This is HiddenBrain, I'm ShankarVedanta.
In2005, an audience filed into the Brava Theatre Centre in SanFrancisco.
The house lights wereon, making it easy to see a small group of men already on stage wearing orange jumpsuits and lying on small prisoncuts.
They were actors in the politically chargedplay,Guantanamo, honor bound to defendfreedom.
The show told the stories of four British Muslimdetainees.
The narrative unfolds through the testimony of theirfamilies, attorneys and USofficials, along with letters of the men wrote while being held at Guantanamo Bay inCuba.
One of them was a guy named Ruhal Ahmed who was from an area outside ofBirmingham, and him and three of his buddies were picked up inAfghanistan, and were held in Guantanamo Bay formany, manyyears.
This is NefiSamid. He played the role of Ruhal in one production of theplay.
What I remember from being in the show was just the way in which his letters were quite spirited in thebeginning.
He would be talking about how all the Guantanamo Bay guards likehim, how they getalong, they call him SlimShady, how he's working on a sixpack.
And then by theend, hisletters, you could justsee, we're getting more and moredepressed, and you could just tell that this was someone who was entering into a dark andvery, very negativestate.
Ruhal Ahmed was accused of being an al-Qaedarecruit, an enemy of the UnitedStates.
Throughout his more than two-year stint inGuantanamo, he maintained that he wasinnocent.
He was eventually released withoutcharges.
As anactor, Nefi's felt his job was to inhabit the prisoner's life andcharacter.
Without any character that youplay, whether they're innocent orguilty, you try not to judge them and try to become one of them as much aspossible.
It was not the last time Nefi's were trying to get into the mind of a suspectedterrorist.
This week on HiddenBrain, we dive into the motivations of people on the brink of extremism and those who have beenradicalized.
We examine what prompts people to turn to violence and explore how psychological science might pull people back from the seductive appeal of extremistideas.
After a few more years in the performingarts, Nefi's have made left acting to pursue a career inpsychology.
I always had an interest in human psychology and what motivatesus.
I think that's part of the reason why I also was interested inacting.
That's just another way of trying to understand a moreembodied, more intuitive way of trying to understand humanpsychology.
Nefi's went on to study cognitivescience, where he still craved drama and excitement and wanted to get into a field of research that would take him all over theworld.
So he sought out cultural anthropologist and former guest of theshow, ScottAtron.
At thetime, Scott was studying terroristgroups.
Youknow, I really wanted to work with Scott and hewas, I think he probably had some interest in working withme, buthe, youknow, ponded me off to another academic who was there at Oxford because that person was maybe more in a position to take on a PhDstudent.
That person tried to pond me off to another academic at the University ofBelfast, past the hot potatohere.
Living in Belfast and doing research on historical conflict in Northern Ireland was not what Nefi's had imagined forhimself.
This was in2013, the ArabSpring.
Pro-democracy protests were spreading across the Middle East and NorthernAfrica.
Jihadistgroups, clusters of violent Islamicmilitias, were forming at a fastpace.
InSyria, young men from around the world weregathering.
They wanted to overthrow Syria's authoritarian leader BasharAl-Assad.
They didn't always know what they were fightingfor.
They weren't necessarily going always to become a Jihadistthemselves.
But youknow, it was a sort of sense oflike, this is for a lot of young Muslimyouth.
This was their equivalent of being able tosay, this is my hero's journey is about tobegin.
I'm going to go and maybe I'lldie, but I'm going to go fight for the plight of the Muslim people in Syria and save them from this brutaldictator.
Outside of adventure andcuriosity, Nefi's had another motivator for studying radicalized Islamicgroups.
His ownupbringing,Mirad, that of many of the people Scott wasstudying.
Nefi's was raised Muslim by his Pakistani father and Indianmother, and he spoke many of the same languages as the Jihadistrecruits.
In away, he felt like he was the perfect candidate for this kind ofwork.
Oneday, he made his views known over dinner with Scott and otheracademics, perhaps a tadforcefully.
And they're all going from thousands of them from all over theworld, or going to Syria to go join groups like ISIS andal-Qaeda.
And you want me to go to Northern Ireland to hang out with former IRApeople.
Who's going to go talk to thesepeople?
Who's going to be able to relate tothem?
Who's going to be able to put himself in theirshoes?
Like an actor portraying these peopleeventually, absorb theirthinking, be able to come back and communicate it not only toyou, but the policymakers and to the media so that way people can understand and relate to it in order to eventually combatit.
