Battle Tested (The Psychology of Armed Conflicts)

[William Hung]

Battle Tested
by David Berreby

Link: Battle Tested | Psychology Today

This is a very good article on the psychology of armed conflicts. I was going to post it in the fascism/socialism thread to support my views there but thought this article is worthy of a separate thread. Please click on the link to read the full article, it’s worth it.

I will only paste some snippets here for the sake of brevity and copyright.

Battle Tested

War has long been the subject of history, philosophy, and poetry. Now, science may be revealing the hard truth about why men fight—and what could make them stop...

...Wilson had arrived in Damascus planning to learn Arabic as part of her doctoral research in medieval Arabic philosophy, but quickly discovered that when living there, “you can’t help but get absorbed in the politics.” At a conference, she happened to meet anthropologist Scott Atran, who for 20 years has studied people who participate in violent action on behalf of a group or a cause. When Atran offered Wilson an opportunity to collaborate with him, she jumped at the chance.

Since then, she has worked in several conflict zones in the region, and among the things she has learned is to adapt her research technique to local mores. For instance, while psychologists often ask subjects to rate their feelings on a scale of 1 to 10, such blunt quantification is “an unheard of way of answering a question” in the Middle East. “They look at you and say, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ So we do not ask with scales anymore. We’ll use images of fighters or we’ll ask them a question, and when they say yes or no, we’ll say, ‘Yes very, very much? Or yes only a bit?’ Or, ‘Are you not quite sure—right in the middle?’”

With the captured ISIS fighters, she plunged into her experiment, with its seemingly odd questions and images on flash cards. From their fellow believers, the men were used to hearing that establishing the Islamic State’s caliphate was God’s work. From their enemies, they were used to hearing the opposite—that ISIS was bad. Wilson managed to engage them by showing that she was not expecting either of these rote answers. “We’re not coming in and saying, ‘What’s it like to live under ISIS?’ or any of the questions they’re very used to. We’re asking something that makes them say ‘What?’ It gets them out of whatever prepared answers they had.” Measuring their true feelings about the relative strength of different groups in the region was the first step in the experiment. Af ter that, other tests would measure the extent to which the fighters identified with groups and their values. Despite the alien nature of Wilson’s line of inquiry, she found that it seized the men’s attention and they freely offered answers.

For millennia, philosophers and poets, historians and political economists have offered explanations for why men fight, with theories primarily based on rhetoric, ideology, or emotion. Yet Wilson and Atran are part of a growing number of researchers who are bringing the tools of science to bear on the study of conflict. That may sound unremarkable, but it’s actually a revolutionary approach to understanding the ancient scourges of war, genocide, and other manifestations of intergroup hatred and violence. Employing systematic research methods, these pioneering scholars are examining the pathology of war in much the same manner that biologists examine the pathology of disease. They hope to do nothing less than decipher the origins of conflict—and ultimately find new ways to stop it.

The Banality Of Evil
One benefit of applying scientific methods to the question of why we fight is that it can clear away misconceptions—the things that “everyone knows” about conflict but that have rarely been tested and, when they are, often prove to be false. One of the most common misconceptions, beloved of partisans in all conf licts as well as many who support combatants from a distance, is that people on the “other side” are abnormal—deluded, cruel, perhaps even insane. In a recent interview, for example, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, said of ISIS: “They are terrorists; they’re criminals. Most of them are psychopathic thugs—murderers who use a religious concept and mask themselves in that religious construct.”

But researchers have established that the image of the “crazy enemy” simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a reflection of outgroup bias, one of the oldest and most robust findings from the annals of social psychology. It shows that we prefer people we perceive as members of our group—however loosely that may be defined—and are biased against those who are not. When groups fight, the natural bias against an outgroup is further exacerbated byfear and resentment.

In contrast to how we perceive them, the majority of terrorists, insurgents, and perpetrators of mass killing who have been tested by scientists have proven to be basically like the rest of us. That’s not to say that participating in a genocide or blowing oneself up in a crowded market is normal, but such behavior is not evidence of personality disorder or other serious psychopathology; rather, it’s an adaptive state of mind that mentally healthy people are entirely capable of adopting. In the case of Islamist terrorist groups, Atran says, “most foreign volunteers and supporters fall within the mid-ranges of what social scientists call the normal distribution of attributes like empathy, compassion, idealism, and wanting to help rather than hurt other people.” It’s proof of what the mid-20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” in her consideration of the seeming ordinariness of Nazis who committed atrocities in World War II.

“Ours is a ‘banality of evil’ approach,” says Hammad Sheikh, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research and collaborator with Atran and Wilson. Sheikh’s personal interest in the psychological origins of group violence began when he was growing up in Germany. “I could never believe that the Nazis were these evil people who had taken over. Millions of ordinary people had followed Hitler, and I met them. They had been fanatics. But in my childhood, they were nice old people shaking my hand and giving me chocolate.”

Not only are perpetrators of conflict not the cold-blooded psychopaths they’re often assumed to be; they may actually be distinguished for having an unusually high degree of compassion. In his studies of the neural mechanisms of prejudice and empathy, Emile Bruneau, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, has found that some terrorists scored higher than average on measures of empathy. Their intense empathy is limited, however, to members of their own group. “The problem is not that they lack empathy,” Bruneau says. “They have plenty. It’s just not distributed evenly.”

Why We Fight
If terrorists and genocidal murderers are not insane or intrinsically wicked, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are coolly rational either. Such is the equal and opposite error often made in thinking about mass violence. Leaders of modern states frequently assume that their opponents are out to maximize their largely material rewards and minimize their pain. They are thought to respond to incentives (“We’ll give you food and other aid”) and avoid disincentives (“We’ll bomb you”). But Atran, who has talked to far more terrorists and likely received far more death threats than any other social scientist, has found that this kind of horse-trading is usually anathema to people in conflict zones.

