prisoners, the gains you recruit, the 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 Mosmore Front in a place called Garameti, 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. But I asked 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 State seemingly indiscriminate 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 the fence centers. Starting 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. Bank Holiday Value Sorted.
Sentra. Live every day. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shaka Vedanta.
When British engineer Ahmed 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, Nasser, trying to recruit others to join ISIS. I feel sick and devastated that my son is caught up in this, he told the Daily Mail. He was brought up to love and respect my country, which is Britain.
I am his father, and naturally I'm worried about his safety while he's out there, but I'm also worried about the evil messages he is spreading in this video. Mutana said he rid his house of photographs of Nasser 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 response to Terence's dictum, nothing, human, is alien to me. Violent people are 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 in search of vulnerable people. Atron and psychologist Arian 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 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. I'm talking about yesterday's suicide attack, how brave he was. 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. At least out to suicide they take him. They don't call it suicide, of course. They call it a market.
The young guy says no one was just bragging. He says oh yes, of course. I will, perhaps something will happen and they won't have to without eventually. The single best predictor of whether someone gets involved in a terrorist organization is that friends and peers are also involved.
In the case of the medical students, waves of British student students have headed out to Syria. Atron told me that ISIS has explicitly laid out a path to gaining young 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 search for glory, the desire for change that youth have.
While the fools, they say, will preach moderation. Was itia? 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 wet it to the story we have of how the world should change and why. Over and over, Adron 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 we 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 you failed in this or your team lost or whatever.
The reason that happened, you see, is because of this larger set of factors, of this larger world set of forces that have been arrayed against you, of which this is just a trivial part. And forget about the trivial parts that affect 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 in 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 trade 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 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 pressure. They're not norms. That is, even if your best friends, your family, your loved ones are against you, you will not see an exit strategy. Scott Atrin has conducted psychological experiments with captured Islamic State fighters on the battlefield.
We were in Kyukkuk. So there's a front there, mud walls that extend for a thousand kilometers and about every kilometer, as a mud turret with about 20 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, Atrin evaluated how much a fighter had adopted the identity of the group over all the other identities the person might have.
Atrin 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 do in battle with the Islamic State. I say about the part in my team. In the Second World War, there was a Russian Soviet ambassador in London. His name was Myski, Ivan Myski.
And once somebody asked Ambassador Myski, what is a good psychological warfare? What's a good psychological world? And Myski replied, a good psychological warfare is facts and facts being victorious 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, defeat ISIS in the territory that occupied successfully, that's the first thing that you have to do. And I don't understand why the West hasn't done it 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 isn't 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. It's like smoking. And pictures of cancer, esophagi, 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 Mohammed Ajid, are 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 Mohammed's Facebook page is from December 30, 2014. Most of his posts are of funny videos, pictures of his brother and friends, and soccer teams. Mohammed has 480 friends, likes Coldplay and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Ibrahim has 546 friends, he likes Manchester United, Beyonce and Eminem, and the TV shows, The Boondocks and everybody hates 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 all your messages. To their waiting families, these messages feel terse and uninformative. They don't sound like the young people they used to be.
Their parents say they sound different. Hidden Brain is produced by Karima Gercalison, Max Nastrak, Maggie Penman, Chris Bandarev and Jenny Schmidt. Special thanks this week to Walter A Watson and Daniel Shukin. 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 like this episode, consider giving us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast. It'll help others find the show. I'm Shankar Vietanthin, and this is NPR.
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