I said to thoseresearchers, you're asking me to operate with one hand tied behind myback.
I have more to offer than just being ascientist.
I have friends who are better scientists thanme.
That's what you just want is anacademic.
I'll introduce you to otheracademics.
You don't needme. And I could tellagain, Scott's sort of like the Khutspa that I showed in thatmoment.
That's when he and another person he was working with offered me ajob.
The job was more of what Nefis had inmind.
It involved moving to Spain tofind, interview and perform brain scans on men nearly or fully entrenched in extremist Islamicgroups.
The research project was designed to evaluate the lengths these men would go to defend what psychologists call sacredvalues.
Yeah, so sacred values are values that are of the utmost importance tous.
They are values that you cannot engage with them or trade them off with the material aspects of theworld.
I can't buy this value offyou.
You're going to reject any kind of economic incentive that Imake.
There's almost an element of purity toit.
Nefis wanted to understand what was happening in the minds of people who have sacredvalues.
But before he could dothat, he had to recruit volunteers for thestudy.
He was working inBarcelona, a city withsmall, concentrated areas known to be breeding grounds forextremists.
Nefis had no idea how to find would beextremists, so he drew on his actingbackground.
He decided to pretend to be an extremisthimself.
So one of my first ridiculous attempts was that I just went tocafes, opened up my laptop in like kind of Muslim danceareas, downloaded an ISISvideo, started to watch that with the volume on fullblast.
Thinking that maybe someone might walk behind me and belike,hey, is that the latestdrop?
Let's sitdown. Are you afan?
Let's sit down and have achat.
Andluckily, all that happened was at the manager of that cafe who was alsoMuslim, kicked me out and threatened that I might get the cops called on me if I pull anything like thisagain.
The YouTube videos were not a totalloss.
Quite a few of them were posted by a man living right outside ofBarcelona.
Surprisingly, when Nefis reached out and explained his researchproject, the man invited him to hisapartment.
I get to his flat and there's already a couple of guys who are there in the kind of the living space and him and I aretalking.
He brings me into the kitchen where he's doing some stuff there and we sit down and we starttalking.
And we're speaking to each other inFrench.
And he's telling me about his ideology and his way of thinking about therole.
It's very clear to me very quickly that this guy is supporter of the sort of global jihadmovement.
We're having this conversation and it's all goingfine.
Then he starts to get more and moreanimated.
He asked me where I'm from and I washonest.
I told him I'mAmerican.
He knew I was aresearcher.
I'm trying to study this way ofthinking.
And then he starts saying some stufflike, youknow, we can't trust anybody as Muslims were persecuted everywhere wego.
And then hesays,basically, youknow, why should I even trustyou?
You're anAmerican. And then hesays, why should I even let you out of myflat?
And that's when Irealize,okay, things are really turning sidewayshere.
No fees decided to appeal to the young man'svanity, his desire to be aninfluencer.
Listen, I saw your YouTubechannel.
No one's watching yourvideos.
Youknow, you had like 68views.
You have likewhatever, like 200 followers orsomething.
I am aresearcher. My articles will be publishedin, youknow, major academicjournals.
I have the potential to if I can understandyou, I have the potential to get your message out to a broaderaudience.
I might hear to be yourmouthpiece, but I can atleast, youknow, communicate what you think and your ideas to a wider audience because you can't do it on yourown.
You're notdoing. You're not succeeding on yourown.
And he kind of laughed itoff.
He thought that was a littlefunny.
And he waslike, allright,fine.
And then he then just continued on with theconversation, but I could tell there was something that's offnow.
It's not really the samedynamic.
He leaves thekitchen. He leaves methere.
And I hear him in the other room speaking to these two guys in theregion.
Now fee spokeUrthu, which shares some words with theregion.
As he eavesdropped on the men in the nextroom, one word kept poppingout.
I hear him say this word again andagain,monophic.
Monophic and monophic is a word that kind of means a besttrader.
Atworst, it means a fakeMuslim.
Someone who's saying he's aMuslim, but is basically not aMuslim.
And I realize they're talking aboutme.
Navi's knew that for some Muslims with extremistviews, being a fake Muslim was a sin punishable bydeath.
Frightened for hislife, he tried to figure out how toescape.
He could not exit through the front door without alerting the three men in the nextroom.
It was at thatmoment. He remembered a story that Scott Atrin had toldhim.
