Out Of The Rabbit Hole

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2005, an audience filed into the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco. The house lights were on, making it easy to see a small group of men already on stage, wearing orange jumpsuits and lying on small prison cots. They were actors in the politically charged play, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The show told the stories of four British Muslim detainees. The narrative unfolds through the testimony of their families, attorneys, and US officials, along with letters that the men wrote while being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

NAFEES HAMID: One of them was a guy named Rujal Ahmed, who was from an area outside of Birmingham, and him and three of his buddies were picked up in Afghanistan and were held in Guantanamo Bay for many, many years. This is Nafees Hamid. He played the role of Rujal in one production of the play. What I remember from being in the show was just the way in which his letters were quite spirited in the beginning. He would be talking about how all the Guantanamo Bay guards like him, how they get along. They call him slim shady, how he's working on a six-pack. And then by the end, his letters, you could just see, were getting more and more depressed. And you could just tell that this was someone who was entering into a dark and very, very negative state.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ruhal Ahmed was accused of being an al-Qaeda recruit, an enemy of the United States. Throughout his more than two-year stint in Guantanamo, he maintained that he was innocent. He was eventually released without charges. As an actor, Nafees felt his job was to inhabit the prisoner's life and character.

NAFEES HAMID: With any character that you play, whether they're innocent or guilty, you try not to judge them and try to just become one of them as much as possible.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It was not the last time Nafees would try to get into the mind of a suspected terrorist. This week on Hidden Brain, we dive into the motivations of people on the brink of extremism and those who have been radicalized. We examine what prompts people to turn to violence and explore how psychological science might pull people back from the seductive appeal of extremist ideas.

After a few more years in the performing arts, Nafees Hamid left acting to pursue a career in psychology.

NAFEES HAMID: I always just had an interest in human psychology and what motivates us. I think that's part of the reason why I also was interested in acting. To me, that's just another way of trying to understand a more embodied, more intuitive way of trying to understand human psychology.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees went on to study cognitive science, but he still craved drama and excitement and wanted to get into a field of research that would take him all over the world. So he sought out cultural anthropologist and former guest of the show, Scott Atrin. At the time, Scott was studying terrorist groups.

NAFEES HAMID: You know, I really wanted to work with Scott, and he was...I think he probably had some interest in working with me, but he, you know, ponded me off to another academic who was there at Oxford, because that person was maybe more in a position to take on a PhD student. That person tried to pond me off to another academic at the University of Belfast.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Passed the hot potato here.

NAFEES HAMID: Exactly.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Living in Belfast and doing research on historical conflict in Northern Ireland was not what Nafees had imagined for himself. This was in 2013, the Arab Spring. Pro-democracy protests were spreading across the Middle East and Northern Africa. Jihadist groups, clusters of violent Islamic militias, were forming at a fast pace. In Syria, young men from around the world were gathering. They wanted to overthrow Syria's authoritarian leader, Bashar al-Assad.

NAFEES HAMID: They didn't always know what they were fighting for. They weren't necessarily going always to become a Jihadist themselves. But, you know, it was a sort of a sense of like, this is, for a lot of young Muslim youth, this was their equivalent of being able to say, this is my hero's journey is about to begin. I'm going to go and maybe I'll die, but I'm going to go fight for the plight of the Muslim people in Syria and save them from this brutal dictator.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Outside of adventure and curiosity, Nafees had another motivator for studying radicalized Islamic groups. His own upbringing mirrored that of many of the people Scott was studying. Nafees was raised Muslim by his Pakistani father and Indian mother, and he spoke many of the same languages as the jihadist recruits. In a way, he felt like he was the perfect candidate for this kind of work. One day, he made his views known over dinner with Scott and other academics, perhaps a tad forcefully.

NAFEES HAMID: I was a little drunk, so I said something I probably wouldn't have said, which is just, are you kidding me? This is 2013, and I'm like, we have right now this huge foreign fighter exodus going on of people who are pretty close to my profile, who are pretty close to my age. They look like me. They speak some of the same languages that I speak, same kind of background. And they're all going from all, thousands of them from all over the world are going to Syria to go join groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. And you want me to go to Northern Ireland to hang out with former IRA people? Who's going to go talk to these people? Who's going to be able to relate to them? Who's going to be able to put himself in their shoes, like an actor portraying these people, eventually absorb their thinking, be able to come back and communicate it not only to you, but to policymakers and to the media so that way people can understand and relate to it in order to eventually combat it. I said to those researchers, you're asking me to operate with one hand tied behind my back. I have more to offer than just being a scientist. I have friends who are better scientists than me. That's what you just want as an academic. I'll introduce you to other academics. You don't need me. And I could tell, again, Scott sort of like the chutzpah that I showed in that moment. And that's when he and another person he was working with offered me a job.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The job was more of what Nafees had in mind. It involved moving to Spain to find, interview and perform brain scans on men nearly or fully entrenched in extremist Islamic groups. The research project was designed to evaluate the lengths these men would go to defend what psychologists call sacred values.

