 Thank you everyone So when we think about violent extremist movements One of the things we we worry about with them is their ability to mass persuade Their ability to create these slick videos and these great online messaging campaigns that then spread out on people's cell phones Into their social media that they watch on YouTube and various devices that change the hearts and minds of people But that might be a very convenient narrative that may be leading us astray in a lot of our strategic communications tactics So a colleague of mine Hugo Mercier a social psychologist has been studying the role of mass persuasion across a variety of contexts And what he basically finds is it hardly ever works Regardless of the sector Religious proselytization doesn't seem to work very well when it's televangelist or people on the radio When it's negative ads on political campaigns or robo calls or online commercials doesn't seem to have a big effect on voter attitudes This is the one that surprised me even commercial advertising doesn't seem to actually be very effective It works on occasions here and there when people don't have a lot of experience with the product But otherwise it's quite idiosyncratic and there's no real systemic element that can show us when it's working when it's not working Even when we think of the Nazis this this powerful machine with a great propaganda that changed the Germans minds Well turns out their propaganda was even not as effective as we generally think it was it had some effect But really what we what the research shows is actually their propaganda increased Antisemitism in areas of Germany that historically had high Antisemitism it actually backfired in areas where there was historically low levels of Antisemitism and a lot of their propaganda just failed it just didn't work for example They tried and failed to make the German people pro-Euthanasia They tried and failed to get German industrial workers to be anti-communist They even tried and failed at getting the German people to like the Nazis They liked Hitler as a leader But they didn't actually like the Nazi political party and their propaganda wasn't able to have much of an effect So what does matter it's not that mass persuasion or that commercials or advertising has no effect But you need to see the effect you need to see it within the ecology of communication It has its biggest impact when it becomes part of the day-to-day conversations of people Person-to-person communication Social interaction actually causes people to change their religion to buy a product They wouldn't otherwise buy to change their their stances on various political issues and even to get pulled into extremist movements Our own research that we've been doing on our database of foreign fighters who joined Al Qaeda We find that 75% were recruited by a friend 20% by a family member and 5% by someone that they didn't have a pre-established relationship with but it was still person-to-person And yes, they were able to talk to people and she had online communication and sometimes shared videos But the videos by themselves didn't have an effect until they became part of the actual conversation with people who had strong trustworthy and authoritative relationships And what we find is that when people fall into these these conversations and they start engaging with each other and they get into these echo chambers Something starts happening with their values for some of them for some of their values their values start to turn into sacred values Now despite the label sacred it actually doesn't have to be religious at all Actually, a lot of these values can be liberal democratic values for some people freedom of speech is a sacred value Civil liberty is a sacred value a sacred value is any value that you would consider Invaluble and non-negotiable and our team has been studying the role of sacred values and conflicts around the world from nation-states like Israel and Palestine To non-state groups like ISIS Al Qaeda and even the pkk and generally what we find is that the more sacred values Enter in to a conflict the more Intractable that conflict becomes and the higher the propensity towards violence But in order for us to really be able to say something about CVE how to actually counter or prevent these things We knew that we had to get deeper than just looking at the role of sacred values in a conflict But looking at the role of sacred values within a person So I spent about three years in Barcelona Doing about 800 surveys with a team of research assistants and a variety of interviews and was able to find some radicalized Populations one of those populations about 30 guys who were avowed supporters of lascarita Iba and al qaeda associate That fights on the Kashmiri issue these people's were supporters of armed jihad They were supporters of armed jihad against the west They even said that they would be willing to join a jihadist group or carry out an active jihad right in the west themselves And so once I got them and I knew what their sacred and non-circuit values where I did the next Best thing that we could possibly think of doing to understand what role sacred values play Internally we put them in a brain scanner And we scan their brains On the first ever neuro imaging studies the first ever brain scan first ever neuroscience studies actually done on radicalization And what we found was that when they were processing their sacred values a part of the brain called a dlpfc You can see it highlighted there in green This is a part of the brain that is associated with deliberative reasoning. It's when you self reflect It's when you engage in deliberative Deliberative rational thought and reasoning this part of the brain deactivates when they're thinking about their sacred values It essentially goes offline Now when they're thinking about their non-circuit values, you have that part of the brain active And you have another part of the brain active the ventromedial prefrontal cortex the vmpfc there in red Now for most of us and all of our decisions These two parts of the brain work in tandem the subjective value part and the deliberative reasoning part So most of you out there when you were having lunch you probably had a moment of thinking Do I really want to crack open this bag of chips? Do I really want to eat this brownie? I want to but that's going to be a lot of calories. That might be unhealthy I just worked