Imagine you got together with some friends for dinner, and in the course of the evening a politically charged topic came up— implementing prayer in school or making abortion illegal, for example. Because you are in a group of friends, it is likely that most of you will be on the same side of the issue: Most will be for prayers in schools, for example, or most will be for legal access to abortion. But because people in the group are all different, they are probably not going to feel equally strongly about their position. Supporting prayer in school, one person would be full of righteous conviction, while another would be somewhat ambivalent.
In a group discussion that would follow, the group as a whole is likely to become more extreme on the issue. This change in group opinion is explained by two forces that affect individuals in like-minded groups during group discussions. The first force has to do with information presented during discussions; the second force has to do with social relationships within the group.
Every member of the group had arrived at his or her pre-discussion political position because of some information—a fact, a logical argument, or an authority who endorsed the position. Ask yourself: Why are you for or against abortion? You are likely to come up with your reasons (let’s call them A, B, and C). Another person who shares your position will come up with their reasons, not all of them identical to yours (let’s call them A, B, and D). Discussing the issue together, you will share your reasons and hear theirs. You had three reasons before; now you have four reasons to support your position (A, B, C, and D). Your position on the issue is going to be strengthened: You now have a new reason in addition to the old ones to feel the way you do.
In a group discussion, like-minded groups (groups that start out favoring a particular side of an issue) discuss reasons for their position. Following these discussions, group members emerge enriched with new arguments for their initial position. Their support for the position is made stronger as a result.
The second force within group discussion is not intellectual but social. Some group members are more influential than others: Maybe a person has a dominant personality or has more information about the topic of interest. But one way to extraordinary influence is perhaps surprising: People who represent extreme positions on an issue—who advocate the most drastic measures in support of their position—are more admired by other group members than are more “middle-of-the-road” individuals.
When we admire someone, we listen to them; we even want to be like them. Those who advocate extreme positions on an issue inspire others in the group to move their opinions toward the extreme. As a result, the whole group’s opinion shifts toward the extreme.
This paradigm, the tendency of like-minded groups to become more extreme because of group discussion, is called group polarization. The two forces that are believed to cause group polarization, the informational pressure and the social pressure within the group, are called persuasive argument theory and social comparison theory.
Radicalization of opinion is one kind of group polarization that can happen when like-minded people discuss political issues. In fact, some notorious terrorist groups have crystallized out of activist groups through intense discussions about the issues that moved them.
The Weather Underground, a US terrorist group that attacked the US government in the 1970s to protest the Vietnam War, broke off from a larger and nonviolent anti-war group—Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Intense discussions among members of SDS converted some of them from activists to terrorists.
In 19th-century Russia, another activist student group, Narodnaya Volya, encouraged debates and forums among its members. The discussions were marked with persuasive arguments and social comparison that moved some activist members of Narodnaya Volya to become terrorists who formed People’s Will, the first modern terrorist group.
The actions of the government are as important for understanding terrorism as the terrorists’ own actions. Often, terrorists are made in a prolonged conflict with the government in which action and reaction radicalize both the government and its challengers.
To make a radical out of an activist, few experiences are as effective as unfair and brutal treatment by the government. An activist group organizes a protest; the government responds with rubber bullets, pepper spray, water cannons, and batons. In the aftermath of the protest, the activist group will view the government’s overreaction as group grievance. Perhaps some members of the protest were arrested, perhaps some reciprocated the government’s violence and were beaten and jailed; perhaps some were brutalized in police custody. These group members’ experiences are likely to radicalize them against the government; their comrades are likely to feel indignation and outrage at their mistreatment, causing them to become radicalized as well.
Prison in itself has been shown to be a source of radicalization. In prison, many activists who would have never interacted with hardened radicals get a chance to meet them and spend time talking with them. The time they spend together serves to introduce activists to a radical ideology, to social connections in which radical actions and ideas are the norm, and to technologies and tactics of radical action against the government. Some have seen the exchanges among jailed radicals as a kind of “prison university.”