In fact, it’s anathema to most of us. That is because people of all cultures hold “sacred values”—things that are too cherished to be compromised. For example, you might relinquish a weekend day to work for money. But if your religion prohibits working on the Sabbath, no amount of money can compel you to do so. Anything—a nation, a religious landmark, a legal status—can be construed as sacred, at which point defending it is perceived as a matter of right and wrong, not of costs and benefits.

Negotiating transactionally with people who are motivated by moral imperatives is bound only to infuriate them. As Jeremy Ginges, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research, wrote in a paper published last year, “Regardless of the specific issue (whether it concerns the right to make salt or to protect an old growth rain forest, a ‘holy’ city, or a national boundary), all sacred values appear to be defined by a taboo against material trade-offs.”

Although the human distinction between values and costs is universal, what we assign to each category varies widely. Something that’s venerated on one side of a dispute may be meaningless to the other, leaving plenty of room for misunderstandings or good-faith offers that can make conflict worse, not better. Ominously, a survey of some 1,400 Iranians conducted a few years ago by Atran and his colleagues found that 14 percent of them saw the maintenance of their country’s nuclear program as sacred.

Worse yet, two sides can regard the same thing as hallowed, setting the stage for a serious impasse. Such is the case in a number of confrontations around the world that seem fundamentally intractable: India and Pakistan fighting over Kashmir, Russia and Western allies over Ukraine, and, most obviously, Israel and the Palestinians over their disputed land. A survey by Sheikh, Ginges, and Atran in 2013 found that 86 percent of Palestinians consider “protecting Palestinian rights over Jerusalem” as a value ranked just slightly less than “protecting the family” and equal to “fairness to others.” The “right of return”—the demand of Palestinians to be able to return to the ancestral homeland from which their families fled during Israel’s establishment in 1948—was held sacred by 78 percent.

These findings may sound like grounds for despair, but the researchers argue that acknowledgment of an adversary’s sacred values—even if they conflict with one’s own—can make negotiations more successful. This is not just because it allows negotiators to avoid the error of offering to horse-trade over an issue that’s impervious to negotiation. It’s because people often respond well to having their sacred values acknowledged, even if that recognition comes in the form of a gesture that makes no practical difference. As Atran and the political scientist Robert Axelrod wrote several years ago, by making “symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit”—for example, an apology for a past wrong or an acknowledgment of the other side’s legitimate right to its position—negotiators “might open the way to resolving seemingly irresolvable conflicts.” In some cases, an apology means more than a very large pile of money.

A thorough understanding of the nature of deeply held values could also eliminate time-wasting and posturing. After all, every side in a political conflict claims that it’s fighting for something fundamental, be it the right to eat whale meat in Japan or to walk around naked in San Francisco. Accurate surveys of people’s attitudes could separate a true values clash from a situation where leaders are just lobbing rhetoric.

What’s more, measuring the degree to which a value is perceived as essentially holy can shed light on behavior that has traditionally been considered impossible to predict or quantify. That was Wilson’s objective in her recent survey in Iraq, which was aimed at testing a method that could predict “willingness to fight”—the spirit of self-sacrifice and ruthless pursuit of victory that, for example, makes ISIS fighters so determined. United States officials believe that this quality is, as President Obama described it last year, “imponderable.”

Atran, Wilson, and Sheikh have argued that willingness to fight is actually quite possible to ponder, and even predict, if two things are known: the extent to which an individual feels his personal identity is fused with a collective identity, and the extent to which he thinks the fight is in defense of sacred values.

With a combination of images and questions, Wilson asked the men she met in the trailer how intensely they identified with various values and group labels (“democracy,” “Kurdishness,” “Iraq,” “Islam”). Later, she asked them to rate how much they would sacrifice for the values and identities that meant the most to them. Would they be willing to die? To kill someone? To kill a child? Crunched as data, the answers to these questions may reveal something critical and measurable about a person’s willingness to fight in a war.

Cure For Conflict?
Understanding how people become mass murderers, terrorists, and exploiters, or even how they come to support barbarousness from the sidelines, is only half the challenge. The other half, of course, is understanding what gets people out of those ranks. Here, too, the problem is not that we lack for theories, but that we have too many explanations on offer, few of which have been tested.

...(I think I’ll stop pasting here. The rest of the article is about conflict resolution, which is also very interesting but too long too paste)

@Nihonjin1051 my friend what’s your expert comment on this? Is the author and content academically sound? I hope this is not just “pop-psychology”.

@jhungary @gambit any comment on this given your past military experiences?

@WebMaster @waz @Indos @Desert Fox @LeveragedBuyout @jamahir @FairAndUnbiased @sahaliyan @Kaniska and all.

 

[William Hung]

For millennia, philosophers and poets, historians and political economists have offered explanations for why men fight, with theories primarily based on rhetoric, ideology, or emotion. Yet Wilson and Atran are part of a growing number of researchers who are bringing the tools of science to bear on the study of conflict. That may sound unremarkable, but it’s actually a revolutionary approach to understanding the ancient scourges of war, genocide, and other manifestations of intergroup hatred and violence. Employing systematic research methods, these pioneering scholars are examining the pathology of war in much the same manner that biologists examine the pathology of disease. They hope to do nothing less than decipher the origins of conflict—and ultimately find new ways to stop it...

...Understanding how people become mass murderers, terrorists, and exploiters, or even how they come to support barbarousness from the sidelines, is only half the challenge.

@Desert Fox I hope this gives you a bit more details (and makes it more convincing perhaps) why I preferred my method of analysis in that fascism/socialism thread and why I focussed on the more “fundamental” level (human psychology instead of differences observed on the surface). My methodology is trying to answer this “half challenge”.

Not only are perpetrators of conflict not the cold-blooded psychopaths they’re often assumed to be; they may actually be distinguished for having an unusually high degree of compassion. In his studies of the neural mechanisms of prejudice and empathy, Emile Bruneau, acognitive neuroscientist at MIT, has found that some terrorists scored higher than average on measures of empathy. Their intense empathy is limited, however, to members of their own group. “The problem is not that they lack empathy,” Bruneau says. “They have plenty. It’s just not distributed evenly.”

