CERCASI INGEGNERI!
E' il grido d'allarme lanciato dai reclutatori di terroristi. Sembra infatti che il profilo cognitivo dei laureati in ingegneria sia particolarmente adatto a svolgere un ruolo nelle file del terrorismo islamista: amore per l'ordine, per la chiarezza, per la purezza; propensione al disgusto, al rigetto dell'ambiguità, della sfumatura; bisogno di una forte chiusura cognitiva per favorire la concentrazione e di una coerenza interiore che si traduca in una lealtà alle proprie idee e a quelle professate dal gruppo di appartenenza.
Non si tratta di mere congetture ma di fatti riscontrati: la presenza di ingegneri tra gli islamisti è sovrabbondante; avvocati, medici, umanisti non possono competere.
Se nella guerra tra le "due culture" uno volesse ancora difendere quella classica contro quella scientifica, questo libro, involontariamente, diventa fondamentale.
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Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
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Last annotated on April 29, 2017
TO EVEN THE MOST CASUAL OBSERVER, KEY MOMENTS IN THE LAST TWO centuries demonstrate the disproportionate impact that the violent actions of a handful of extremists can have in shaping the course of events in the Western world.Read more at location 111
The Spartacists whose revolutionary zeal contributed to the rise of the right in Germany in 1919Read more at location 115
Violent extremists may have abruptly changed the course of history, both nationally and internationally, but often not in the way they intended. The outcome of their actions depends more on the response of the establishmentRead more at location 119
What kind of people embark on a violent, radical course when their chances of success are low and the fight they pick is so asymmetrical in terms of force?Read more at location 125
The powers under attack, too, strive to impose their narrative on events, and demonizing extremists is an inevitable part of that process.Read more at location 133
In this book we take a different and unusual approach. Our point of departure is a surprising fact: engineers are overrepresented among violent Islamist extremists.Read more at location 146
Relying on education as our key variable has several advantages. The level of education and, for those who attended university, the discipline of the degree pursued are types of biographic information that are not very difficult to obtain; because they are considered irrelevant for governments’ counterterrorism operations, they are unlikely to be classified or strategically manipulated.Read more at location 149
education usually does not change or progress after an individual has gone through the education system, while occupation does.Read more at location 153
What are the socioeconomic conditions that explain why people join extremist groups?Read more at location 191
the failure of secular modernization projects, blocked social mobility, economic malaise, Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, the legacy of colonialism and cultural imperialism, and political alienation” (Wiktorowicz 2004b: 3).Read more at location 193
In fact, the opposite effect has also been detected: there is evidence of a positive correlation between level of education and militancy both among Islamist and left-wing radicals (Russell and Miller 1977; Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Krueger 2007; Berrebi 2007).Read more at location 197
Can we identify the socioeconomic conditions to which engineers are particularly exposed relative to other graduates that could explain their radicalization?Read more at location 208
Do some people more than others have a mind-set susceptible to the lure of extremism?Read more at location 210
The idea that, given the “right” socioeconomic conditions, anyone can end up an extremist is widespread among social scientists. We are wary of believing that there could be types of individuals whose hardwired traits make them more likely to become extremists.Read more at location 211
While we know that violent extremists are more likely to be male and young, no other feature has consistently emerged. No one has been able to construct a profile of the archetypal extremist.Read more at location 217
an increasing amount of empirically grounded research in political psychology, which we review in chapter 6, shows that political preferences in general are grounded in personality types and even in genetic dispositions.Read more at location 225
There are theoretical grounds to suggest that certain political and ideological orientations can be either promoted by the discipline one chooses to study or be the reason why certain individuals are attracted to a discipline in the first place.Read more at location 231
To what extent is the question of who ends up becoming an extremist a matter of “supply”—different types of people choosing particular types of extremism—or a matter of “demand”—groups searching for and selecting suitable recruits?Read more at location 235
This explanation of violent extremists as demand driven seems particularly suited to the case of engineers, who possess technical skills that make them prized recruits among all kinds of extremist groups.Read more at location 243
Does ideology matter in determining which types of people join certain groups? The strategic recruitment hypothesis may not work if different types of people are attracted to different types of groups, in which case regardless of how groups select, groups would receive different types of people: “It is plausible but yet to be proven that different types of terrorism disproportionately attract individuals with specific temperaments.Read more at location 247
RESEARCHERS WHO HAVE LOOKED FOR PATHOLOGICAL TRAITS IN THE minds of violent extremists have found none, and generally uncovered little that distinguishes extremists from anyone else—“they are just like you and me!”Read more at location 2963