When he was inIndonesia, he got into a bit of trouble with some jihad he'sthere, and how he had to jump out of a window while he was using the bathroom to get out of thatsituation.
I'm glad I had that conversation withhim, because that is what caused me at that moment to look out and see that there's a window in thisroom.
There was only oneproblem.
He couldn't just jump out the window like Scott haddone, because this apartment was on the secondfloor.
Navi's opened the window and saw there was a narrow ledgeoutside.
Terrified by the men in the nextroom, he stepped out onto theledge.
I'm hanging on the ledge of the side of thisbuilding.
There's an awning of like a store or something underneathme.
I just momentarily balance my foot on theawning, but immediately the awningcracks.
So Ifall, but I fall into theawning, which mostly broke myfall.
I completely shattered theawning.
Luckily I didn't hit the ground toohard, and I was able to just get basically just as soon as I got my feet on theground, I just ran to the train station as fast as Icould.
And stupidly when I get to the trainstation, I realize the next train is an hour and 27minutes.
This is not the rightmove, but luckily there was a taxioutside, so I got onto the taxi and told him to go towardsBarcelona.
Wow, so this was your introduction to trying to find thesepeople.
This didn't dissuade you at this point fromsaying, maybe I should go back toacting?
It's allacting,right?
But I wantedadventures,right?
I wantedexcitement. I didn't want stuntdoubles.
I wanted to be my own stuntdouble, so here Iwas, youknow, getting what I askedfor.
When we comeback, Navi's finds a slightly moreboring, but also less dangerous way to talk toextremists.
You're listening to HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. This is HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. Navi Samhidh is a cognitive scientist at King's CollegeLondon.
As a young doctoralstudent, he wanted to identify what factors push people to become violentextremists.
While conducting research inBarcelona, his first few attempts to find volunteers to take part in his studiesfailed.
But he did eventually discover a better way to connect with radicalized Muslimmen.
One of the best ways was to use afixer, someone from the area who was already trusted by the communities could speak their languages and understood their culturalnorms.
Navi's found a few young men who fed the bill and hired them as researchassistants.
One ofthem, especially stoodout.
Atfirst, I wasn't sure whether he was going to be a good research assistant ornot, because he didn't have a university degree oranything.
He didn't even have a normal high schooldiploma.
But turned out he wasamazing.
He spoke something like six languagesfluently, verycharismatic, full ofpersonality, had big dreams andambitions.
Wanted to be a professionalathlete.
Wanted to be amusician.
Wanted to go into thearts.
After meetingme, he wanted to be aresearcher.
Just a really charismaticindividual.
And he kneweveryone. And so he and Itogether, in thebeginning, started to go out and meetpeople.
And he would introduce me to the white kinds ofcharacters.
And then kind of just snowballs fromthere.
You kind of get eventually more and more extremistpeople.
They focused on recruiting volunteers from Moroccan and Pakistani immigrantcommunities.
To Nefisa'ssurprise, many young men were excited about the possibility of having their brainsscanned.
People found thatinteresting, to behonest.
Even when I got to the most extremepeople, the most radicalized people who were openly telling me about their support for Al-Qaeda or for othergroups.
When they would hearthat, theywould, they becamecurious.
They wanted to know moreabout,well, what does previous neurosciencestay?
Like what are your hypotheses aboutthis?
And then some of them also were a bit narcissistictoo.
They werelike,oh, my brain is veryspecial.
You're going to discoverthat.
Just wait until you see mybrain.
One guy waslike,okay,fine, I will participate in yourstudy, but only under onecondition.
You kind of lookaround.
He's about to tell me something verysecretive.
And hegoes, I want a picture of my brain just to prove to my mother that I haveone.
Nafi's and his team conducted the first set of brain scans on a group of Moroccan men whose families had been living in Barcelona for a fewgenerations.
These were men on the edge ofradicalization, open about their willingness to fight or even die for theirbeliefs, but who hadn't yet committed themselves to a group like ISIS orAl-Qaeda.
Nafi's wanted to better understand what might prompt these men to make the leap to join extremistgroups.
So he set up a video game calledCyberball, a virtual soccergame.
When a volunteer sat down toplay, he'd see four avatars on thescreen.
One of them representsthem.
It's their littleavatar.
And then there's three other avatars of three otherplayers.
They can see faces of those threeplayers.
They look like Spanish or Catalanplayers.
They have names underneath them that are very typical stereotypical Catalan malenames.
