The idea of thrill seeking,
I know I mentioned earlier that the one thing we do know about this cohort of
individuals who do radicalize, it's more attractive to the young males.
And we see in society, young men wanting more action.
They want to seek out an adventurous lifestyle.
They're bored, they want to go off and try something extreme or different.
So they can then radicalize by just the desire to seek
out thrills in their life and that's how they get caught up in these groups.
A notion of love can radicalize an individual,
that you have this deep connection with someone else and
that someone else is pushing you towards these radical ideas.
So, even though they're not attracted to them,
they become part of the relationship that you have and that you want so
badly that you ultimately end up adopting the idea of the loved one.
And then there's this idea of unfreezing, that one point your living a normal life,
but somehow you become disconnected from a number of the anchors in your life.
And all of a sudden you don't have any other connections that are keeping
you anchored in that way.
And then you can drift to these more radical ideas, his notion of unfreezing.
He talks about three different types of ways groups can radicalize together.
So these would be people who have already connected with each other.
And McCauley looks at what he calls a small group dynamics as a psychological
process, to explain why the group together will take on more and more radical ideas.
The first is group polarization, that if you have a group together,
over time, the average person's radicalization level tends to increase.
And that's because of the dynamics within the group,
where you always have some people who are a little bit more extreme.
They tend to convince others that if they want to stay
with the group that their views have to move more towards theirs.
But then, to become the leader or to distinguish themselves,
they might become more and more radical.
So over time, the whole entire group keeps moving up the radicalization chain.
There's this idea of group competition,
if you have a number of different groups that are trying to attract support from
the same base of people that they too will become, they will compete with each other.
And they'll try to outdo each other by showing they are more willing to
engage in radical activity,
more willing to engage in violence in order to attract their base.
Then there finally the notion of group isolation, that if a group gets cut off
from other channels of society, that the bonds between them grow so
strong that they are willing to do, even sacrifice their life, for others.
A good example of this is how when our military, in order to promote group
cohesion, we try to cut the individuals off, we send them away to basic training.
We send them away from their loved ones, where they can bond with their group, and
build this comradery and strong affection, such that when they get into battle,
they're willing to do extraordinary things.
The same can have with a radical a group that gets isolated.
And their strong bonds for each other, because of their isolation,
pushes them to do things to promote their ideology.
David SchanzerAssociate Professor of the Practice