The systematic differences in the educational composition of different extremist groups we described in chapter 5 is a strong indication that different types of people are attracted to different types of extremism: engineers appear mostly on one side, and social scientists and humanities graduates appear mostly on the other side.Read more at location 2968
Right-wing and Islamist extremism share many ideological features, while left-wing extremism differs from both.Read more at location 2974
are joined by humanities and social sciences graduates who are conversely absent from Islamist and right-wing extremist groups.Read more at location 2977
The political psychology literature, which we examine shortly, offers extensive evidence of the traits associated with conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. We also have solid evidence on the prevalence of certain personality traits among graduates of different disciplines.Read more at location 2987
A thorough review of the literature, which focuses mostly on the personality traits underlying right-wing and conservative attitudes, reveals that three traits stand out as the most relevant: one trait, an emotional one, is the proneness to experience disgust; another trait, the most multifaceted of the three, involves a strong “need for cognitive closure”; the third, at once cognitive and emotional, is an urge to impose strict distinctions between in-group and out-group members.Read more at location 3001
This characteristic appears to underlie conservatism in particular on social issues like abortion or gay rights, both of which relate to notions of morality or purity (Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom 2008; Inbar et al. 2009; Inbar et al. 2012; Jost and Amodio 2011).3 Nazis were particularly well-known for their rabid homophobia and obsession with cultural purity.Read more at location 3009
Conversely, disgust is weak among those with leftist inclinations—perhaps explaining why post-World War II left-wing student activists in Europe and the United States tried to shock the conservative establishment with their use of feces in various protest events (including so-called “shit-ins”).Read more at location 3014
Faisal Shahzad, who planted a bomb in an SUV parked in Times Square in 2010, was very clean and diligent, and left his apartment in immaculate condition:Read more at location 3021
Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a young Jordanian national whom the FBI “lured [in 2009] into a plot to blow up the Fountain Place tower in downtown Dallas,” was described by his friends as “obsessively clean; three times a week, he removed the furniture from his bungalow and cleaned the floors.”Read more at location 3025
Most striking of all is Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 attack mastermind, who wrote in a sort of will, “an almost hallucinatory document,” instructions on how to treat his body after death: “‘I do not want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral.’” He also asked “the men [who] would be washing his dead body to avoid unshielded contact with his genitals” (Holmes 2005: 138).Read more at location 3027
It encompasses “intolerance of ambiguity,” a notion introduced in connection with authoritarianism by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist who worked with Theodor Adorno on The Authoritarian Personality (1950).Read more at location 3034
the profile of liberals and left-wingers is the very opposite: they are “more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking” and more likely to tolerate disorder, complexity, and rebellion (Carney et al. 2008: 807–8).Read more at location 3041
ideological conservatism, right-wing voting, attempts to maintain group norms and traditions, racism, right-wing authoritarianism,9 and “social dominance orientation,” a measure of individuals’ preference for social hierarchy and domination over lower-status groups (Kemmelmeier 1997; Kruglanski and Orehek 2011; Roets and Van Hiel 2006; Van Hiel, Pandelaere and Duriez 2004).Read more at location 3044
Kruglanski and Orehek (2011) show a correlation of high NFC and tough anti-terror positions, while Federico and colleagues (2005) link NFC to support for military action against Iraq.Read more at location 3047
Engineers stand out as those most opposed to gay freedom (figure 6.1); just under a quarter of them are opposed, while graduates in medicine, law, and economics hover around 20 percent (which is also the overall graduate average), and all other subjects, including humanities and social and psychological sciences, seem more tolerant, showing opposition at around 15 percent.Read more at location 3110
five components of NFC: traditionalism (figure 6.2), tolerance of inequality (figure 6.3), preference for order and hierarchy (figure 6.4), threat perception (figure 6.5), and openness to new experiences (figure 6.6).Read more at location 3119
We find that engineers are not particularly traditional (figure 6.2). They are also somewhat in favor of creativity (figure 6.6), but this indicator is generally the least discriminating among academic disciplines. All other results are in the expected direction, showing graduates in engineering scoring at or near the top. While engineers are often “beaten” to the top position by graduates in economics, they are the most consistent, showing higher scores across all indicators.Read more at location 3129
engineers find it particularly likely that a terror attack will happen in the next twelve months, indicating a strong threat perception; display a strong preference for authoritarian schooling; and are economically to the right on questions about redistribution and welfare, albeit less so than economics graduates.Read more at location 3147
Economics students and even more so law graduates are less rigid on immigration, while engineers seem eager to preserve the integrity of their national community (even if not in the name of “tradition”).Read more at location 3152
