Personal Background and Research Focus

• Speaker: behavioral historian studying aggression, moral cognition, decision making in social movements
• Research focus: moment individual decides to pull trigger, day-to-day decisions leading up, justification stories
• Personal connection: grew up Kootenay County Idaho (not potato region)
  • 1980s became worldwide headquarters Aryan Nations
  • Annual neo-Nazi marches through town, counter-protests by locals
• 2001: graduated high school, college NYC, arrived August 2001
  • 3 weeks later: Twin Towers attack
  • Initial response: studied Arabic ("why they hate us" mentality)
  • Scholarship to study Israel, met diverse groups (Palestinian Muslims/Christians, Israeli settlers/peace activists)

Research Methodology and Findings

• Global fieldwork: Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Balkans, Cuba
• PhD in history, archival research methodology
• Documents analyzed: police confessions, court cases, diaries, manifestos from violent attackers
• Key finding: manifestos are imitative of political movements, don't reveal individual decision-making
• Critical question shift: from "why" to "how" - how individuals produce attacks, how decision-making ecology contributes

Core Principle

• Political violence not culturally endemic - we create it
• Day-to-day habits contribute to violence creation in environment

Four Key Habits Contributing to Violence

1. Information Bubbles

• Attackers enclosed themselves in information bubbles
• Every studied group had fake news slogans:
  • French communists: "putrid press"
  • French ultra nationalists: "sellout press," "treasonous press"
  • Egyptian Islamists: "depraved news"
  • Egyptian communists: "fake news"
• Mechanism: decisions based on trusted information - bad information = bad decisions

2. Dehumanization Through Team Thinking

• Victims viewed as team members, not individuals
• Brain science: dividing people into teams (blue/red) creates millisecond pleasure responses when bad things happen to opposing team
• Brain recalibrates instantly when switching teams
• Us-them thinking dangerous in political environments

3. Focusing on Differences

• Attackers focused on differences: "I share nothing in common with that person"
• Scientific evidence: sympathetic activation varies by perceived similarity
  • White people feel most pain watching pins driven into white hands
  • Latin American/Arab/Black people feel most pain watching pins in similar-looking hands
• Good news: learned behavior, not biologically fixed
• More time with other ethnic communities = more similarity perception = more empathy

4. Emotional Cue Conditioning

• Attackers focused on anger cues for months before attacks
• Popular concepts: amygdala hijacking, emotional hijacking
• Reality: bombarded with hundreds of thousands of cues daily
• We learn to filter - ignore some, pay attention to others
• Attackers didn't "snap" from single cue
• Politicians/activists flooded environment with anger cues for weeks/months/years
• Attackers: paid attention, trusted, focused on, memorized anger cues

Historical Case Study: Two Women in 1957

Woman 1 (Did Not Attack)

• 20s, same city, same political group as Woman 2
• Took gun, approached soldier at checkpoint
• Critical moment: "he's the same age as me, he looks like me"
• Put down gun, walked away
• Similarity recognition prevented violence

Woman 2 (Completed Attack)

• Same demographics as Woman 1
• Surrounded herself with violence-supportive individuals
• Enclosed in information bubble
• Focused on emotional cues for months
• Bypassed cultural inhibitions against violence
• Practiced plan, taught herself new habits
• Took bomb to cafe, followed through with attack
• Not impulse - learning

Key Conclusions

• Political violence = learning, not impulse
• Polarization in society = learning, not impulse
• Daily choices contribute to learning:
  • News we click
  • Emotions we focus on
  • Thoughts about opposing teams

Solutions and Prevention

• Can change trajectory while individuals in study already made decisions
• Stop contributing to violent ecologies:
  • Exit news bubbles
  • Be mindful of emotional cues/outrage bait clicked
  • Stop seeing others as just red/blue team members
• Recognition: Christian/Muslim/Jewish/atheist/Democrat/Republican = human beings
• Share similar habits despite differences
• Differences are beautiful and important
• Future depends on finding common ground with other side
• Must retrain brains, stop contributing to violent ecologies