NAFEES HAMID: Yeah, so sacred values are values that are of the utmost importance to us. They are values that you cannot engage with them or trade them off for the material aspects of the world. I can't buy this value off you. You're going to reject any kind of economic incentive that I make. There's almost an element of purity to it.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees wanted to understand what was happening in the minds of people who held sacred values. But before he could do that, he had to recruit volunteers for the study. He was working in Barcelona, a city with small, concentrated areas known to be breeding grounds for extremists. Nafees had no idea how to find would-be extremists, so he drew on his acting background. He decided to pretend to be an extremist himself.

NAFEES HAMID: So one of my first ridiculous attempts was that I just went to cafes, opened up my laptop in kind of Muslim dense areas, downloaded an ISIS video, started to watch that with the volume on full blast, thinking that maybe someone might walk behind me and be like, hey, is that the latest drop? Let's sit down and have a chat. And luckily, all that happened was that the manager of that cafe, who was also Muslim, kicked me out and threatened that I might get the cops called on me if I pull anything like this again.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The YouTube videos were not a total loss. Quite a few of them were posted by a man living right outside of Barcelona. Surprisingly, when Nafees reached out and explained his research project, the man invited him to his apartment.

NAFEES HAMID: I get to his flat, and there's already a couple of guys who are there in kind of the living space, and him and I are talking. He brings me into the kitchen, where he's doing some stuff there, and we sit down and we start talking. And we're speaking to each other in French. And he's telling me about his ideology and his way of thinking about the world, and it's very clear to me very quickly that this guy is a supporter of the sort of global jihadi movement. We're having this conversation, and it's all going fine. But then he starts to get more and more animated. He asked me where I'm from, and I was honest. I told him I'm American. He knew I was a researcher, and I'm trying to study this way of thinking. And then he starts saying some stuff like, you know, we can't trust anybody, as Muslims were persecuted everywhere we go. And then he says, basically, you know, why should I even trust you? You're an American. And then he says, why should I even let you out of my flat? And that's when I realized, okay, things are really turning sideways here.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees decided to appeal to the young man's vanity, his desire to be an influencer.

NAFEES HAMID: Listen, I saw your YouTube channel. No one's watching your videos. You know, you had like 68 views. You have like whatever, like 200 followers or something. I am a researcher. My articles will be published in, you know, major academic journals. I have the potential to, if I can understand you, I have the potential to get your message out to a broader audience. I am not here to be your mouthpiece, but I can at least, you know, communicate what you think and your ideas to a wider audience, because you can't do it on your own. And you are not doing, you are not succeeding on your own. And he kind of laughed it off. He thought that was a little funny, and he was like, all right, fine. And then he then just continued on with the conversation, but I could tell there was something that's off now. It's not really the same dynamic. He leaves the kitchen. He leaves me there. And I hear him in the other room speaking to these two guys in the Darija.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees spoke Urdu, which shares some words with the Darija. As he eavesdropped on the men in the next room, one word kept popping out.

NAFEES HAMID: I hear him say this word again and again, monophic, monophic, monophic. And monophic is a word that kind of means at best, traitor. At worst, it means a fake Muslim. Someone who's saying he's a Muslim, but is basically not a Muslim. And I realize they're talking about me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees knew that for some Muslims with extremist views, being a fake Muslim was a sin punishable by death. Frightened for his life, he tried to figure out how to escape. He could not exit through the front door without alerting the three men in the next room. It was at that moment he remembered a story that Scott Attrin had told him.

NAFEES HAMID: When he was in Indonesia, he got into a bit of trouble with some jihadis there, and how he had to jump out of a window while he was using the bathroom to get out of that situation. I'm glad I had that conversation with him, because that is what caused me at that moment to look out and see that there's a window in this room.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There was only one problem. He couldn't just jump out the window like Scott had done, because this apartment was on the second floor. Nafees opened the window and saw there was a narrow ledge outside. Terrified by the men in the next room, he stepped out onto the ledge.