@jamahir this is what I tried to emphasise in the other threads about “true” socialism being rooted in the “empathy for the strangers” and what sets it apart from fascism and other ideology. The care and empathy for the “others”, for everyone (internationalism) instead of just for your own group.

 

[Desert Fox]

@Desert Fox I hope this gives you a bit more details (and makes it more convincing perhaps) why I preferred my method of analysis in that fascism/socialism thread and why I focussed on the more “fundamental” level (human psychology instead of differences observed on the surface). My methodology is trying to answer this “half challenge”.

I responded in the Fascism thread @Yorozuya

 

[LeveragedBuyout]

Battle Tested
by David Berreby

Link: Battle Tested | Psychology Today

This is a very good article on the psychology of armed conflicts. I was going to post it in the fascism/socialism thread to support my views there but thought this article is worthy of a separate thread. Please click on the link to read the full article, it’s worth it.

This is why I loathe academia. Let's review the findings:

But researchers have established that the image of the “crazy enemy” simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a reflection of outgroup bias, one of the oldest and most robust findings from the annals of social psychology. It shows that we prefer people we perceive as members of our group—however loosely that may be defined—and are biased against those who are not. When groups fight, the natural bias against an outgroup is further exacerbated by fear and resentment.

I'm happy that my tax dollars went to pay for the research that led to this profound conclusion. Who knew that we prefer people like us, and mistrust people who are different?

In contrast to how we perceive them, the majority of terrorists, insurgents, and perpetrators of mass killing who have been tested by scientists have proven to be basically like the rest of us.

Raise your hand if you think there are terrorist groups, mass murderers, or criminals who believe themselves to be evil. I'll wait. Ok, so they're not evil. Are they normal?

That’s not to say that participating in a genocide or blowing oneself up in a crowded market is normal, but such behavior is not evidence of personality disorder or other serious psychopathology; rather, it’s an adaptive state of mind that mentally healthy people are entirely capable of adopting.

The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that it's not normal to commit genocide, but it's also normal for mentally healthy people to adapt to the mindset that enables genocide. In short, it's not normal, but it's also normal. All clear?

In the case of Islamist terrorist groups, Atran says, “most foreign volunteers and supporters fall within the mid-ranges of what social scientists call the normal distribution of attributes like empathy, compassion, idealism, and wanting to help rather than hurt other people.”

Normal people who are empathetic, compassionate, and want to help other people [in their group]; and they want to inflict harm on people outside their group. These are new and exciting findings, that I'm certain no one can claim to have pondered before. Let me shovel some more of my tax dollars into this study.

Not only are perpetrators of conflict not the cold-blooded psychopaths they’re often assumed to be; they may actually be distinguished for having an unusually high degree of compassion. In his studies of the neural mechanisms of prejudice and empathy, Emile Bruneau, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, has found that some terrorists scored higher than average on measures of empathy. Their intense empathy is limited, however, to members of their own group.

These are normal, compassionate people, who happen to commit atrocities against members of the out-group. Nothing to see here, move along.

If terrorists and genocidal murderers are not insane or intrinsically wicked, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are coolly rational either. Such is the equal and opposite error often made in thinking about mass violence.

I'm quite pleased that this research is so definitive.

In fact, it’s anathema to most of us. That is because people of all cultures hold “sacred values”—things that are too cherished to be compromised.

Sacred > norms, sacred > compassion. I had no idea. Until terrorists hijacked planed on 9/11, we all concluded that terrorists were normal, compassionate people who held to the same value system that we did. Who knew that adherence to radical Islam contributed to or even drove their motivation?

Although the human distinction between values and costs is universal, what we assign to each category varies widely. Something that’s venerated on one side of a dispute may be meaningless to the other, leaving plenty of room for misunderstandings or good-faith offers that can make conflict worse, not better.

You're probably as bored of my sarcasm as I am, so I don't need to say it. I think anthropologists should be required to take courses in negotiation before wasting tax dollars discovering the fundamentals of negotiation.

concluding that “the causal effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown.”

Human nature is hard to overcome. Remember the first quote? I don't think the authors of the study remember the first quote:

But researchers have established that the image of the “crazy enemy” simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a reflection of outgroup bias, one of the oldest and most robust findings from the annals of social psychology. It shows that we prefer people we perceive as members of our group—however loosely that may be defined—and are biased against those who are not. When groups fight, the natural bias against an outgroup is further exacerbated by fear and resentment.

I won't bother with the inconclusive Rwanda/Congo contrast, which reveals nothing about solving the question of war.

The possibility of engineering people away from their natural prejudices and impulses sounds like the plot of a science-fiction story. It’s exhilarating to imagine a scenario where the causes of a suicidal willingness to fight could be identified and eliminated, where propaganda promoting group violence could be instantly negated by a well-tested antidote, and where psychological profiles help tailor a perfect anticonflict message to each person’s distinct biases.

Can we be honest, and get to the point: this is left-wing fantasy. The causes of war are simple, and simple to understand, and human nature cannot be altered without altering humanity itself. If the authors are proposing the development and widespread distribution of soma, I'll leave them to their delusions.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on how this study advanced our understanding of war, because I am left confounded by the article's contradictions.

 

[Aepsilons]

This is why I loathe academia. Let's review the findings:

 

[macnurv]

Its a very informative article, as far as the validity of tools used is concerned the information is not accurate. The tools used to collect data should have been described in more details, but as this is not a peer reviewed scientific article but an opinion piece the authors must have thought the background of researcher and limited information to materials and methods should suffice, although I am second guessing here.
Furthermore the researchers are not unveiling any breakthrough, concepts such as Banality of Evil are not new, When groups or nations commit violence against other groups which they perceive as outsiders or others, at a deeper level the perpetrators of this violence believe in the fairness of their cause. Dehumanizing your opponent is another well known state, once we convince ourselves that the other side is not human, the doors are open to commit all sorts of unspeakable atrocities.
I don't agree with authors suggestion that people just don't have any psychopathic tendencies when they commit genocide, leaders who in the past had lead their nations to commit such acts had been clinical or some times sub-clinical psychopaths. It is not a slam-dunk science.
In today's world role of media can not be stressed enough, as example of Rawanda is used and how radio was used to instigate mass murder, if Rawandas had access to Television, the brain washing might have been even more effective. Todays media is all about FEAR, and anyone with few working brain cells can actually see the corrosive effects of this on society.
Although there is a lot that can be said, but the crux of this piece is absolutely spot on. And lastly the abstract concept of sacred (different for different groups) is the driving force behind such conflicts.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

No doubt, this is useful to know, but it is also not a breakthrough.

