How do daily habits lead to political violence? | Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah

90,057 views ・ 2020-09-18

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Transcriber: Leslie Gauthier Reviewer: Camille Martínez
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So I'm starting us out today with a historical mystery.
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In 1957, there were two young women,
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both in their 20s,
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both living in the same city,
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both members of the same political group.
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That year, both decided to commit violent attacks.
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One girl took a gun and approached a soldier at a checkpoint.
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The other girl took a bomb and went to a crowded café.
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But here's the thing:
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one of the those girls followed through with the attack,
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but the other turned back.
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So what made the difference?
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I'm a behavioral historian, and I study aggression,
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moral cognition
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and decision-making in social movements.
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That's a mouthful. (Laughs)
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So, the translation of that is:
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I study the moment an individual decides to pull the trigger,
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the day-to-day decisions that led up to that moment
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and the stories that they tell themselves about why that behavior is justified.
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Now, this topic --
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it's not just scholarly for me.
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It's actually a bit personal.
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I grew up in Kootenai County, Idaho,
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and this is very important.
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This is not the part of Idaho with potatoes.
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We have no potatoes.
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And if you ask me about potatoes,
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I will find you.
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(Laughter)
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This part of Idaho is known for mountain lakes,
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horseback riding,
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skiing.
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Unfortunately, starting in the 1980s,
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it also became known as the worldwide headquarters
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for the Aryan Nations.
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Every year, members of the local neo-Nazi compound
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would turn out and march through our town,
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and every year,
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members of our town would turn out and protest them.
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Now, in 2001, I graduated from high school,
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and I went to college in New York City.
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I arrived in August 2001.
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As many of you probably are aware,
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three weeks later,
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the Twin Towers went down.
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Now, I was shocked.
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I was incredibly angry.
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I wanted to do something,
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but the only thing that I could think of doing at that time
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was to study Arabic.
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I will admit,
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I was that girl in class that wanted to know why "they" hate "us."
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I started studying Arabic for very wrong reasons.
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But something unexpected happened.
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I got a scholarship to go study in Israel.
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So the Idaho girl went to the Middle East.
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And while I was there, I met Palestinian Muslims,
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Palestinian Christians,
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Israeli settlers,
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Israeli peace activists.
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And what I learned is that every act has an ecology.
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It has a context.
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Now, since then, I have gone around the world,
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I have studied violent movements,
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I have worked with NGOs and ex-combatants in Iraq,
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Syria,
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Vietnam,
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the Balkans,
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Cuba.
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I earned my PhD in History,
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and now what I do is I go to different archives
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and I dig through documents,
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looking for police confessions,
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court cases,
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diaries and manifestos of individuals involved in violent attacks.
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Now, you gather all these documents --
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what do they tell you?
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Our brains love causal mysteries,
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it turns out.
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So any time we see an attack on the news,
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we tend to ask one question:
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Why?
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Why did that happen?
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Well, I can tell you I've read thousands of manifestos,
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and what you find out is that they are actually imitative.
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They imitate the political movement that they're drawing from.
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So they actually don't tell us a lot about decision-making
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in that particular case.
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So we have to teach ourselves to ask a totally different question.
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Instead of "Why?" we have to ask "How?"
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How did individuals produce these attacks,
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and how did their decision-making ecology contribute to violent behavior?
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There's a couple things I've learned from asking this kind of question.
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The most important thing is that
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political violence is not culturally endemic.
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We create it.
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And whether we realize it or not,
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our day-to-day habits contribute to the creation of violence
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in our environment.
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So here's a couple of habits that I've learned contribute to violence.
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One of the first things that attackers did
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when preparing themselves for a violent event
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was they enclosed themselves in an information bubble.
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We've heard of fake news, yeah?
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Well, this shocked me:
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every group that I studied had some kind of a fake news slogan.
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French communists called it the "putrid press."
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French ultranationalists called it the "sellout press"
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and the "treasonous press."
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Islamists in Egypt called it the "depraved news."
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And Egyptian communists called it ...
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"fake news."
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So why do groups spend all this time trying to make these information bubbles?
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The answer is actually really simple.
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We make decisions based on the information we trust, yeah?
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So if we trust bad information,
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we're going to make bad decisions.
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Another interesting habit that individuals used
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when they wanted to produce a violent attack
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was that they looked at their victim not as an individual
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but just as a member of an opposing team.
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Now this gets really weird.
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There's some fun brain science behind why that kind of thinking is effective.
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Say I divide all of you guys into two teams:
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blue team,
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red team.
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And then I ask you to compete in a game against each other.
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Well, the funny thing is, within milliseconds,
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you will actually start experiencing pleasure -- pleasure --
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when something bad happens to members of the other team.