NAFEES HAMID: I'm hanging on the ledge of the side of this building. There's an awning of like a store or something underneath me. I just momentarily balance my foot on the awning, but immediately the awning kind of cracks. So I fall, but I fall into the awning, which mostly broke my fall. I completely shattered the awning. Luckily, I didn't hit the ground too hard, and I was able to just get basically just as soon as, as soon as I got my feet on the ground, I just ran to the train station as fast as I could. And stupidly, when I get to the train station, I realize like the next train is in an hour and 27 minutes. I'm like, okay, this is not the right move. But luckily, there was a taxi outside, so I got into the taxi and told them to go towards Barcelona.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So this was your introduction to trying to find these people. This didn't dissuade you at this point from saying, you know, maybe I should go back to acting?

NAFEES HAMID: I mean, it's all acting, right? But I mean, it's like it's... I mean, I wanted adventures, right? I wanted excitement. I didn't want stunt doubles. I wanted to be my own stunt double. So here I was, you know, getting what I asked for.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, Nafees finds a slightly more boring, but also less dangerous way to talk to extremists. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Nafees Hamid is a cognitive scientist at King's College, London. As a young doctoral student, he wanted to identify what factors push people to become violent extremists. While conducting research in Barcelona, his first few attempts to find volunteers to take part in his studies failed. But he did eventually discover a better way to connect with radicalized Muslim men. One of the best ways was to use a fixer, someone from the area who was already trusted by the communities, could speak their languages and understood their cultural norms. Nafees found a few young men who fit the bill and hired them as research assistants. One of them especially stood out.

NAFEES HAMID: And at first, I wasn't sure whether he was going to be a good research assistant or not, just because he didn't have a university degree or anything. He didn't even have like a normal high school diploma. But turned out he was amazing. I mean, he spoke something like six languages fluently, very charismatic, full of personality, had big dreams and ambitions, wanted to be a professional athlete, wanted to be a musician, wanted to go into the arts. After meeting me, he wanted to be a researcher, just a really charismatic individual, and he knew everyone. And so he and I together in the beginning, started to go out and meet people, and he would introduce me to the right kinds of characters. And then it kind of just snowballs from there. You kind of get eventually more and more extremist people.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: They focused on recruiting volunteers from Moroccan and Pakistani immigrant communities. To Nafees' surprise, many young men were excited about the possibility of having their brains scanned.

NAFEES HAMID: People found that interesting, to be honest. You know, even when I got to the most extreme people, the most radicalized people, who were openly telling me about their support for al-Qaeda or for other groups, when they would hear that, they became curious. They wanted to know more about, well, what does previous neuroscience say? Like, what are your hypotheses about this? And then some of them also were a bit narcissistic, too. You know, they were like, oh, my brain is very special. You're going to discover that. Just wait until you see my brain. One guy was like, OK, fine, I will participate in your study. But only under one condition. He kind of looks around. Like, he's about to tell me something very secretive. And he goes, I want a picture of my brain, just to prove to my mother that I have one.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees and his team conducted the first set of brain scans on a group of Moroccan men whose families had been living in Barcelona for a few generations. These were men on the edge of radicalization, open about their willingness to fight or even die for their beliefs, but who hadn't yet committed themselves to a group like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Nafees wanted to better understand what might prompt these men to make the leap to join extremist groups. So he set up a video game called Cyberball, a virtual soccer game. When a volunteer sat down to play, he'd see four avatars on the screen.

NAFEES HAMID: One of them represents them. It's their little avatar. And then there's three other avatars of three other players. They can see faces of those three players. They look like Spanish or Catalan players. They have names underneath them that are very typical, stereotypical Catalan male names. And they're told that these three players are three other real people who are sitting in rooms as well. So they think they're real people. They said the task is simple. You're just going to press this little button on this computer, and you can pass the ball towards any of the other three players that you want to. They'll then pass the ball back to you.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Unknown to the participants, the other three avatars were not real players. They were part of the experimental team. Nafees had split the volunteers into two groups. The men in the first group would play the game for a while, just passing the ball back and forth with the other avatars. But for the volunteers in the second group, things played out differently.

NAFEES HAMID: They pass the ball to the other players. Maybe the ball gets passed to them once or twice, but then the other players basically stop tossing the ball back to them. And the three ostensibly Spanish Roquetalon players basically just start tossing the ball back and forth to each other.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The Moroccan volunteer would be deliberately excluded from the game. His avatar left standing with nothing to do but watch. Once the volunteers had played the game, they were asked to get into an fMRI machine.