Yes, people are dehumanized all the time before a conflict. This is why I find the dehumanization and reduction of Asians to caricature and stereotype in Hollywood media to be highly disturbing. If it was just about the story, I don't give a shit because I can choose to not watch it. However, this is not about my preferences. I don't prefer to watch alot of things.

This is the exact sort of dehumanization of Chinese that resembles what Genghis Khan did back in the 12th and 13th century and what the Germans and Japanese did back in the early 20th century.

I might be paranoid, but the Hollywood narrative seems to me like the prelude to conquest and occupation of China. This is not without precedent - celebrated author Jack London was a rabid racist who wrote a book on the genocide of Chinese and the colonization of China by whites.

Of course, any attempted conquest of Chinese will become a global holocaust when nukes start flying.

 

[William Hung]

You're probably as bored of my sarcasm as I am, so I don't need to say it.

No sir, I always appreciate your comments. Sarcasm is good, as long as it doesn’t misrepresent the article.

I'm happy that my tax dollars went to pay for the research that led to this profound conclusion. Who knew that we prefer people like us, and mistrust people who are different?

I think you have misread the article. The author (or the mentioned researcher) did not spend their time to come up with the theory of “outgroup bias”. He/she was just quoting that commonly accepted view in social psychology to hightlight their findings that the ISIS terrorists in their study was “quite” normal and not psychopaths like what most people think (like how that CIA director have portrayed them). Personally, this was a surprise for me.

Raise your hand if you think there are terrorist groups, mass murderers, or criminals who believe themselves to be evil. I'll wait. Ok, so they're not evil. Are they normal?

Not sure what you mean by this.

The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that it's not normal to commit genocide, but it's also normal for mentally healthy people to adapt to the mindset that enables genocide. In short, it's not normal, but it's also normal. All clear?

The article did not say it is normal for mentally healthy people to adapt to a mindset that enables genocide. It simply said
“an adaptive state of mind [the one that enables genocide] that mentally healthy people are entirely capable of adopting”. “Adopting” and “having the capability to adopt” are not the same thing. There is no contradiction.

Normal people who are empathetic, compassionate, and want to help other people [in their group]; and they want to inflict harm on people outside their group. These are new and exciting findings, that I'm certain no one can claim to have pondered before. Let me shovel some more of my tax dollars into this study.



These are normal, compassionate people, who happen to commit atrocities against members of the out-group. Nothing to see here, move along.

The finding is that these terrorists has normal emotional characteristics that disqualify them from being regarded as psychopath, which your former CIA director have mistaken them to be. And I assume those in the CIA has some influence on US foreign policy.

Human nature is hard to overcome. Remember the first quote? I don't think the authors of the study remember the first quote:

Yes the causes of conflicts are somewhat known (human nature, outgroup outgroup bias, etc), he/she has not forgotten anything about that. What he/she said in your quote was that the causal effects of common conflict reduction measures (media campaigns, etc) was unknown, and she wants to make it known by experimenting it in Rwanda and Congo, whats wrong with that?

I won't bother with the inconclusive Rwanda/Congo contrast, which reveals nothing about solving the question of war.

She didn’t managed to get the conclusive answer like she had hoped for, but she did went out there and tried, isn’t that praiseworthy enough?

Can we be honest, and get to the point: this is left-wing fantasy. The causes of war are simple, and simple to understand, and human nature cannot be altered without altering humanity itself. If the authors are proposing the development and widespread distribution of soma, I'll leave them to their delusions.

Why is this article a left-wing fantasy? The author admitted that she still have not figured out how to “alter” humanity, so she is still researching. Do you know how? If yes then please enlighten us. If not, then what’s wrong with her research and attempt to find out how?

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on how this study advanced our understanding of war, because I am left confounded by the article's contradictions.

The ISIS terrorists having normal emotions and not clinically psychopath was quite a surprise to me. Those common media campaign used for conflict resolution having worked in Rwanda but not in the Congo was interesting to me. Can you explain why it was so? If not, then what’s wrong with her effort in continuing her research to find out the reasons?

Finally sir, I didnt see any contradictions in the article. You pointed out one but it was a misreading.

Thank you sir for reading the article and commenting.

No doubt, this is useful to know, but it is also not a breakthrough.

Yes, people are dehumanized all the time before a conflict. This is why I find the dehumanization and reduction of Asians to caricature and stereotype in Hollywood media to be highly disturbing. If it was just about the story, I don't give a shit because I can choose to not watch it. However, this is not about my preferences. I don't prefer to watch alot of things.

This is the exact sort of dehumanization of Chinese that resembles what Genghis Khan did back in the 12th and 13th century and what the Germans and Japanese did back in the early 20th century.

I might be paranoid, but the Hollywood narrative seems to me like the prelude to conquest and occupation of China. This is not without precedent - celebrated author Jack London was a rabid racist who wrote a book on the genocide of Chinese and the colonization of China by whites.

Of course, any attempted conquest of Chinese will become a global holocaust when nukes start flying.

Yes, but what are the mainland Chinese people and govt doing as a response to those media portrayal?

In the west, you have researchers like the author and mentioned researcher going out there experimenting on people in order to understand and figuring out how to alter people’s state of mind. While in Asia the social science ranking are well below the western universities. Although Leveraged will be happy for Asia for that result but I disagree.

