Why extremism loves company



Why do people become violent extremists? You might speculate that the answer is poverty. U.S. President George W. Bush thought so: “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror.” Or you might think a lack of education explains it. Laura Bush thought so: “A lasting victory in the war against terror depends on educating the world’s children.”


Suicide bombers are likely to have more income and more education than most people in their home nation, research shows. A few years after the attacks of 9/11, people in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey with higher than average incomes were no less likely to say that suicide attacks against Westerners were justified. People with more education were actually more likely to reach that conclusion.

Similarly, among Palestinians, support for violence against Israeli targets is pervasive — not lower among people with relatively high earnings and education than it is among those who are illiterate and unemployed.



The original experiments, conducted in 1961 by James Stoner, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked as follows. A number of Americans were assembled into groups and asked whether they would like to take certain hypothetical risks — to try a new job, to invest in a foreign country, to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp, or to run for political office.

As it turned out, participation in group decision-making made people more inclined to take risks. Stoner’s findings were later replicated by many others, leading to the conclusion that when people act in groups, they experience what Stoner called a “risky shift.”




In France, for example, group members who start out suspicious of the U.S. become even more so after they exchange points of view. If people are inclined to want to punish some wrongdoer, their discussions with one another tend to lead them to favor a more severe punishment.

Likewise, people with radical tendencies become more radical after group discussion — and more willing to favor breaking the law.






  • http://www.sheldonthinks.com/ Andrew Sheldon

    Thank you for conveying how little academia knows. State funding model should be considered an “extreme ideology’ since the funds are extorted from the public, and given that taxpayers have no capacity to challenge the ‘group’, its fair to say there is no counterparty discretion to withhold your funding. Terrorists fighting terrorists.

  • Mahesh Bhardwaj

    There’s a certain class of people which is composed of lesser number of educated and more ignorant who can be moulded into doing heinous acts. All such people lack reason and commonsense in universal values. Now put on this the power of religion, you have a created human bombs. Rather than conducting artificial research it is better to learn directly from self-righteous fundamentalists and their disciples. You will quickly come to conclusion, as soon as a reasonable dialog is begun, they either run away or call you devil. I have been doing this kind of research for 45 years to see if reason-based dialog with this class was possible. On a one-on-one basis yes. In a group, no! Thank you!