One could suspect that our measures of psychological traits drawn from a European population may be relevant for understanding Western-born radicals but not graduates in Muslim countries. Muslims in the developing world might have different reasons for choosing their discipline of study; given strong family bonds and the high prestige of engineering programs, parental pressure, for example, might play a more important role than preferences.Read more at location 3165
however, in Muslim countries medical studies are generally as prestigious (and time-consuming and costly) as engineering. High-achieving students hence should have a reasonably free choice between these two degrees.Read more at location 3171
We already know that doctors are more frequent among peaceful Islamists and less overrepresented among the violent variety.Read more at location 3172
In addition to male graduates in the social sciences and humanities, there is another group that manifests an inverse distribution to that of the engineers: women.Read more at location 3184
we have been able to assemble for a number of groups show that the left-wing group with the lowest share of women still boasts a higher share than the highest shares of any right-wing or Islamist group (table 6.1Read more at location 3185
everywhere in the world engineering is the most male-dominated discipline.19 Conversely, female representation among humanities and social sciences students is much stronger, in line with their stronger representation among leftist groups.Read more at location 3195
women have largely been missing from the ranks of neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and violent racial supremacist groups. And, so far as we are aware, women have rarely participated in the “death squads” that were prevalent in Central and South America during the 1970s. These rightist groups typically stressed the traditional child-bearing role of women and emphasized the manliness and therapeutic benefits of violence.Read more at location 3208
“being male increases the probability of an individual being an extreme right voter by more than 50 percent This finding supports results from existing national studies that found that right-wing extremist parties have consistently attracted a considerably higher number of male voters than female voters” (Arzheimer and Carter 2006: 428).Read more at location 3221
“Women and girls appear to make up about 10% of those leaving Europe, North America and Australia to link up with jihadi groups, including Islamic State.” Their motives, however, differ and seem less bellicose than those of men: “In most cases, women and girls appear to have left home to marry jihadis,Read more at location 3239
On all other measures that we presented for male graduates, women do indeed score lower than men do and, a fortiori, much lower than engineers: they are less tolerant of inequality, have a weaker preference for order and hierarchy, are less opposed to gay freedom, and more tolerant of immigrants in all other respects.Read more at location 3256
Political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab first attributed to right-wing extremists what they called simplism: the “unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena” (1971: 7).Read more at location 3267
It stands to reason that extremists of all stripes, not just right-wingers, in order to do what they do, need a considerable degree of cognitive naïveté concerning how the world works, especially about the causes of the state of affairsRead more at location 3270
New evidence suggests that a feature arguably related to simplism, overconfidence in one’s beliefs, is indeed stronger on the right than on the left, and that Lipset and Raab’s conjecture might be correct.Read more at location 3283
Is simplism present also among Islamist extremists? Psychologist Bernhard Fink and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers argue that “cognitive simplicity” is particularly powerful among religiously motivated suicide bombers (Fink and Trivers 2014; see also Triandis 2008).Read more at location 3288
The assassins of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat believed that his regime would quickly crumble after his killing, allowing them to establish an Islamic state (Beattie 2000: 276).Read more at location 3290
Is simplism also a feature of engineers? For all their technical superiority engineers can be surprisingly naïve when it comes to political issues. U.S. research has shown that students in the pure sciences have more sophisticated and less closed views of knowledge than do students in engineering (understood as an “applied science”); those in soft, social scientific fields have the most open-ended view of knowledge as uncertain and dependent on their own reasoning ability (Paulsen and Wells 1998; Jehng, Johnson, and Anderson 1993).Read more at location 3299
Scientists learn to ask questions, while engineering students, like followers of text-based religions, rely more strongly on answers that have already been given.Read more at location 3306
The ordered, hierarchical, and corporatist view of society—akin to a well-maintained machine—that we mentioned in chapter 4 could gel with the engineering mentality, seeking clear answers to closed-end problems.Read more at location 3314
An extreme case illustrating the “arrogance of scientific certitude” is Bekkay Harrach, whom we met in chapter 1, a German Moroccan student of engineering who went to Afghanistan in 2007 to train for jihad, joined Al-Qaida, and died in a bombardment of the Bagram air base in 2010. He had released some videos that can still be viewed on YouTube:31 in one of them he presents, neatly written out on a blackboard, two simple mathematical formulas that produce curves that represent the fight between the West and Al-Qaida, aiming to “prove” that the latter will inevitably prevail.Read more at location 3321