 

[LeveragedBuyout]

I think you have misread the article. The author (or the mentioned researcher) did not spend their time to come up with the theory of “outgroup bias”. He/she was just quoting that commonly accepted view in social psychology to hightlight their findings that the ISIS terrorists in their study was “quite” normal and not psychopaths like what most people think (like how that CIA director have portrayed them). Personally, this was a surprise for me.

This is the part that riled me:

One benefit of applying scientific methods to the question of why we fight is that it can clear away misconceptions—the things that “everyone knows” about conflict but that have rarely been tested and, when they are, often prove to be false.

I don't know why the author thinks that the belief that psychosis causes terrorism is something that "everyone knows," but the author never demonstrated this to be true, and then appears to spend the rest of the article debunking this strawman argument. Needless to say, I have never thought this, nor have I thought that "everyone knows" that terrorists are psychopaths.

I can't speak for the head of the CIA, except to hold him in contempt as yet another clueless political appointee.

Not sure what you mean by this.

Every group believes that it is acting out of good intentions, even terrorists. No terrorist will claim to be acting out of evil intentions (even if the majority consider them to be evil), because we all believe that we are right in fighting for our causes (else, why fight for them?) To reveal, after extensive study, that terrorists believe their causes are just and right just like we believe our causes are just and right is... disappointing. I expect the academy to be hard at work revealing surprising truths, not re-proving what is common sense.

The article did not say it is normal for mentally healthy people to adapt to a mindset that enables genocide. It simply said
“an adaptive state of mind [the one that enables genocide] that mentally healthy people are entirely capable of adopting”. “Adopting” and “having the capability to adopt” are not the same thing. There is no contradiction.

I am not a specialist in the mind, I admit. In the context of describing normality, can you please parse the difference between "adopting" and "capable of adopting" is, and how one can use this parameter to determine what is "normal," and what is not? I don't see a difference in practice, especially with the "banality of evil" context. That is to say, normal people can do abnormal things, and still be considered normal. What does that say about our concept of "normal," that it is so flexbile and relativist?

The finding is that these terrorists has normal emotional characteristics that disqualify them from being regarded as psychopath, which your former CIA director have mistaken them to be. And I assume those in the CIA has some influence on US foreign policy.

There are several reasons for the CIA director's opinion:

1) He truly believes that terrorists are psychopaths.
2) He was ordered to tell the public that the terrorists are psychopaths.
3) He was following the tried-and-true method of demonizing the enemy to motivate our public to combat them.
4) He realized that the public is tired of the "we have to understand the root causes" line peddled by the left, and that the public has no patience for "understanding," and only wants to be left alone (with the shortest route being victory over the enemy, since they won't agree to leave us alone if we simply withdraw).
5) The motives of the terrorists are sufficiently alien to our Western culture that "psychosis" and "imponderable differences" are a distinction without difference.

Remember, the CIA director is a political appointee, and should thus be considered a politician, not a professional.

This discussion has been present for centuries concerning the nature of war, and the study doesn't shed any new light on the matter. I remember some of the same discussion during the Cold War concerning the Soviet Union, and whether the Soviets were rational or not. In truth, we can see the same bewilderment in the West today about the motives of Russia and China. There is nothing new under the sun, certainly not this study.

Yes the causes of conflicts are somewhat known (human nature, outgroup outgroup bias, etc), he/she has not forgotten anything about that. What he/she said in your quote was that the causal effects of common conflict reduction measures (media campaigns, etc) was unknown, and she wants to make it known by experimenting it in Rwanda and Congo, whats wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with studying the effect of such strategies, but there's something wrong with writing that we didn't understand the effect of such strategies before, and we still don't understand the effect of such strategies. What was the author trying to accomplish?

She didn’t managed to get the conclusive answer like she had hoped for, but she did went out there and tried, isn’t that praiseworthy enough?

My animus towards academia stems from the ivory tower's condescension that if the academy occasionally serves up common sense wrapped in complicated language too convoluted for the general public to understand, then it will have added value to the discussion. This article is less egregious than most examples, but in the end, what can we say we have learned from this study that was not already known? Not much. But to have the academy patting itself on the back for rehashing known truths just increases my scorn.

Why is this article a left-wing fantasy? The author admitted that she still have not figured out how to “alter” humanity, so she is still researching. Do you know how? If yes then please enlighten us. If not, then what’s wrong with her research and attempt to find out how?

I wouldn't presume to know how to alter humanity, because I don't think humanity can be altered except through extremely long processes like natural selection or ethically unsound methods like genetic engineering (and even then, can you call the products of such experiments "homo sapiens"?).

Only the left believes that humanity can and should be altered, so it's not for me to say how that can/should be done except to point to numerous historical examples of previous left-wing attempts--through the totalitarian imposition of communism and socialism--which were abject failures. The left will continue to claim that these failed precedents were "not real communism/socialism," and thus don't count, so the left will have an excuse to try some other totalitarian experiment. The rest of us, having studied history, know that humanity will continue in its cycles of conflict and peace, competition and cooperation.

There's nothing wrong with her research--as long as she can show something for it, which she has not done.

The ISIS terrorists having normal emotions and not clinically psychopath was quite a surprise to me. Those common media campaign used for conflict resolution having worked in Rwanda but not in the Congo was interesting to me. Can you explain why it was so? If not, then what’s wrong with her effort in continuing her research to find out the reasons?

The article explains why the Rwanda and Congo experiments differed:

The reason for the outcome, she speculates, is that “it’s very different to generate discussion within an ongoing conflict than it is in a postconflict situation.” The larger lesson she gathers is that searching for broad ways to manipulate human behavior will get a researcher only so far.

i.e. the conflict reduction strategies only worked in Rwanda because the conflict was already over, but in the Congo, where conflict was still active, the strategies were ineffective. In short, her strategies were a placebo--they "worked" where they were redundant, and didn't work where they were needed. And her admission that there are limitations to manipulation of human behavior is the most damning of all. If she believes this (as I do), what is she trying to accomplish by studying the issue?