And they're told that these three players are three other real people who are sitting in rooms aswell.
So they think they're realpeople.
It's a task assimple. You're just going to press this little button on this computer and you can pass the ball towards any of the other three players that you wantto.
They'll then pass the ball back toyou.
Unknown to theparticipants, the other three avatars were not realplayers.
They were part of the experimentalteam.
Nafi's had split the volunteers into twogroups.
The men in the first group would play the game for a while just passing the ball back and forth with the otheravatars.
But for the volunteers in the secondgroup, things played outdifferently.
They passed the ball to the otherplayers.
Maybe the ball gets passed to them once ortwice.
But then the other players basically stopped tossing the ball back tothem.
And the three ostensibly Spanish or Catalan players basically just start tossing the ball back and forth to eachother.
The Moroccan volunteer would be deliberately excluded from thegame, his avatar left standing with nothing to do butwatch.
Once the volunteers had played thegame, they were asked to get into an FMRImachine.
Just a big magnetic tube that they lay down and they slide intoit.
And then they look up at a screen basically and what they're seeing is avalue.
These were not numericalvalues, but values of the volunteers had been surveyed onbefore.
Non-sacred values such as halal food should be served inhospitals, jails andschools.
Or sacred values like western military forces should be expelled from muslimlands.
Underneath the value they then see ascale, a 1-7scale.
And that's a fight and diescale.
So forone, it says how much are you willing to do for thisvalue?
One being I'm not willing to do anything atall.
And then seven being I'm willing to fight anddie.
Previous research that nafis and other cognitive scientists had done had revealed atrend.
When someone was on the edge ofradicalization, an experience of social exclusion would often push them over theedge.
The results of the cyberball study mirrored thisfinding.
Volunteers who were excluded during the virtual soccer game became more willing to fight and die for their sacred values and for non-sacred values aswell.
And not onlythat, we saw that behaviorally when we retested people for their sacred non-sacredvalues, more of the values that were previously labeled as non-sacred started to get categorized as sacred when they went through the psychometrictests.
If a trivial act of exclusion in a video game could change how volunteers felt about seriousissues, what might be the effect of more serious forms of exclusion in reallife?
What I think is going onhere, mixing in my qualitative observations and looking at otherresearches, is that when people feel many of us hold multiple identities and certainly secondgeneration, Moroccan youth in Spain are nodifferent, they hold multiple identities fromMorocco, toSpanish, toyoung, there are a bar-soft footballteam,fan, they associate with different political movements aswell.
When you feel rejected by a particulargroup, especially if it's the majoritygroup, you're probably out of the different groups that you belongto, you're going to find solace in that one group that actually presents itself as yourdefender, as the group that is there to get your back to be your fellow gang members to protect you against that group that just rejectedyou.
That group is now going to gain an attraction a lotmore.
In someways, the speaks are the deep rooted need we all have to findacceptance.
In someways, when we don't have acceptance in one area of ourlives, it's perhaps not irrational that we will seek acceptance in another area of ourlives.
Getting belonging is just one of those very basic humanneeds.
As socialanimals, it's where we feelsafest.
Evolutionarily, if we're as a lone animal out there in thewilderness, we're in hugedanger.
Social exclusion isn't the only thing that pushes people to whatextremism.
Nafiz and other researchers have noted that it's often a cascade of life events combined with an experience of social exclusion that leads toradicalization.
He witnessed this first hand while working with that charismatic research assistant who had helped him find volunteers for the brain imagingstudy.
So I thinkhe, in thebeginning, sort of saw me as a little bit of like an older brother orfigure.
And he wanted to share all of his passions with me and all of his big goals that he had in his life and how he really wanted to becomesomebody.
But then over the course of our fieldwork, he startedto, I could just see kind of go into a darker and darkerplace.
In thebeginning, I could just kind of see it in his mood and hisenergy.
And a lot of it started off with issues that he was having with his father who basically just wanted him to go get a job to help support thefamily, some kind of menial work and really denigrated his high-mindedambitions.
Then he had a best friend who was life went into like a very negative direction and he basically lost contact with his best friends so he started to feel more alone because ofthat.
The punches just keptcoming.
Next, his family found out that he had secretly been dating a Spanish woman who was in Muslim and forced them to breakup.
He told me that he was just walking around Barcelona all the time until 3a.m.
in the morning and sometimes chainsmoking.
And he would be watching videos a lot and he couldn't sleep and he had insomnia and I could tell he was kind of getting into a depressedstate.