out this morning. Well, that's what you maybe maybe I worked out last week And it'll and it'll you know undo all the benefits of that Well, that was your dlpfc and your vmpfc working together Most of our decisions involved both of those areas and sure enough with our radicalized population When they had low willingness to fight and die for their values, both of those areas were working in tandem However, when they had high willingness to fight and die for their values, which were mostly their sacred values This connection cuts off the dlpfc deactivates and there's no longer a connection between these two areas of the brain Basically decision making is no longer being mediated by deliberative reasoning regions of the brain So our question became how do we reconnect these areas and reactivate deliberative reasoning regions? All of our research on sacred values show that it's incredibly hard to change a sacred value to desacralize a value It happens people do deraticalize people do desacralize their values, but it's idiosyncratic We have tried a variety of experiments try to systematically do this and we have not been able to do it So we knew that we can't go after the values that that usually leads to a backfire effect people become reticent They become stubborn They sometimes increase their propensity towards violence when they feel like someone is challenging their values So we knew we had to come at it from a different tactic So we used something called manipulation of social consensus. Basically, we made them think that their peer group Who they for them was just other pakistanis living in barcelona that their peer group disagreed with them About their willingness to fight and die for these values And for those for half their values and half the values we used as a control where they agreed with them And so when the when the participants were looking at this disagreement They were willing to martyr themselves their in-group is not willing to martyr themselves. They were upset They were outraged they even got out of the scanner and we did a we did a post Post-experiment survey with them. They said that they were bothered by that Nonetheless, they conformed They lowered their willingness to fight and die to actually conform to their peer groups And when they were conforming when they were actually moving towards the general consensus their perception of what the social norm is About violence the dlpfc the part of the brain that was deactive came right back online And they were willing this to fight and die as it lowered those two parts of the brain the vmpfc and the dlpfc Started working in tandem again. They reconnected deliberative reasoning came back online and it reconnected with subjective value Now this has a few strategic communications implications On the one hand again going back to mass persuasion If you don't know people's sacred values and you're just targeting messages out there one size fits all If you're hitting their sacred values, you're basically targeting your message towards a part of the brain that isn't even online at that moment You're not going to have an impact because that's deactivated and it certainly doesn't have any access to the subjective value part of the brain So you need to know what people's sacred values are But another problem is that people's sacred values vary from person to person Even within just our 30 participants. We had in this neuro imaging study. They had different sets of sacred values between them So again, how is a one size fits all mass persuasion attempt actually going to have an impact when you don't really know Which values your messaging might be able to have an impact on or not? Again, this goes back to that the importance of person to person interaction And leveraging the social norms you don't have to change the beliefs You just change their perception of the norms you change their perception of what they think Their peer group thinks is acceptable levels of violence if anything at all And this fits in quite well with a lot of post-conflict reconciliation research that's been done Elizabeth Pollock another social psychologist did work on post-conflict reconciliation in uh, rwanda And what she found was she dropped radios into different parts of rwanda different villages and for half the villages They had a reconciliation themed soap opera they were listening to and for the other half It was a health program when she came back a year later She found basically the same thing that we've been finding in all of our research people's beliefs didn't change The actual strategic communications didn't actually work at changing anyone's beliefs or values But what it did do is it changed their perception of the social norms They now believed that other in-group members believe that reconciliation was important even though they personally did not And that belief that change in perception of social norms led to a change in actual behavior Including a 100 increase in cooperative behavior in the trial populations So again, you don't actually need to change people's beliefs You just need to change what they think their peers think About violence or certain actions and what action pathways can be taken in order to change behavior So what does that mean? It means that we should be trying to amplify the voices That believe that that are anti-violent basically that don't actually believe in these violent actions Many people who join these groups come from communities where there are prevailing the prevailing norms are basically non-violent They don't support many of these groups, but those voices aren't being heard Those voices aren't being deafening those voices are not being amplified Or if they are if the messaging is coming out it's coming out through some Government organization or some unknown entity that's throwing out this mass persuasion as opposed to local voices having their voices amplified So again As the speakers before me were talking about you got to go local You got to go down into the friendship circles You got to go down to the community level if you want to change people's perception of social norms It's who they think is their in-groups norms that they ultimately care about and if you can change the norms You can change behavior. You can increase cooperation. You can increase reconciliation You can decrease propensity to violence. You can literally change the circuitry of people's brains Thank you