The solution to end conflict is well known: resource exhaustion. Don't you think she should study the politics of war before studying the anthropological drivers of war? Remember her early admission:

Wilson had arrived in Damascus planning to learn Arabic as part of her doctoral research in medieval Arabic philosophy, but quickly discovered that when living there, “you can’t help but get absorbed in the politics.”

There's a reason why she couldn't avoid politics. I wish she had taken that more seriously, instead of brushing it aside.

 

[William Hung]

This is the part that riled me:

I don't know why the author thinks that the belief that psychosis causes terrorism is something that "everyone knows," but the author never demonstrated this to be true, and then appears to spend the rest of the article debunking this strawman argument. Needless to say, I have never thought this, nor have I thought that "everyone knows" that terrorists are psychopaths.

They used quotations mark around “everyone knows” so I’m pretty sure they are using it as an expression and not in the literal sense. My English is not good but the things that “everyone knows” express something like “beliefs that are considered to be common sense”, correct? In this case, the belief that ISIS are pyschopaths being a common sense kind of belief is not far off. I just googled ISIS+Psychopath and it gives plenty of results, from blogs, obsure sites to major news source attributing the ISIS with psychopathy withoutshowsiding any scientific evidence (because its common sense?):

From Russia (and quoting from British Muslim council):
‘Psychopathic violence’: British Muslim organizations condemn ISIS extremism — RT UK

From Canada:
Toronto Star

And of course from the US (Times):
CIA Chief Says Calling ISIS Islamic “Does Injustice” To Religion

All using the word psychopath bold and clear in the headlines. And google shows many more examples.

I can't speak for the head of the CIA, except to hold him in contempt as yet another clueless political appointee.

If the CIA director, with the help of media agencies, have given false information (deliberately or not), then doesn’t this alone make this article commendable for correcting the misinformation?

Every group believes that it is acting out of good intentions, even terrorists. No terrorist will claim to be acting out of evil intentions (even if the majority consider them to be evil), because we all believe that we are right in fighting for our causes (else, why fight for them?) To reveal, after extensive study, that terrorists believe their causes are just and right just like we believe our causes are just and right is... disappointing. I expect the academy to be hard at work revealing surprising truths, not re-proving what is common sense.

So you are questioning her research methodology, saying that the article gives common sensical facts about ISIS terrorists believing their cause to be just and not evil, but the article didn’t even mentioned anything about ISIS believing they are just or evil.

I am not a specialist in the mind, I admit. In the context of describing normality, can you please parse the difference between "adopting" and "capable of adopting" is, and how one can use this parameter to determine what is "normal," and what is not? I don't see a difference in practice, especially with the "banality of evil" context. That is to say, normal people can do abnormal things, and still be considered normal. What does that say about our concept of "normal," that it is so flexbile and relativist?

Im not a specialist either, but the article seems to be pretty clear. Normality in the sense that ISIS terrorists, under their research, was not diagnosed with psychopathy. Meaning they are “normal” in the sense that they are not psychopaths, just like most of us are not psychopaths. Their crimes were not caused by psychopathic disorders but by a state of mind that they have adapted, the state of mind that normal people too are capable of adapting to (but choose not to or take measures to prevent it). I can easily adopt the state of mind of a lazy unmotivated student, but I choose not to, just like most “normal” people would not (or take measures to prevent myself from adapting that state of mind). I don’t have the state of mind of a lazy student, mine and theirs are difderent, but I am capable of adopting a state of mind similar to theirs (in fact it is a fight to keep me from adopting it). Where is the contradiction?

You can say it is common sense, “some terrorists were once normal but then they indoctrinated themselves to become terrorists”. But at least be honest and admit that there were no contradiction like what you originally said.

There are several reasons for the CIA director's opinion:

1) He truly believes that terrorists are psychopaths.
2) He was ordered to tell the public that the terrorists are psychopaths.
3) He was following the tried-and-true method of demonizing the enemy to motivate our public to combat them.
4) He realized that the public is tired of the "we have to understand the root causes" line peddled by the left, and that the public has no patience for "understanding," and only wants to be left alone (with the shortest route being victory over the enemy, since they won't agree to leave us alone if we simply withdraw).
5) The motives of the terrorists are sufficiently alien to our Western culture that "psychosis" and "imponderable differences" are a distinction without difference.

Remember, the CIA director is a political appointee, and should thus be considered a politician, not a professional.

Even if the CIA director have genuinely believed it, then obviously articles like the above is needed to clarify misinformation. If he did not, then he is deliberately giving misinformation to the public, and the article would also be needed to debunk the misinformation. Unless, you think the public sometime needs to be fed false information (propaganda) in order to serve another purpose (if so, I would be sorely disappointed, sir).

This discussion has been present for centuries concerning the nature of war, and the study doesn't shed any new light on the matter. I remember some of the same discussion during the Cold War concerning the Soviet Union, and whether the Soviets were rational or not. In truth, we can see the same bewilderment in the West today about the motives of Russia and China. There is nothing new under the sun, certainly not this study.

The article did say something useful (that ISIS are not psychopath) because a lot media assumed that to be true, and potentially the CIA dirctor too.

There's nothing wrong with studying the effect of such strategies, but there's something wrong with writing that we didn't understand the effect of such strategies before, and we still don't understand the effect of such strategies. What was the author trying to accomplish?

She set out to find some unknown answer. She described her experiments, explained where it failed and where it succeeded. If you don’t see the point of publishing such data then you don’t understand the basics of academia. It still contribute to the knowledge base in her field and can be useful for other researchers, others could build from her project or hightlight something flawed about her project that could then assist her in getting closer to that answer. Granted this is just a popular level article, her more academic paper would no doubt contain more details.

My animus towards academia stems from the ivory tower's condescension that if the academy occasionally serves up common sense wrapped in complicated language too convoluted for the general public to understand, then it will have added value to the discussion. This article is less egregious than most examples, but in the end, what can we say we have learned from this study that was not already known? Not much. But to have the academy patting itself on the back for rehashing known truths just increases my scorn.