Many jihadist terrorists have gotten their radical education in prison. These include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who became the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command. In Europe, jihadist terrorists responsible for recent ISIS-inspired attacks in France, Belgium, and Germany have spent time behind bars, often for nonpolitical offenses, before they mounted their terrorist attacks. Social connections made in prison with like-minded prisoners strengthen radicalization.
The more the government cracks down on activists, the more likely it is that some of them will move on to radicalism. The majority will be deterred by the prospect of being brutalized, arrested, and imprisoned. But a minority will become hardened by such experiences, their radicalization boosted by their personal grievance. They are likely to break away from the larger activist group and go underground as a terrorist cell, as happened with the Weather Underground in the United States.
Psychologist Muzafer Sherif captured the effects of group competition in his 1954 naturalistic study, the Robbers Cave experiment. In Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, Sherif set up a summer camp for boys. Two groups of 12-year-old boys camped separately and without knowledge of the other group for the first week of the study. During that week, each group developed its own norms of behavior (one forbade cursing; the other encouraged it), its own leadership, its own network of friendships, and each chose a name for itself (the Eagles and the Rattlers).
During the second week of the study, the two groups of boys were made to run into each other when each approached the baseball diamond. A weeklong tournament was organized, with competitions in baseball, tug-of-war, and other sports between the two groups. The winning group received trophies, and members of the winning group got individual prizes such as multiblade pocket knives.
The second week of the study, therefore, was all about competition. Sherif was interested in psychological changes that group competition would have on the boys. He found that the groups became more cohesive than before: They enforced a lot more subordination to group leaders and discouraged dissent. Furthermore, boys became aggressive toward the other group: Food fights broke out, each group raided the other’s bunks, each burned the other’s flag, and each came up with offensive names for the other group. In other words, competition created radicalization in both opinion (boys on the other team were “stinkers” or “smart alecks”) and action (fighting). With the data from his study, Sherif formulated realistic group conflict theory, which states that when resources are limited, groups fighting for them will develop in-group cohesion and out-group hostility.
With adults, competition can lead to similar radicalization, often with much more drastic consequences than those of Sherif’s summer camp for boys. Activist groups compete for funding from sponsors; they compete for airtime on the news; they compete for the base of sympathizers from which they recruit new members, draw resources, and seek political support. When more than one group claims to represent the same cause, conflict between them is inevitable. As with the boys in Sherif’s experiment, group cohesion will increase, with increased respect for leaders, glorification of in-group values, and increased punishment for deviates. Also likely are hostility and aggression against the competing group.
This is what happened in competition between the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Tashnaks, another activist group competing for resources and support from the Armenian diaspora. ASALA was first to attack Turks in retribution for the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917, when other Armenian activist groups were only talking about what to do. Not to be outdone, the Tashnaks established the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, their own terrorist group. Competition between activist groups led to their radicalization to terrorism.
Similarly, in the second intifada, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) dropped in poll ratings among Palestinians to near zero as suicide bombings brought Hamas and Fatah to the forefront. PFLP scrambled to compete. Reneging on its own opposition to jihad, PFLP recruited its own shaheeds and carried out a number of martyrdom operations, restoring its standing in the polls.
Group influence is not easy for most Western-minded people to accept. Even students of psychology have a hard time accepting that Milgram’s results would hold for them. We are raised to think for ourselves, to stand out from the crowd, to be unique. Nonetheless, experiments and naturalistic studies show that for all our cultural independence, we are still very much affected by groups, more than we are ready to admit. In radicalization, individual trajectories are affected by groups as well. Especially when the group is isolated and threatened, and becomes the only social world its members know, its power is greatly amplified. As with individuals who lose social ties and routines in unfreezing, isolated and threatened groups open themselves to radical ideas and actions.
Chapter 5 discusses an even subtler influence on radicalization—not individual, not group, but mass publics. We are imbedded in a culture, its influence on us constant and elusive at once. Radicalization can take place when this influence affects emotions toward particular groups of people: positive emotions toward “us” and negative emotions toward “them.”