And then overtime, he started talking about some political issues and I could see that there was this bubbling sympathy for extremistgroups.
He would be talking about the Taliban and he would be saying how the Taliban are being bombed on Pakistani soil by the US government and how these are our people and thisis, youknow, we should be talking to them and then he started talking about foreign fighters going to Syria andhow, youknow, when foreign fighters came toSpain, they were consideredheroes, went to go intoSyria, they were consideredtraitors, probably because they're just Muslims or this ishypocrisy.
And these are showing me videos that he was watching and some of them were ISIS propaganda videos about how ISIS was opening up schools and hospitals in Syria and so this is the stuff you never see in the mainstreammedia.
This is what these guys are actually doing on the ground and so I realize I have to intervene and I have to dosomething.
Nefis asked his research assistant to meet in a tree line promenade in an immigrant neighborhood of thecity.
He waited on a bench and waited andwaited.
First ofall, he shows up verylate, which again is not likehim, but he shows up very late and I can remember seeing him from a distance walking over tome, shouldersslomped, hands in hispockets, just kind of a shell of the guy that Iremember, but so muchcharisma.
He knows I want to talk to him about something related to what he's been showing me and he comes and he sits next to me in thebench, his arms arecrossed, he's not even really looking atme, he's kind of looking off in the other direction and I just start tellinghim, youknow, these videos you'rewatching, these arecrazy, this ispropaganda.
They're just taking advantage ofyou.
You don't even understand who these peopleare, these are terroristgroups, they'remurderers, they're killing everyone and they're just completely brainwashing you and taking advantage of your vulnerablestate.
And what was his reaction when you saidthis, did he say thanks for setting mestraight?
Imean, he looked up to you as an olderbrother, did he have the reaction of basicallysaying, you've shown me something that I hadn'tseen?
He tried to playkame, he just stared down at the ground while I wastalking, he was nodding hishead, listening tome, but not really looking atme, not really taking in what I wassaying.
And he just kindof, in a way that even I didn't quite believe at thetime, just said thank you Nuffie'splay, thankyou, Iunderstand, I understand what you'resaying.
And then he just basically agreed that we would pick up the field workagain, we would do it in a fewdays.
And he said thank you and then he just got up and just walkedaway, he didn't really even turn to me oranything, he just stood right up and just walked back towards where he camefrom.
And then the research assistant broke off all contact withNuffie's.
I sent himmessages, I was askinghim, are we going to meetup?
I tried to callhim, I realized the phone had beendisconnected.
We were following each other on socialmedia.
I went and checked a social media profile and I saw that the user had been deletedessentially.
And I feared theworst, my mind goes into the direction of did he go off and join a group or something or go toSyria.
Nuffie's considered trying to track the research assistantdown, but he didn't know where helived.
So he tried an alternateroute.
He went to one of the assistant's cousins to do some digging forhim.
That guy saysokay, he'll do someinvestigation.
He didn't want to talk to me on thephone, he said just come back one weeklater.
So for a wholeweek, I'm just kind of sweatingbullets, youknow, metaphoricallyspeaking.
Like I just don't really know what's going on happened tohim.
They come back and I meet with the cousin and he tells me basically that the parents sort of found out what was going on withhim.
And then the parents basically saidokay, we can send you abroad to another Western country where you can get a job at a family acquaintancesbusiness, work parttime, send some of that money back to us and then you can pursue some of your grander ambitions that you have while you'rethere.
So that way we get the money that we need and you can still pursue the things you want topursue.
And supposedly that's what he went off anddid.
Ironically, the parents did what Nuffie should havedone.
Instead of trying to convince the young man that his beliefs werewrong, they offered him an opportunity to chase hisdreams.
As soon as those pathways for purpose and meaning and really inclusion in terms of his life and hisdreams, once those pathways opened back up to himagain, he dropped his flirtation with radicalization and went off and pursued hisambitions.
When we comeback, Nuffie's discovers more methods we can use to deter the spread ofradicalization.
And he said tome,Nuffie's, I can't live in thatworld.
That world gives meanxiety.
The world ofQAnon, even if it'swrong, it at least tells me where the bad guyis.
It gives me a direction of which way to point mygun.
You're listening to HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. This is HiddenBrain.
I'm ShankarVedanta. Across theworld, politically-fueled violence is on therise.
People from different backgrounds are joining extremistgroups, willing to fight and even die for theirbeliefs.