The article was on the layperson level targeted at the general readeship. What was “already known”? like how the ISIS was psychopathic? Until the mass media (and a CIA director) stop giving false infomation to the public then these kind of articles are needed.

I bet if I were to ask random people, who have not read this article, whether the the media campaigns would work in Rwanda/Congo or not, they would have no clue, other than to give a random guess.

I wouldn't presume to know how to alter humanity, because I don't think humanity can be altered except through extremely long processes like natural selection or ethically unsound methods like genetic engineering (and even then, can you call the products of such experiments "homo sapiens"?).

Your opinions here are wrong which gives it more reasons for tax payer to fund the social science.

Consider the last 2000 years of human civilizations. Do you think humanity has not made any changes? Societies haven’t changed? social ethos and social norms have never not changed? Surely it has, significantly.

And the changes are not due to genetic engineering or natural selection (2000 years’ too short to produce noticable change).

Only the left believes that humanity can and should be altered, so it's not for me to say how that can/should be done except to point to numerous historical examples of previous left-wing attempts--through the totalitarian imposition of communism and socialism--which were abject failures.

As mentioned above, humanity (or segments of it) do have the capability to change.

Pointing to the past failed attempt of certain totalitarian regimes does not imply anything, other than that those attempts (or anything similar to it) were a failure.

The left will continue to claim that these failed precedents were "not real communism/socialism," and thus don't count, so the left will have an excuse to try some other totalitarian experiment.

Is this an attempt at associating anything leftist with totalitarianism?

Dissassociating from the past totalitarian state has its legitimate reasons, not an excuse. Those totalitarian states (Im assuming your are referring to the Soviet Union and the likes) developed independently in parallel with other leftist movements so why would other leftists need to be associated with them?

There's nothing wrong with her research--as long as she can show something for it, which she has not done.

As mentioned earlier, that’s not how academia works. You want to lock her in a room and won’t let her out until she have figured out something breakthrough?

The article explains why the Rwanda and Congo experiments differed:

You have misread again sir. The article clearly stated that she is sepculating the reasons why it failed. Speculations means she does not know the answers yet. Its only a hypothesis, not an explanatory conclusion.

And her admission that there are limitations to manipulation of human behavior is the most damning of all. If she believes this (as I do), what is she trying to accomplish by studying the issue?

I think you have misread once again. The passage you quoted was not saying that there are limitations in manipulating human behaviours. Rather, it is saying there are limitations in trying to find “broad ways” to manipulate human behaviors. Meaning, there is no “one size fits all” technique to manipulate all humans, the techniques are determined on a case by case basis. This is in the context that her experiments worked in Rwanda but not for the Congo.

The solution to end conflict is well known: resource exhaustion.

Are you saying that conflicts will cease once the parties’ resources supporting their war efforts gets exhausted? This is common sense and this fact is not really useful.

Or are you saying that all conflicts are fights ober resources? Was the 1979 Sino-VN war a fight for resources? (no). What about the Senkaku dispute? What about the fights between rival football Ultras? They are fighting over resources?

Don't you think she should study the politics of war before studying the anthropological drivers of war? Remember her early admission:

There's a reason why she couldn't avoid politics. I wish she had taken that more seriously, instead of brushing it aside.

There are already plenty of people studying it from a political perspective. Don’t you think it would be handy for other researchers to look at it from other perspectives to augment the other fields?

Thank you sir for commenting. Although now I’m wondering whether this is a genuine discussion or just a chance for you to make fun of the author and academia in general.

 

[LeveragedBuyout]

They used quotations mark around “everyone knows” so I’m pretty sure they are using it as an expression and not in the literal sense. My English is not good but the things that “everyone knows” express something like “beliefs that are considered to be common sense”, correct? In this case, the belief that ISIS are pyschopaths being a common sense kind of belief is not far off. I just googled ISIS+Psychopath and it gives plenty of results, from blogs, obsure sites to major news source attributing the ISIS with psychopathy withoutshowsiding any scientific evidence (because its common sense?):

I'm not sure if you want this discussion to descend to that level of detail, but would you consider Googling to be a scientific method of proving common sense? If not, how is the article anything other than a strawman? Some people also believe the moon landing was fake, should we start some scientific studies to debunk that as well?

If the CIA director, with the help of media agencies, have given false information (deliberately or not), then doesn’t this alone make this article commendable for correcting the misinformation?

Perhaps I misunderstood your intent, so I will concede that for those who incorrectly believed that ISIS or other terrorists were unilaterally driven by psychosis, I agree that she did a service by trying to disabuse these poor souls of that mistake.

So you are questioning her research methodology, saying that the article gives common sensical facts about ISIS terrorists believing their cause to be just and not evil, but the article didn’t even mentioned anything about ISIS believing they are just or evil.

It says ISIS is essentially just like us. Do you believe you are a good person? Perhaps you don't, in which case, my mistake. I was wrong to criticize this point, since I made the poor assumption that we all believe ourselves to be acting out of good intentions. I never realized that was not necessarily true.

Im not a specialist either, but the article seems to be pretty clear. Normality in the sense that ISIS terrorists, under their research, was not diagnosed with psychopathy. Meaning they are “normal” in the sense that they are not psychopaths, just like most of us are not psychopaths. Their crimes were not caused by psychopathic disorders but by a state of mind that they have adapted, the state of mind that normal people too are capable of adapting to (but choose not to or take measures to prevent it). I can easily adopt the state of mind of a lazy unmotivated student, but I choose not to, just like most “normal” people would not (or take measures to prevent myself from adapting that state of mind). I don’t have the state of mind of a lazy student, mine and theirs are difderent, but I am capable of adopting a state of mind similar to theirs (in fact it is a fight to keep me from adopting it). Where is the contradiction?

Can you define "normal" for me? I suspect we are approaching this from different definitions. As far as I'm concerned, either a normal person is capable of committing atrocities and still considered normal (because normal people are perfectly capable of such actions), or committing atrocities is abnormal, in the sense that normal people do not commit atrocities. I suspect I'm not smart enough to understand how it's normal to be capable of committing atrocities, but abnormal to actually commit atrocities.

