How religion can inoculate against radicalism




















In some ways, Morton said, the Redirect Method is similar to the anti-hate vaccine Braddock is testing. Search Search. Home United States U. VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next.

Researcher Tests 'Vaccine' Against Hate. It is important to make this distinction. Muslim representation in Australia is not only the image of the bearded man with the taqiya the Muslim cap or the veiled woman. So it is interesting to see, if one is paying attention to it, images of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, or Parramatta Mosque Chairman, Neil El-Kadomi, in a suit and tie, for example, leaving aside their differences of opinion.

To reduce the image of the "Muslim" to such a depiction would be to undermine the rich cultural and ethnic diversity of Muslims globally and within Australia. Indeed, it would be gross misrepresentation of the religion and its people. Furthermore, such a reductive view of Muslims is blind to the subtleties and degrees of social and cultural sophistication that play out in majority Muslim countries.

Islamic history contains multiple representations of peoples, each one with their own interpretation of the faith, which had spread from Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley, initially, and which now is a religion practised across the globe. There are - and, it would seem, that there have always been - a significant proportion of Muslims who are nominal. These "cultural Muslims" - non-practicing, nominal Muslims who see their religion as part of their ethnic identity - are now increasingly recognised in academic circles elsewhere and in Australia as making up a "silent majority.

This is not a purely "Western" phenomenon. Indeed, Muslims in majority Muslim countries have tended to demonstrate a lesser degree of religiosity, as Islam is their lived political reality.

This would apply to Muslims in Iran and Egypt , for example. In the West this may be connected to secularisation processes and the "multiple modernities" thesis.

It is important to recognise this fact, since it demonstrates an entirely new level of the social, cultural and intellectual development of Muslims that is largely absent from mainstream consciousness. The position adopted by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the wake of the recent violence in Parramatta is important for reinforcing the values Australians need to uphold in the face of adversity: "I think it is imperative now, more than ever, that we try to overcome our differences and misunderstandings and open our hearts to each other," he said.

Yet, it is also important to note there is no sure-fire inoculation against radicalisation, and no silver bullet for Islamism. The surgically invasive terminology identify, isolate, and obliterate commonly used to describe the government's response to radicalisation simply adds to the problem, because it is invariably reactive and targets the symptoms rather than root causes.

It follows that inoculation messages can be effective without the problems that beset other programs: neither lack of domain knowledge nor stigmatization are likely to derail inoculation. Future research should test the effectiveness of inoculation on groups who are likely targets of extremists. Whereas our approach was generic and broad based, this may be insufficient to reach and protect at-risk populations.

Inoculation could give adolescents the tools to identify extremist messages and subsequently increase their resistance to persuasive misinformation. However, to date, there has been surprisingly little inoculation research involving young people below college age.

Future work must also explore avenues to roll out inoculation at scale. However effective a treatment may be in the laboratory, it cannot make a difference in the real world unless users are exposed to it.

One potential avenue would involve YouTube itself, ideally by linking the inoculation material into the recommender system such that it is recommended to people who are deemed likely to watch potentially radicalizing content. YouTube has a clear policy against hate speech Google, n. The idea of using the recommender system to deploy public-service messages is therefore not far fetched.

At a time when regulation of social media is increasingly being entertained by policy makers, in particular in the European Union e. Lewandowsky et al. Online radicalization driven by disinformation is of growing concern in many societies and has demonstrable adverse consequences offline. Interventions based on rebutting of misinformation face several challenges: First, the dynamically changing nature of radicalizing content makes timely deployment of specific countermessages difficult.

Second, corrections are often only partially successful. Finally, people who have consumed disinformation are often difficult to reach with corrections. We therefore explored another tool that can protect people against misleading rhetoric, namely argumentation-based inoculation. We successfully inoculated against both Islamophobic and Islamist disinformation using a video that was presented in a neutral context, thereby circumventing some of the problems associated with rebuttals.

The results point to a scalable intervention against radicalization that can be deployed preemptively without requiring specific knowledge of radicalizing content.

We are grateful for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript by anonymous reviewers recruited by CREST. SL conceived the study and designed it with MY. Both authors analyzed the data independently and SL produced figures for publication. Both authors contributed to the manuscript with SL taking the lead and setting up the Markdown files and R scripts to permit recompilation.

All authors read and approved the final manuscript. The funder was involved in ethics approval and thus contributed to debriefing procedures and vetting of the stimulus material. The first author was supported by a Humboldt Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany during part of this work.

