The Problem
People deeply convinced about what is good and what is evil can become devoted actors, in the double sense that they embrace sacred values that are utterly nonnegotiable, and they experience fusion between their personal identity and a group to which they belong. As devoted actors, they experience an assault upon their group as a personal attack, triggering evolutionarily stabilized self-protective instincts that extend to protecting their group and its members. They also experience attempts to negotiate over their sacred values – the importance of land, of beliefs, of their community, or of certain practices – as profoundly offensive, triggering outrage and a willingness to entertain violent responses. Not all devoted actors are religious and not all religious people are devoted actors but there is a strong association between the two. Something about religious piety and social networks enhances confidence in worldviews that generate sacred values and sustain those values in the presence of powerful convictions about right and wrong and potent social glue that promotes identity fusion. The journey from becoming a devoted actor to embracing violence as a problem-solving strategy is a much shorter one than it is for most people. Thus, religiously inspired and rationalized violence is a seemingly intractable problem that is urgent, profound, and extremely difficult to mitigate.
Our Approach
In partnership with the John Templeton Foundation and the US Government, we have built computational simulations to express the dynamics of religious extremist violence, including:
- Devoted actor processes
- Extremist recruitment
- Extremist exiting
- Impact of extremism on immigrants and their children
- Impact of military violence on extremism
- Impact of careless versus skillful diplomacy on extremism
These computational systems, when calibrated to specific cultural and historical scenarios, help to identify effective strategies for mitigating the seemingly intractable problem of religious extremist violence.
Methodologies Used
Agent-based models to express the spread of extremist ideologies, decision processes around extremist recruitment and existing, and the way extremism interacts with first,-second-, and third-generation immigrants in western cities System-dynamics models to express the population-level effects of military action and diplomacy on devoted actors Parameter Tuning & Scenario Testing based on real-world datasets from experts studying this problem Sensitivity Analysis to evaluate robustness of solutions across different national and regional contexts Public communication to raise consciousness and intercultural understanding through explainer videos and an award-winning documentary by Jenn Lindsay called “Modeling Religious Violence”
Findings & Impact
Our computational simulations helped to identify socio-historical tipping points where devoted actors are more willing to cross the threshold into violent action. They also identified circumstances where both military action and diplomacy can either exacerbate or mitigate the problem of extremist religious violence. These insights are now being used in the US Government to support decisions around extremism mitigation, minimization and cessation of military conflict, and diplomatic interventions.
Status
- Phase: Completed model design and verification; working on model validation and decision-support applications
- Next Step: Employing computational simulations in decision support within the US Government
- Lead Investigator: Dr. Wesley J. Wildman
- Collaborators: NexusSIM team, global network of dozens of researchers, US Government