Nuffie some eats studies the psychology ofextremism.
In his initialresearch, he was able to identify how social exclusion often paves the path to radicalideologies.
Which left him towonder, is there a way to pull people from the grip of suchideologies?
So he set out on anotherstudy.
Thistime, he gathered a group of Pakistani men living inBarcelona.
Unlike the volunteers in the initialstudy, these men were fully radicalized or what Nuffie's calls devotedactors.
Devoted actors is a term that basically just means that there are some people who sometimes think about the world in very duty-boundways.
And they're willing to commitextreme, costly sacrifices for their group or for theirvalues.
They're going to fight and die forit.
They'll killpeople. They'll even kill themselves if they needto.
The Pakistani men he recruited for the study were devoted actors to LashkarItaiba, an extremist Islamic group whose main mission is to fight India and force it to turn over the disputed state of Kashmir toPakistan.
Forthem, we want to understand what will bring them back from the edge ofviolence, because they're already very close to it and they're already putextreme.
Onceagain, Nuffie's asked the men to get into an FMRImachine.
The volunteers were presented with a series of sacred and non-sacred values and then asked about their willingness to fight and die for thosevalues.
When the men were asked about sacredvalues, Nuffie's found one part of their brains appear to bedeactivated.
Called the Dorsal Lateral PrefrontalCortex, which is associated with many things but including executivefunctions, deliberativecognition,self-control, emotionalregulation,etc.
Essentially, this is the part of the brain that makes you take a moment to stop andthink.
Should I dothis? Why am I doingthis?
Simultaneously, another part of thebrain, and that's the ventramedial prefrontalcortex, seem to show heightenedactivation.
This part of the brain is involved withemotion,reward, motivation andfear.
But when asked about non-sacredvalues, the researchers did not see differences between these two areas of thebrain.
The standard example that I usually give when I tell people about this studyis, imagine you're out at a restaurant and you've had a nice dinner and the waiter comes and offers you a menu and there's some nice dessert inthere.
You might see a nice tiramisu or something and yougo,oh, I wantthat.
If I were scanning yourbrain, there's a pretty good chance I would be seeing the ventramedial prefrontal cortex active in thatmoment.
Oh, Iwant. Then yougo,oh, youknow, I got to go to thetunnel, loseweight.
I'm going to thegym. I went to the gym yesterday and I didn't gotoday.
Maybe I'll gotomorrow.
I don'tknow. This is not really a good decisionhere.
I was scanning your brain at thatmoment.
I might see the door salad or prefrontal cortexactive.
You'll see these two parts of the brain competing over eachother.
Maybe one will win out and you mightsay,hey, youknow, I wantthat.
I want that tiramisu or I mightnot.
That's normal decision making that takesplace.
When it comes to non-sacredvalues, it's basically thesame.
Even for these supporters of the LushkriyaThieba, when it's non-sacredvalues, you see that normal activity of decision making goingon.
But you don't see it when it comes to sacredvalues.
It's just the I want part of the brain that seems to beonline.
Nefis and his team wanted to see if it was possible to counter that I want response with more measured and thoughtful brainactivity.
As he'd learned with his researchassistant, it usually doesn't work to try and convince someone that their beliefs arewrong.
So Nefis and his colleagues took a differenttack.
We thought toourselves,okay, maybe what we can do is we can't change their sacredvalue, but we can change what they're willing to do for their sacredvalues.
We can change theirintentions.
We can change their actionpropensity.
Maybe we can lower their willingness to fight and die for these beliefs without changing the beliefsthemselves.
Okay, that's probably a more realisticgoal.
How do you change someone'sintentions?
How do you get someone to back away from their sacredvalues?
Let alone say no to thetiramisu.
Again, it comes back to that basic human need tobelong.
If you want to stay belonging into a particulargroup, you have to follow the social norms of thatgroup.
The more you deviate from the social norms of thegroup, the more you're sort of otheringyourself, you're hacking away at your own sense ofbelonging, and we normally wouldn't want to dothat.
We want to follow the social norms of the social normsshift, we shift along with it oftentimes in order to maintain our sense of safety that comes withbelonging.
Was it possible in other words not to shift the views of thevolunteers, but to shift that perception of the social norms of the groups they caredabout?
The researchers once again had the men climb into the FMRIscanner.
They could see each sacred and non-sacred value they'd been shown in the first half of thestudy, along with a little green square that represented how willing they were to fight and die for eachvalue.
