a Better Place
This note is intended mainly to provoke interest. No claims are made for its completeness, correctness, or quality. Whatever value these ideas have is due to the years of work by hundreds of people trying to understand behavior. Whatever weaknesses there are, reflect my inadequacy in understanding and interpreting this body of work.
HS
Terrorist acts have been highlighted in recent news. However horrible, the number of deaths and destruction due to terrorism is much smaller than from actions by recognized governments, natural disasters, and disease. However, the apparent randomness of terrorist acts and the resulting innocent victims makes terrorism especially abhorrent, even though those killed or starved by established political entities, natural disaster or disease, are usually equally innocent.
Terrorism bothers us out of proportion to its relative magnitude because we do not know what to do about it. However incorrectly, by comparison we tend to assume that existing political processes will eventually resolve governmental violence, and that scientific research will eventually conquer diseases and natural disasters. What to do about terrorism is unknown.
The significance of terrorism may also be due to the fact that terrorist acts may be like barometers. As a volcanic eruption indicates underlying explosive boiling magma and tectonic weaknesses, terrorist acts may signal more general explosive world problems.
From a behavioral science point of view, confronting and responding to terrorism pose some difficult technical problems. A few such problems are:
Terrorist acts may indicate real inequities. Much terrorism involves those who are or consider themselves “have nots” acting against richer and more advanced countries or groups. The inequities may be in terms of goods, services, or in terms of political, economic or cultural influence. Terrorists often believe they do not have power to change things through what others consider acceptable mechanisms. The behavioral problem is how to correct these causal inequities or “perceptions,” thus reducing terrorism in the long run, without reinforcing terrorist behavior.
Providing aversive consequences after behavior has complex effects. “Punishing” terrorist behavior, when this is possible, may have a wide range of effects. Correctly administered punishment usually reduces the punished behavior. This is true even when the punished behavior is some aggressive behavior. But paradoxically, punishment, while reducing the punished behavior, may also increase aggressive behavior, and terrorism is aggressive behavior. Thus, punishment of aggressive behavior both reduces it and strengthens it. We currently have incomplete understanding of this, some research suggesting that punishment of aggressive behavior may reduce it in the short run and under the stimulus conditions in which it was punished, but increase it in the long run and/or in other settings. Parents often note that a child spanked for fighting with his brother may fight less when parents are present or at home, but fight more when away from home.
It is difficult or impossible to provide clear contingencies for aggressive behavior. When it is possible to provide consequences for terrorist acts, these “punishments” usually do not meet those criteria research suggests make consequences maximally effective with minimally undesirable other effects. The demands of investigative accuracy and legal and political process make such consequences, such as bombing a training site, delayed; the bombing happens days, weeks or months after the terrorist act. However, research shows that immediate consequences are most effective and less likely to have undesired effects. In addition, the complexity of the real world usually makes conclusions probabilistic; we are quite sure who did it, but not entirely sure. Thus, many terrorist acts go unpunished. When retaliation does occur, there is always a chance that the guilty may go unpunished while the innocent are punished. Many consequences, such as bombings or political and economic sanctions, affect great numbers of people who were not involved in and may not have supported the terrorist acts, thus generating new enemies. Often, those ultimately responsible have the resources and power to avoid consequences, while others, who may have been uninvolved, misled, coerced, or bribed take the brunt of any retaliation. Even when we are more informed and can respond more precisely, political pressures may make this difficult. Other countries do not like us taking action in their sovereign territory. These issues all pose problems in responding to terrorism in ways that will have the precise effects we want and not untoward effects.
Proactive actions always present difficulties. There are two general types of proactive actions we can take. One involves preventing the pressures that generate terrorist behavior. Early identification of “hot” issues and attempts to negotiate these through dialogue and compromise, easy to say and hard to do, are the types of things that are considered. Such approaches in the Middle East, Ireland, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa have had many successes as well as failures. One major drawback, of course, is generating public and political support for programs to prevent things that have not yet happened and are far from home. Another strategy is to destroy terrorist resources before they are used. This also is difficult. It requires accurate intelligence information that usually must be compelling and credible both at home and to other governments, and it requires political and public support sometimes difficult to generate. And, like responses to actual terrorism, it may be difficult to do with surgical precision and avoidance of unwanted effects. A number of behavioral issues related to successfully dealing with terrorism have been briefly noted. If you have suggestions of any sort on how to use behavior analysis to deal with these and other world problems, or disagree with any of this material, please respond by email.
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