by Alice LoCicero
It may come as unexpected bad news to many readers, but even “the experts” who propose what seem like logical programs to predict who will engage in violence against civilians for a political cause cannot do that. The idea has its appeal–predict who will become violent and intervene to prevent it before they get too close to acting. But, in fact, no one can predict, on an individual level, who will become violent in the future.
That is not to say that we don’t know anything—we know, for example, that men are more likely to engage in physical violence than women. But nothing we know can be relied upon to predict whether a specific individual—male or female—will act violently in the future.
There are multiple articles advocating programs (almost all of which reflect implicit or explicit bias against Muslim youth) intended to identify youth who are apt to become terrorists. Appropriately, these articles generally include a disclaimer saying there’s no consistent pattern to help us actually predict who might become a terrorist. That is, no one knows what the path to terrorism might look like; it’s impossible to predict, for any individuals, whether they will engage in violence against civilians for political purposes.
Telling it like it is, here’s a quote from a 2017 article in the American Psychologist, by terrorism researcher John Horgan: “Though terrorist profiles exist in a broad sense, no meaningful (i.e., having predictive validity) psychological profile has been found either within or across groups.”
Given the lack of a solid scientific foundation for predicting the development of terrorists, many scientific and professional articles on the “terrorist threat” suggest that more research is needed–a reasonable suggestion. However, terrifyingly, others recommend programs and interventions based on conjectures, hypotheses, and theories about 1) who in the community might be helpful in predicting potential terrorists, and 2) how we might get them to inform the authorities of their suspicions about their friends, neighbors, and/or family members.
Just think about this: Here we have “professionals” making the outrageous assertion that, since neither researchers nor clinicians know who will become violent, we should get members of the community to inform on other members of the community, and assume that they’re correct.*
Ask yourself: What are the implications of getting family, friends, and community members to inform police if they think someone may be on the path to committing terrorist acts? Some authors even suggest that teachers and/or care providers should report if they have some reason to think someone is at risk for developing into a terrorist. Some even have lists of risk factors. But the lists do not stand up to scientific inquiry.
It’s a House of Cards, and an expensive one at that.
*Readers might wonder about the “duty to warn”—i.e., clinicians’ legal duty to inform potential victims and law enforcement if a patient threatens imminent harm to an identifiable person or persons. The differences here are: duty to warn involves 1) Imminent harm and 2) patient report. That is, if a patient–or anyone– tells a clinician that they’re about to do harm, the obligation is to believe them. But the programs proposed for predicting future terrorists are not oriented to self-reported imminent actions, but to scrutinizing kids to guess which ones are likely to become terrorists in the future.
Reprinted, lightly edited, from an article published Aug 30, 2019, on the Psychology Today website.
Alice LoCicero, Ph.D., is past president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, Division 48 of the APA.
In Print: Creating Young Martyrs: Conditions That Make Dying in a Terrorist Attack Seem Like a Good Idea (Contemporary Psychology (Hardcover)) Online: Personal Website