http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/potential-militant-extremist-inside-1343
The fanatical thinking that leads to militant extremism is a
seductive narrative that may have a surprisingly widespread low-level
resonance in the general population, finds one study.
By Lee Drutman
July 20, 2009
Ever since 9/11, the threat of militant extremism has loomed large in
the American psyche. But how much do we really know about the
militant-extremist mindset?
According to one new study, we may actually be able to learn more
than we think just by looking in the mirror. That's the conclusion
from group of psychologists who presented undergraduates in two
countries with a broad range of framings common to militant extremist
fanatical groups. In survey after survey, students generally failed
to strongly dissociate themselves from the sentiments.
"If, in fact, extremist thinking is something bizarre, you'd expect
people to disagree with the statements," said Gerard Saucier, a
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the lead
researcher on the study. "What you get instead is that they're
failing to disavow them. A typical showing is a mixture of agree and
disagree." The findings are reported in the May issue of Perspectives
on Psychological Science.
In order to determine what goes into the militant-extremist mindset,
Saucier and his colleagues (a pair of Oregon psychology grad
students, Laura Geuy Akers and Seraphine Shen-Miller; Goran Knezevic,
a professor of psychology at the University of Belgrade; and Lazar
Stankov, currently a visiting professor at National Institute of
Education, Singapore, formerly a research scientist with Educational
Testing Service) first read widely. They examined the published
materials of 13 militant extremist groups, which they defined as
groups that combine fanatical beliefs and values and advocacy of
extremist means, including violence.
The extremists came from across regions, religions and cultures. They
ranged from the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Germany) to Meir Kahane and
followers (Palestine and Israel) to the Lord's Resistance Army
(Uganda) to the Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka) to Aum Shinrikyo (Japan) to
the Shining Path (Peru) to home-grown U.S. extremists like the
Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh.
The researchers then extracted 16 key themes that occurred over and
over in the texts. Taken together, the themes cohere into what
Saucier and colleagues describe as a "seductive narrative": The
modern world has fallen into a catastrophic state. The ordinary
mechanisms of change are no longer valid. Only extreme, violent
measures can save things. This is a war of us against them, a war of
good versus evil, a war of necessity. Any and all means are not only
justified, they are glorified. God is on our side. In the end utopia
will be restored.
"The persuasive force comes from the storyline," Saucier said. "When
I tried putting all the themes together to get a composite storyline,
it was kind of striking. What struck me was the highly emotional kind
of thinking. It has a lot of a kind of motivational force to it." (In
the journal article, Saucier and colleagues call this story "the
seductive narrative in militant-extremist thinking" and write that it
"may seem like a dramatic comic book.")
Then, the researchers asked 215 American undergraduates and 297
advanced high school students from Serbia how much they agreed or
disagreed with statements. On a five-point scale (going from strongly
disagree to strongly agree), American undergraduates averaged 2.5,
with nobody averaging higher than a 4; Serbian students averaged
2.95, with only very few scoring 4 or higher.
"The simple but unattainable position is to see militant extremists
as some kind of maverick freaks or severely mentally disturbed people
or exceptionally evil," said Knezevic, the University of Belgrade
psychology professor, in an e-mail. But, he noted, "the psychological
constituents of it are omnipresent in humans. ... Consequently, the
immense recruiting potential for all sorts of future extreme and
destructive political programs will continue to be present in human societies."
A depressing statement, perhaps, but the researchers hope that by
identifying the dangerous thought patterns, they can promote modes of
thinking that they call "antithetical to militant extremism."
These include the general virtues of toleration, respect for rules
and ethical responsibility for actions, as well as being comfortable
with the imperfections of the world and not longing for some
glorified past or future utopia or dwelling on some current
catastrophe. They describe 16 such modes in the journal article. "The
pattern of thinking should be promoted everywhere as part of
educational standards," Knezevic said.
Saucier suggested that better understanding militant extremist
thinking can help "to defuse the phenomenon, because the story line
may be a kind of a key glue in how movements operate, and so a big
piece is just understanding that." Saucier also thought that such an
understanding might allow pollsters to better design questions to
gauge the levels of support for such movements internationally.
But while militant extremist thinking may lie dormant in many people,
it takes certain conditions to activate the thinking. One is the
general condition in society. "Failed states, oppressive governments,
factors like that," Saucier said. "There is a good chance those broad
contextual factors will heighten tendencies towards extremist
patterns." This explains why brutal regimes often gain popular
support when a society descends into chaos.
The other is the social context. "It depends on who you hang around
with," Saucier said. If someone prone to militant extremist thinking
falls in with a group of similarly minded folks, the individuals are
likely to feed off each other.
Recently, far-right nationalist parties have been gaining ground in
some European countries as the economy continues to struggle. For
example, in the Netherlands, the nationalist Freedom Party did
surprisingly well. And in the United Kingdom, two members of the
British National Party who were just elected to the European
Parliament recently made news by saying the EU should sink boats of
African immigrants in order to stop Europe from being "swamped by the
Third World." Such sentiments may lead to more widespread militant
extremist thinking.
"I see indications that ethnonationalism is a pretty good
place-setter for militant extremism wherever the ethnonationalists
feel particularly obstructed and adopt an angry and aggressive tone,"
said Saucier, who is now beginning to explore the psychological
construct behind such thinking. "It is pretty easy to see that
ethnonationalism can easily get one well into a militant-extremist
thinking pattern because of the emphasis on fervor-promoting themes
like an obstructed group, an illegitimate government, a glorious past
and so on."
In the larger context of personality research, the militant-extremism
study is also an attempt, as Stankov put it, to ask: "Is there
something new that captures that militant mindset of terrorists or
can it be understood in terms of the well-established constructs from
the broad areas of personality and social psychology?"
The question of evil, of course, is a longstanding one in modern
psychology. Following World War II, a lot of psychological research
investigated if there was a particular fascist mindset or personality
that would explain the rise of brutal totalitarian states. Theodore
Adorno, for example, developed a theory of the authoritarian
personality, and came up with a set of tests to rank one's propensity
to this kind of thinking. Stanley Milgram's famous Obedience to
Authority experiments, meanwhile, seemed to suggest given the "right"
conditions, most people would follow orders even when the orders were
to administer a potentially fatal electric shock.
Saucier and colleagues, however, draw more inspiration from a 1951
work by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature
of mass movements, which posits fanaticism as something different
from Nazi/Fascist/Communist authoritarianism, but no less dangerous.
"Hoffer's work is based on a much broader look at fanatical groups,"
Saucier said. "And one of the things that is going on in this work is
that we're going back to a different foundation looking at attitudes,
one not coming out of the fascism-authoritarian school, but one with
a much broader background."
Finally, in an era in which so much psychological research focuses on
happiness, Stankov notes that it is important to remember that most
people also have a dark side that would be dangerous to ignore.
"Our work can be seen as a reaction to what is sometimes called
'positive psychology.'" Stankov said. "What we are doing is saying
that 'hate' is still around and it can be harmful and we need to
understand its nature and its workings in society."
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