But that wasn't all theysaw.
They see in a red square what the general opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona was in terms of their willingness to fight and die for this particularvalue.
And they knew that we were out there doing surveys with lots ofpeople, so they knew that we had access to thisdata.
The radicalized men saw there was a large gap between their views and the views of the broader Pakistanicommunity.
Suddenly, the researchers noticed a shift in the brain imagingdata.
Parts of the volunteer's brains that focused on executivefunctioning,asking, should I dothis?
And does this really makesense?
Should increasedactivation.
They lowered their willingness to fight and die to get closer to what the actual general communitysaid.
And the degree to which they conformed was predicted by the degree of reactivation of the door-cellateral prefrontalcortex.
So in otherwords, really what's happeninghere, if you can tell a story about thisresearch, is that they are seeing that their views in some ways are more extreme than the views of people whom they consider to be there ingroup.
And something is happening in their brains that basicallysays, let me become more in line with the views of people in my ingroup.
Yeah, sobasically, what I think is going on here isessentially,yeah, they see thatthis, my in group doesn't agree with my willingness to findthat.
I think that's sort of like this errordetection,right?
It'slike,oh, I'm outof, maybe I shouldn't be so confident about my answer to this willingness to fight anddie.
Because I'm out ofline.
Andagain, there's athreat.
There's a dangerhere. These are a group of people that I want to belongto.
The story painted by this research has been demonstrated in many othersettings.
Winston University psychologist Betsy Palak found that when Hutus and Tutsis in post-genocide Rwanda were led to think that most Rwandans were forreconciliation, they started to favor reconciliationthemselves.
We explored that research in an earlier episode of Hidden Brain titled Romeo and Juliet inKigali.
For his ownpart, Nefi says he has come to see the pointlessness of trying to argue people out of theirbeliefs.
Debates on social media or across the dinner table rarely change the minds of people with strong pre-existingviews.
A better approach is to focus again on building bonds with our interlocutors and then counting on those bonds to change how peoplethink.
Nefi's got to try this approach himself when he noticed a form of flatmate behavingoddly.
This was someone who I had lived with many yearsearlier, almost a decade earlier at thatpoint.
I had known him as a youngperson.
I was maybe eight years older than him orso.
He also looked up tome. He was a whiteAmerican.
He and I sort of lost touch over theyears.
We stayed in touch over socialmedia.
The pandemic hit in2020.
I could see on social media that he was posting a lot of extremecontent.
I noticed that he was specifically going after some people on socialmedia, some people that we mutually knew who were Jewish or at least it seemed like he was targeting them and calling them out and saying that they're just believing whatever the cabal tells them and that they need to trust the plan and they need to trust Q and Q has all the answers and that they're part of theproblem.
The Q that Nefi's former flatmate was referring to is a person or people responsible for the group QAnon which spreads misinformation about a variety of topics in the United States andbeyond.
Rather than calling out his friend online or chastising him like he had done with his researchassistant, Nefi's asked his former flatmate if he'd be willing totalk.
When they got on a videocall, it was clear his friend was having a roughtime.
He didn't look like thatnice, starry eyed cute little boy that I knew when he wasyounger.
He was now a man and a man who looked like he had aged quite a bit as well and seemed like he had seen a lot of stress in hislife.
The initial conversation was a bitstilted.
He was a bitideological.
But at thispoint, I had actually had so much experience talking to people with ideas that are very different than myown.
I really knew how to navigate the situation which was just to ask a lot of questions and for him to feel like he's beingheard.
He eventually revealed to me his whole journey down the QAnon rabbit hole and even into more far right wingideology.
What basically ended up happening was that he had a series of events that happened in hislife, losing hisjob, relationship breakingup, family members loved ones dying and all happened in very shortorder.
This really created a sense of being lost in his life because all the things that gave him a sense of who he was and a sense of stability were just sort of stripped away from him in a shortorder.
Unemployed, lonely and stuck at home during thepandemic, Neufesis Friend had started spending a lot of time onYouTube.
It began with popular alt-right channels which led to conspiracy theory videos and eventually toQAnon.
QAnon gave him a badguy.
He gave him a bad guy that could just be responsible for all the world'sproblems.
At the end of a 10 hourconversation, I could tell that he understood that I didn't understand really what was motivatinghim.
He sat andsaid, let me try to figure myself out withyou.
He says tome, my family werepreppers.
We had like 10guns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition and enough food and water for us to survive the zombie apocalypse if it camealong.