You can say it is common sense, “some terrorists were once normal but then they indoctrinated themselves to become terrorists”. But at least be honest and admit that there were no contradiction like what you originally said.

I think I lack the IQ to understand how it's consistent. If normal people can be brainwashed, then it should follow that being brainwashed doesn't necessarily disqualify someone from being normal. But the author seems to posit that normal people become abnormal for doing normal things, which I can't seem to wrap my mind around. But if it satisfies you, I admit there is no contradiction, since I don't understand what you or the author are saying.

Even if the CIA director have genuinely believed it, then obviously articles like the above is needed to clarify misinformation. If he did not, then he is deliberately giving misinformation to the public, and the article would also be needed to debunk the misinformation. Unless, you think the public sometime needs to be fed false information (propaganda) in order to serve another purpose (if so, I would be sorely disappointed, sir).

Or he could simply be mistaken. If you live in a world where officials are expected to know the truth about everything, I can see how one could come to the conclusion that there's a binary choice between "truth" and "propaganda," but unfortunately, in America, there's also the choice of "idiot."

The article did say something useful (that ISIS are not psychopath) because a lot media assumed that to be true, and potentially the CIA dirctor too.

I concede that this is useful information for those who don't already know it.

She set out to find some unknown answer. She described her experiments, explained where it failed and where it succeeded. If you don’t see the point of publishing such data then you don’t understand the basics of academia. It still contribute to the knowledge base in her field and can be useful for other researchers, others could build from her project or hightlight something flawed about her project that could then assist her in getting closer to that answer. Granted this is just a popular level article, her more academic paper would no doubt contain more details.

I agree that our knowledge is enriched by now knowing one more way that conflict resolution can fail.

The article was on the layperson level targeted at the general readeship. What was “already known”? like how the ISIS was psychopathic? Until the mass media (and a CIA director) stop giving false infomation to the public then these kind of articles are needed.

I agree that this article provides useful information to those who held mistaken beliefs before reading the article.

I bet if I were to ask random people, who have not read this article, whether the the media campaigns would work in Rwanda/Congo or not, they would have no clue, other than to give a random guess.

Unfortunately, I suspect that even now, the researcher would also be unable to provide a definitive answer.

Your opinions here are wrong which gives it more reasons for tax payer to fund the social science.

Yes, I am wrong. I'm also probably not smart enough to understand the intricacies of the research.

Consider the last 2000 years of human civilizations. Do you think humanity has not made any changes? Societies haven’t changed? social ethos and social norms have never not changed? Surely it has, significantly.

I agree. We have eliminated petty crime, murder, greed, and war, so it's clear that we have been able to change the nature of humanity, rather than simply raising the societal cost of violating societal norms.

And the changes are not due to genetic engineering or natural selection (2000 years’ too short to produce noticable change).

Has humanity changed, or the nature of the state changed?

As mentioned above, humanity (or segments of it) do have the capability to change.

Change? Or be constrained by a more powerful and intrusive state?

Pointing to the past failed attempt of certain totalitarian regimes does not imply anything, other than that those attempts (or anything similar to it) were a failure.

I concede that certain forms of totalitarianism have been successful at achieving their stated purpose, such as in North Korea.

Is this an attempt at associating anything leftist with totalitarianism?

Yes.

Dissassociating from the past totalitarian state has its legitimate reasons, not an excuse. Those totalitarian states (Im assuming your are referring to the Soviet Union and the likes) developed independently in parallel with other leftist movements so why would other leftists need to be associated with them?

What leftist movements developed in the last 90 years that can be said to have been entirely clear of association with the USSR? Honest question, since everything I was taught points to massive infiltration of other leftist groups during the existence of the USSR, or at least sympathetic links (e.g. NAM).

As mentioned earlier, that’s not how academia works. You want to lock her in a room and won’t let her out until she have figured out something breakthrough?

I wish she wouldn't publish inconclusive studies. I suppose publishing failure is also a part of academia, but that's why I have little time for academia.

You have misread again sir. The article clearly stated that she is sepculating the reasons why it failed. Speculations means she does not know the answers yet. Its only a hypothesis, not an explanatory conclusion.

Indeed, she speculates quite a bit in the article. What does she actually know? What do we now know, having read it?

I think you have misread once again. The passage you quoted was not saying that there are limitations in manipulating human behaviours. Rather, it is saying there are limitations in trying to find “broad ways” to manipulate human behaviors. Meaning, there is no “one size fits all” technique to manipulate all humans, the techniques are determined on a case by case basis. This is in the context that her experiments worked in Rwanda but not for the Congo.

You mean to say that every culture has its own norms, value systems, and drivers of human behavior? Again, I agree that this article provided useful information to those who were unaware of this fact before reading the article, and I apologize for my misunderstanding.

Are you saying that conflicts will cease once the parties’ resources supporting their war efforts gets exhausted? This is common sense and this fact is not really useful.

Indeed, the irony is delicious.

Or are you saying that all conflicts are fights ober resources? Was the 1979 Sino-VN war a fight for resources? (no). What about the Senkaku dispute? What about the fights between rival football Ultras? They are fighting over resources?

I didn't comment on why wars start, except to say that the factors behind that are simple and well-known (we can discuss that as well, if you like). My comment was on how wars end: resource exhaustion (men, materiel, funds, willpower, etc.)

There are already plenty of people studying it from a political perspective. Don’t you think it would be handy for other researchers to look at it from other perspectives to augment the other fields?

Certainly. If you can point me to a study that draws decisive conclusions, I would be grateful. Unfortunately, this was not such a study.

Thank you sir for commenting. Although now I’m wondering whether this is a genuine discussion or just a chance for you to make fun of the author and academia in general.

No sarcasm: you have my sincere apologies if I wasted your time or came across as condescending. Probably better for me to stay out of the discussion from this point forward.