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The funny thing about that is if I ask one of you blue team members
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to go and join the red team,
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your brain recalibrates,
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and within milliseconds,
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you will now start experiencing pleasure
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when bad things happen to members of your old team.
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This is a really good example of why us-them thinking is so dangerous
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in our political environment.
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Another habit that attackers used to kind of rev themselves up for an attack
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was they focused on differences.
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In other words, they looked at their victims, and they thought,
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"I share nothing in common with that person.
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They are totally different than me."
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Again, this might sound like a really simple concept,
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but there's some fascinating science behind why this works.
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Say I show you guys videos of different-colored hands
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and sharp pins being driven into these different-colored hands,
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OK?
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If you're white,
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the chances are you will experience the most sympathetic activation,
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or the most pain,
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when you see a pin going into the white hand.
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If you are Latin American, Arab, Black,
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you will probably experience the most sympathetic activation
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watching a pin going into the hand that looks most like yours.
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The good news is, that's not biologically fixed.
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That is learned behavior.
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Which means the more we spend time with other ethnic communities
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and the more we see them as similar to us and part of our team,
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the more we feel their pain.
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The last habit that I'm going to talk about
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is when attackers prepared themselves to go out and do one of these events,
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they focused on certain emotional cues.
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For months, they geared themselves up by focusing on anger cues, for instance.
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I bring this up because it's really popular right now.
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If you read blogs or the news,
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you see talk of two concepts from laboratory science:
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amygdala hijacking and emotional hijacking.
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Now, amygdala hijacking:
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it's the concept that I show you a cue -- say, a gun --
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and your brain reacts with an automatic threat response
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to that cue.
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Emotional hijacking -- it's a very similar concept.
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It's the idea that I show you an anger cue, for instance,
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and your brain will react with an automatic anger response
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to that cue.
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I think women usually get this more than men. (Laughs)
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(Laughter)
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That kind of a hijacking narrative grabs our attention.
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Just the word "hijacking" grabs our attention.
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The thing is,
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most of the time, that's not really how cues work in real life.
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If you study history,
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what you find is that we are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of cues
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every day.
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And so what we do is we learn to filter.
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We ignore some cues,
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we pay attention to other cues.
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For political violence, this becomes really important,
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because what it meant is that attackers usually didn't just see an anger cue
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and suddenly snap.
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Instead,
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politicians, social activists spent weeks, months, years
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flooding the environment with anger cues, for instance,
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and attackers,
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they paid attention to those cues,
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they trusted those cues,
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they focused on them,
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they even memorized those cues.
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All of this just really goes to show how important it is to study history.
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It's one thing to see how cues operate in a laboratory setting.
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And those laboratory experiments are incredibly important.
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They give us a lot of new data about how our bodies work.
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But it's also very important to see how those cues operate in real life.
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So what does all this tell us about political violence?
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Political violence is not culturally endemic.
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It is not an automatic, predetermined response to environmental stimuli.
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We produce it.
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Our everyday habits produce it.
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Let's go back, actually, to those two women that I mentioned at the start.
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The first woman had been paying attention to those outrage campaigns,
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so she took a gun
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and approached a soldier at a checkpoint.
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But in that moment, something really interesting happened.
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She looked at that soldier,
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and she thought to herself,
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"He's the same age as me.
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He looks like me."
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And she put down the gun, and she walked away.
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Just from that little bit of similarity.
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The second girl had a totally different outcome.
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She also listened to the outrage campaigns,
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but she surrounded herself with individuals
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who were supportive of violence,
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with peers who supported her violence.
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She enclosed herself in an information bubble.
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She focused on certain emotional cues for months.
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She taught herself to bypass certain cultural inhibitions against violence.
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She practiced her plan,
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she taught herself new habits,
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and when the time came, she took her bomb to the café,
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and she followed through with that attack.
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This was not impulse.
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This was learning.
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Polarization in our society is not impulse,
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it's learning.
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Every day we are teaching ourselves:
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the news we click on,
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the emotions that we focus on,
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the thoughts that we entertain about the red team or the blue team.
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All of this contributes to learning,
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whether we realize it or not.
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The good news
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is that while the individuals I study already made their decisions,
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we can still change our trajectory.
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We might never make the decisions that they made,
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but we can stop contributing to violent ecologies.
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We can get out of whatever news bubble we're in,
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we can be more mindful about the emotional cues
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that we focus on,
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the outrage bait that we click on.
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But most importantly,
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we can stop seeing each other as just members of the red team
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or the blue team.
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Because whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist,
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Democrat or Republican,
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we're human.
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We're human beings.
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And we often share really similar habits.
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We have differences.
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Those differences are beautiful,
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and those differences are very important.
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But our future depends on us being able to find common ground
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with the other side.
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And that's why it is so, so important
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for us to retrain our brains
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and stop contributing to violent ecologies.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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