I'm an anxiousperson, I can't handleuncertainty, I need a contingency plan foreverything.
He said tome, if there's no real good guys or badguys, there's no one person who's creating all the trouble in theworld, it'schaotic.
You have this chaostheory.
You have all these different power players all trying to do their own thing and then things emerge out of that complexinteraction.
Even if that's the way the worldis, I can't live in thatworld.
That world gives meanxiety.
The world ofQAnon, even if it'swrong, it at least tells me where the bad guyis.
It gives me a direction of which way to point mygun.
Inessence, it gives him a map to aterritory.
And so he can navigate that world moreeasily.
Although this wasunsettling, Nafi's just kept having open conversations with hisfriend.
He wanted to give him a space outside the radical world of QAnon where he could feelunderstood, where he could feel like hebelonged.
These conversations lastedhours.
Nafi has gained his friend'strust, going so far as to become what psychologists call a crediblemessenger.
Credible messenger needs to have at least twoqualities.
One is a perception of benevolence that this person has my best interests to hurt and two that this person hasauthority, that they know more about the topic than Ido.
And I knew from his eyes he saw me as having both of thosequalities.
So he respected me and he knew that I respected him as aperson.
And so I became a credible messenger for him where we would have these conversations where he would post something that was clearly a conspiracy ideology based thinking or what I would consider sometimes hate-to-mongeringmessages, us versus them divisivemessages, sometimes with undertones ofanti-semitism.
But I knew that as the credible messenger in his life I could in a nice way and a polite way and a respectful way engage with him aboutit.
Andsay,listen, I don't think this message is quite true because look at this alternativeinformation.
And because I had brought him in and became sort of one source of inclusion forhim, he was open to what I wassaying.
Overtime, the friend became more and more willing to have Nafi'schallenge, his extremistbeliefs.
He posted less andless.
He got a girlfriend who didn't support his radical ideas and with Nafi's encouragement pursued a new line ofwork.
Q became a thing of hispast.
Most people don't want to say or even admit to themselves that they believed in something that perhaps they don't agree withanymore, but they just simply walk away from it and they just move on with other things in their life and they don't want to talk about itanymore.
And I would say he's kind of more in thatface.
I have to saythough, the model that you're suggestinghere, it's such a difficult model for many people topractice,right?
Because if someone does something that we find not just wrong but deeplyoffensive, deeply hurtful that anger'sus, it's very hard to remember that our ability to influence them comes down to there being able to trust us and therefore we should actually reach out to them and make them feel included when everything in our body is screaming to us to excludethem.
Yeah. And beafter,remember, are you doing this for you or are you doing this forthem?
Allright? Because sometimes it can feel personally cathartic and feel good to get upset atthem.
And sometimes it'salmost, we don'trealize, but maybe we're even being a bit performative in our anger because this is what our in-group would think is the righteous way and the virtuous way tobehave.
And even if there's nobody elsewatching, we might be virtue signaling because we've just intrinsically hold these valuesnow.
But it's not always going to be the useful and the right way to actually help navigate someone into a differentpathway.
If you want to transform another person'slife, you have to really transform your relationship withthem.
I think this is the big myth of individualism as we think that we can existindependently, but wedon't.
We only exist in relation to other people and everyone else exists in relation to everyoneelse.
And so if you want to transform an individual person in somesense, you have to transform yourself aswell.
You have to change the relationship and be open to the fact that not only are you going to maybe transform their way ofthinking, but maybe you'll also change in terms of having more empathy for them and hopefully even more compassion for them aswell.
Nafisa Meef is a cognitive scientist at King'sCollege,London.
Nafisa, thank you so much for joining me today on HiddenBrain.
Thankyou,Ed. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden BrainMedia.
Our audio production team includes AnnieMurphy-Paul, KristenWong, LauraQuarelle, RyanKatz, AutumnBarnes, Andrew Chadwick and NickWoodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executiveproducer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executiveeditor.
If you enjoy ourwork, there's plenty more for you to listen to as a member of our podcastsubscription, Hidden BrainPlus.
Hidden Brain Plus is now available across podcast platforms anddevices.
You can sign up for a free seven day trial by going tosupport.hiddenbrain.org.
If you use Appledevices, you can find Hidden Brain Plus and Apple podcasts or atapple.co-hiddenbrain.
Onceagain, those links are support.hiddenbrain.org andapple.co-hiddenbrain.