The method and analysis plan were preregistered. The files in the repository permit recompilation of this manuscript, including the analysis. The ethics process examined all stimuli used in the study, in addition to recruitment and debriefing procedures. Given the nature of the material, particular care was taken to ensure that participants were debriefed see details in Method.

Participant information, consent, and debriefing material are available in the preregistration. Publisher's Note. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Cogn Res Princ Implic. Published online Aug Stephan Lewandowsky 1, 2 and Muhsin Yesilada 1. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Stephan Lewandowsky, Email: ku. Corresponding author. Received Jan 25; Accepted Aug 9. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Associated Data Supplementary Materials Additional file 1.

YouTube analysis and verbatim scripts. Abstract We report the results of a preregistered study that tested the effectiveness of inoculating participants against Islamophobic and radical-Islamist disinformation. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at Significance statement Social media and other online platforms have contributed to Islamist and Islamophobic radicalization by increasingly sophisticated methods Kruglanski et al.

Method In preparation for the current study, we analyzed Islamophobic and radical-Islamist videos on YouTube using the YTDT tool Rieder, to understand the techniques by which extremists mislead. Table 1 Number of participants per group. Open in a separate window. Screen snapshot of the recommender tabs for the two conditions. Materials Training video The training video for the inoculation condition was designed to counter the prevailing misleading rhetorical techniques identified by our analysis of extremist YouTube videos see Additional file 1 : Section S1 for details.

Support for the video Unlike the other measures, the survey software recorded a notable number of missing responses for this measure. Exploration of anger and agreement We conducted an additional exploratory analysis not preregistered that examined the association between self-reported anger and agreement with the target video.

Discussion Limitations and relationship to previous results Several limitations of the study must be recognized before we consider its implications. Theoretical implications Our results also have implications for psychological theory.

Practical implications Some interventions against violent extremism and radicalization have not relied on empirical evidence to inform best practice.

Conclusions Online radicalization driven by disinformation is of growing concern in many societies and has demonstrable adverse consequences offline. Supplementary Information Additional file 1. Acknowledgements We are grateful for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript by anonymous reviewers recruited by CREST.

Authors' contributions SL conceived the study and designed it with MY. Availability of data and material The method and analysis plan were preregistered. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Footnotes Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. References Abbas T. The symbiotic relationship between Islamophobia and radicalisation. Critical Studies on Terrorism. Far right and Islamist radicalisation in an age of austerity: A review of sociological trends and implications for policy.

International Centre for Counter-Terrorism; Limits of UK counterterrorism policy and its implications for Islamophobia and far right extremism. A war of keywords: How extremists are exploiting the internet and what to do about it. Center on Religion and Geopolitics; Conspiracy theory and American foreign policy.

Manchester University Press. Beyond the incident: Outcomes for victims of anti-Muslim prejudice. A meta-analysis of research on inoculation theory. Communication Monographs. Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID misinformation. Online propaganda use during Islamist radicalization. Populism and informal fallacies: An analysis of right-wing populist rhetoric in election campaigns. Media portrayals of minorities: Muslims in British newspaper headlines, — Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Vaccinating against hate: Using attitudinal inoculation to confer resistance to persuasion by extremist propaganda. Terrorism and Political Violence. Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Timing matters when correcting fake news. Fact sheet: Katie hopkins. Bridge Initiative Team.

Conway M. Determining the role of the internet in violent extremism and terrorism: Six suggestions for progressing research. Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence. Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. Fear appeals motivate acceptance of action recommendations: Evidence for a positive bias in the processing of persuasive messages.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. How WhatsApp destroyed a village. BuzzFeed News. Is it terrorism? Can WhatsApp counter misinformation by limiting message forwarding? In International conference on complex networks and their applications pp. Hate speech policy. In the present study, the training video did not mention Islam or any issues related to radicalisation.

The video nonetheless successfully inoculated people against being misled by two diametrically opposed radicalising positions. It follows that inoculation messages may be effective without the problems that may beset some other counter-messaging programs: neither lack of domain knowledge nor stigmatisation are likely to derail inoculation.

Overall, the results provide support for the use of inoculation in combating extremist messages and demonstrate the potential success of using inoculation to make people more resilient to extremist disinformation.

It should be noted, however, that the study did not measure the duration of the inoculation effect, nor compare inoculation to fact-checking or corrections. Future research could address these and other issues such as the effectiveness of inoculation in specific groups who are likely targets of extremists such as adolescents. Ahmed, M. A war of keywords: How extremists are exploiting the internet and what to do about it.

Center on Religion and Geopolitics.



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