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Ever hear of the phenomenon called an “illusory correlation”? It explains why commentator Williams, who was recently fired from NPR, associates Muslims at airports with terrorists.

I am going to be writing my next column for Slate about this issue. To whet your appetite, here’s a radio interview about illusory correlations and other biases with Steve Fast of WJBC. 

Joseph Stack, the Texas man who burned his house down and then recently flew a plane into an IRS building, killing one person, has some stark similarities to the the suicide bomber I write about in The Hidden Brain. Like Stack, Larry Layton was white and American — which apparently makes it difficult for some commentators to think of his action as an act of terrorism. In an ongoing Newsweek debate, senior editors are asking whether the label terrorist should be applied only to foreign actors. It’s intellectually muddled — what happens the next time Al Qaeda recruits an American to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States? Would that be terrorism — foreign actors were behind the mission — or not an act of terrorism, since it was an American who actually carried out the attack? The debate over whether Stack should be called a terrorist shows how problematic the definition of terrorism continues to be. I’ve long been in favor of using the consistent definition that terrorism expert Brian Jenkins utilizes: Terrorism is theater. The central difference between terrorist violence and other kinds of violence is that terrorists uses violence symbolically — the real target is not the person/building/institution being attacked but everyone who is watching. When you are angry at some group of people and you pick someone from that group at random to attack, you are engaging in terrorism, because the point of the attack is to send a message to everyone else in the group. Terrorists devalue their victims by turning them into props, and that is exactly what Joseph Stack did when he flew a plane into an IRS building. It did not matter to Stack which IRS worker he killed, just as it did not matter to Al Qaeda which Americans were in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, because the real targets of these attacks were not the victims directly affected but everyone else who was watching.

For a video introduction to the chapter in The Hidden Brain that talks about how tunnel vision shapes people into suicide bombers and terrorists, please click on the link titled The Tunnel here. Contrary to popular belief, I show that terrorists are not distinguished by their personalities, religious beliefs or internal make-up, but rather by their environments. The process by which people become suicide bombers is remarkably similar whether you are talking about Japanese kamikaze pilots, suicide bombers in Sri Lanka in the 1980s or Joseph Stack.

Listen to an interview about The Hidden Brain conducted by the Diane Rehm show. The show was guest-hosted by the immensely talented Susan Page of USA Today, and featured a discussion that ranged from how to reform our criminal justice system to same-sex attraction among Visigoths. Sorry, I can’t say more. You’ll just have to listen to it.

The idea of machines that take naked pictures of airline travelers is a titillating idea, of course, and images of randy airport screeners ogling naked people springs to mind. What is harder to bring to mind, of course, is the effect of the hidden brain on this process. Humans have an extraordinary ability to adapt to their circumstances — the tenth cookie does not taste as sweet as the first, the 16th cigarette of the day pales in its effect compared to the first, the 90th week in a wheelchair is not as painful as the tenth, and so on. This phenomenon of diminishing returns is sometimes called a hedonic treadmill — you run and run, but never make as much forward progress as your first step onto the treadmill. (This is part of the reason people make dreadful errors in forecasting their future happinesses and unhappinesses — we mistakenly assume the way we feel in the first moment we experience something is the way we will feel about that thing after ten years.)

I have no quibble with the very real debate between privacy and security. But the risk of voyeurism shouldn’t occupy our fears. It’s the risk of boredom among airport screeners that is the much greater concern, in terms of how the mind works. I don’t care if the airline passengers are Hollywood’s most glamorous stars — having to watch a thousand naked stars a day would make even a voyeur’s eyes glaze over.

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The debate gets tricky — and this is where the intellectual dishonesty starts — when you have to make trade-offs between security and civil liberties. During the 2008 election campaign, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly argued that choosing between our values and our security is a false choice. In this, he was being unscientific. Whenever you are dealing with a foe that is hard to spot — whether it be a case of a rare but deadly flu or a would-be terrorist — there is always an inverse relationship between the number of false positives and the number of false negatives. Decreasing false positives tends to increase false negatives, and decreasing false negatives tends to increase false positives.

False positives are the innocent people we target during anti-terrorism measures, or patients who do not have a disease who get scanned, treated and exposed to side effects. False negatives are the terrorists who slip through, or the patients with real disease who go undetected. False negatives can have catastrophic consequences, but there are invariably many more false positives than false negatives, so the adverse consequences of false positives can sometimes be greater than the cost of false negatives. The recent call to scale back on screening for certain kinds of cancer is one example of how the toll of false positives can sometimes exceed the toll of false negatives.

When it comes to terrorism, a truly honest conversation would ask how many terrorist incidents a nation is willing to tolerate in order to maintain its highest values regarding civil liberties, or how many civil liberties it is willing to forsake in favor of security. The dishonesty lies in suggesting we can always reduce false positives and false negatives simultaneously: That is sometimes possible (when you develop a perfectly accurate and risk-free screening tool for terrrorism or disease) but more commonly you have to trade one off against the other.

Given the human penchant for wanting our cake and eating it, too, it isn’t surprising our national debate over terrorism falls into predictable and polarized camps, where each side demonizes the other’s views. Wouldn’t it be better to have an honest conversation about the costs of security, and the costs of civil liberties?

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The club model of terrorism explains why terrorist masterminds are rarely betrayed by fellow members in the group, who stand to gain enormous financial rewards by betraying their masters. Unlike book clubs and other associations that make it easy for people to join and easy to leave, exclusive clubs are difficult to join and have high dues that make it difficult to stay. New members are rarely admitted unless they are able to demonstrate extraordinary commitment — often over long periods of apprenticeship — or have deep family connections with existing members. Exclusive clubs therefore produce very different kinds of human behavior than associations that are easy to join and easy to quit. They produce intense bonds of loyalty and tend to be extremely insular. It is these relationships that set the stage for the small group dynamics that prompt people to carry out actions that seem insane, depraved or bizarre to those of us on the outside.

These ideas are discussed in greater detail in a chapter called “The Tunnel” in my upcoming book, The Hidden Brain.

Five young men from Virginia intent on jihad were recently apprehended in Pakistan, as they sought to join Al Qaeda. As this news article notes toward the end, recruiters are rarely in the business of radicalizing young recruits; they are mostly in the business of reviewing recruits who come to them fully radicalized.

The chapter in the book looks at the reasons so many young people seek out jihad through the unusual story of an American who signed up to be a suicide terrorist. I’m hoping it will help people and policy makers think about suicide terrorism in a new light, and allow us to pay closer attention to the evidence, rather than to our intuitions about what makes suicide terrorists tick.

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