To test these assumptions, we used ESS data on self-declared political preferences, measured on a 0 to 10 left to right scale recorded by the ESS, broken down by discipline. The distribution is reported in figure 6.8: in line with our expectations, economics, law, and engineering are more to the right than the average of the whole sample while social sciences and humanities graduates are more to the left.Read more at location 3334
engineers are the least liberal, followed by faculty in business studies, while humanities and social science professors had the most leftistRead more at location 3340
Women in the ESS data, too, match the expectation and are more to the left by a small but significant margin (their score is 4.9 versus 5.1 for men).Read more at location 3343
are the traits innate, that is, do they make individuals both choose a particular discipline and gravitate toward a particular political behavior?Read more at location 3376
There is, however, a growing body of literature, to which we referred at the onset of this chapter (see footnote 1), arguing for and offering some evidence that political attitudes could be inherited (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005; Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi 2012). There is also indirect evidence that individuals who already possess a given mind-set are attracted to specific disciplines. Ladd and Lipset, drawing on the large 1969 Carnegie survey, not only document the above-mentioned political biases among U.S. faculty and students; they also show that “un-socialized” students in the first four semesters of study already exhibit these biases (1975: 74–75). In their study, no other variable predicts ideological leanings as powerfully as discipline.Read more at location 3381
The evidence we found is ample enough to revive the theory of relative deprivation and frustrated expectations as a fundamental explanation of why people form and join extremist movements.Read more at location 3621
Engineers, and to a smaller extent doctors, stand out among them because when economic development ground to a halt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they fell from the highest perch in terms of expectations and formed or joined Islamist movements that in previous decades had been led by lower-status graduates.Read more at location 3632
The sources of frustrated expectations are not rooted in sheer materialism, however.Read more at location 3635
The fuel flows rather from the feeling of being unjustly deprived of a status for which they and their families worked hard and sacrificed, and to which they felt entitled to aspire, and, grander still, from the lack of opportunity to prove one’s worth in shaping the future one’s country—Read more at location 3636
Middle East regimes would discover that promoting higher education does not promote social acquiescence.Read more at location 3642
The first generation of violent Islamist radicals in the 1970s was replete with highly educated individuals.Read more at location 3644
Signs of “proletarization” have been apparent in radical Islamist groups now for a while, as we noted in chapter 1. Still, these motives seem to take effect in a second stage, after groups have been formed and their goals and ideology have taken shape.Read more at location 3648
Relative deprivation is not, however, an exhaustive explanation of engineers’ overrepresentation. Engineers continue to be vastly overrepresented among radical Islamists in both the West and South Asia despite not being exposed to the same relative deprivation as their peers in the Middle East.Read more at location 3650
we found evidence that engineers are more likely to join violent opposition groups than nonviolent ones, to prefer religious groups to secular groups, and to be less likely to defect once they join an Islamist group.Read more at location 3666
overrepresentation of engineers occurs in vastly different social and economic contexts,Read more at location 3669
network connections by themselves do not explain the overrepresentation of engineers: this cannot be due to a hypothetical jihadi engineer-mutant who started the whole process, which then spread through his engineer-dominated network of friends and trusted contacts. Network connections also fail to explain why engineers are less likely, and social scientists and humanities students much more likely, to drop out of radical organizations.Read more at location 3671
Next, the patterns of overrepresentation show the limits of social movement theories that, in order to explain the emergence of rebel movements, invoke “political opportunity structures” and “political entrepreneurs”Read more at location 3674
But the concepts of social movement theory cannot account for the uneven success of Islamist activism across different categories of people and, by implication, the influence that the membership of groups has on their militant strategies and persistence. As we argued in the preface, they cannot explain why among larger dissatisfied populations certain agents were the first to become radicalizedRead more at location 3679
Another theory of extremists’ profile purports that it would be determined by recruiters’ choices, that it would be in other words demand driven.Read more at location 3685
our evidence suggests that recruiters’ preferences do not account for engineers’ overrep-resentation: in groups in which members are selected by recruiters, engineers are less frequent than they are in groups in which members are self-recruited—aRead more at location 3690
Engineers possess not so much a proclivity to extremism as such but to extremism of a certain type. In the case of MENA countries, relative deprivation and ideological propensity worked together: the former selected elite graduates and the latter boosted the share of engineers among them.Read more at location 3711
different ideologies meet the cognitive and emotional needs of different people.Read more at location 3718