NAFEES HAMID: Just a big magnetic tube that they lay down in, they slide into it, and then they look up at a screen basically, and what they're seeing is a value.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: These were not numerical values, but values that the volunteers had been surveyed on before. Non-sacred values, such as halal food should be served in hospitals, jails, and schools, or sacred values, like Western military forces, should be expelled from Muslim lands.

NAFEES HAMID: Underneath the value, they then see a scale, a one to seven scale, and that's a fight and die scale. So for one, it says, how much are you willing to do for this value? One being, I'm not willing to do anything at all, and then seven being, I'm willing to fight and die.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Previous research that Nafees and other cognitive scientists had done had revealed a trend. When someone was on the edge of radicalization, an experience of social exclusion would often push them over the edge. The results of the cyberball study mirrored this finding. Volunteers who were excluded during the virtual soccer game became more willing to fight and die for their sacred values, and for non-sacred values as well.

NAFEES HAMID: And not only that, we saw that behaviorally when we retested people for their sacred non-sacred values, more of the values that were previously labeled as non-sacred started to get categorized as sacred when they went through the psychometric tests.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: If a trivial act of exclusion in a video game could change how volunteers felt about serious issues, what might be the effect of more serious forms of exclusion in real life?

NAFEES HAMID: Well, what I think is going on here, mixing in my qualitative observations and looking at other researches, is that when people feel... Many of us hold multiple identities, and certainly second generation Moroccan youth in Spain are no different. They hold multiple identities, from Moroccan to Spanish. They're young, they're a Barca football team fan. They associate with different political movements as well. When you feel rejected by a particular group, especially if it's the majority group, you're probably out of the different groups that you belong to, you're going to find solace in that one group that actually presents itself as your defender, as the group that is there to get your back, to be your fellow gang members, to protect you against that group that just rejected you. That group is now going to gain an attraction a lot more.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, this speaks to sort of the deep-rooted need we all have to find acceptance. So in some ways, when we don't have acceptance in one area of our lives, it's perhaps not irrational that we will seek acceptance in another area of our lives.

NAFEES HAMID: Yeah, I think belonging is just one of those sort of very basic human needs. It's as social animals, it's where we feel safest.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Social exclusion isn't the only thing that pushes people toward extremism. Nafees and other researchers have noted that it's often a cascade of life events combined with an experience of social exclusion that leads to radicalization. He witnessed this firsthand while working with that charismatic research assistant who had helped him find volunteers for the brain imaging study.

NAFEES HAMID: So I think he, in the beginning, sort of saw me as a little bit of like an older brother figure. And he wanted to share all of his passions with me and all of his big goals that he had in his life and how he really wanted to become somebody. But then over the course of our field work, he started to, I could just see kind of go into a darker and darker place. In the beginning, I could just kind of see it in his mood and his energy. And a lot of it started off with issues that he was having with his father, who basically just wanted him to go get a job to help support the family, some kind of menial work, and really denigrated his high-minded ambitions. Then he had a best friend whose life went into like a very negative direction, and he basically lost contact with his best friend, so he started to feel more alone because of that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The punches just kept coming. Next, his family found out that he had secretly been dating a Spanish woman who wasn't Muslim and forced them to break up.

NAFEES HAMID: He told me that he was just walking around Barcelona all the time until 3 a.m. in the morning, sometimes chain-smoking. And he would be watching videos a lot, and he couldn't sleep, and he had insomnia, and I could tell he was kind of getting into a depressed state. And then over time, he started talking about some political issues, and I could see that there was this bubbling sympathy for extremist groups. He would be talking about the Taliban, and he would be saying how the Taliban are being bombed on Pakistani soil by the US government, and how these are our people, and this is, you know, we should be talking to them. And then he started talking about foreign fighters going to Syria, and how, you know, when foreign fighters came to Spain, they were considered heroes. When they're going to Syria, they're considered traitors, probably because they're just Muslims, so this is hypocrisy. And they started showing me videos that he was watching, and some of them were ISIS propaganda videos about how ISIS was opening up schools and hospitals in Syria. And so, this is the stuff you never see in the mainstream media. This is what these guys are actually doing on the ground. And so I realized I have to intervene, I have to do something.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees asked his research assistant to meet in a tree-lined promenade in an immigrant neighborhood of the city. He waited on a bench, and waited, and waited.

NAFEES HAMID: First of all, he shows up very late, which again is not like him, but he shows up very late, and I can remember seeing him from a distance, walking over to me, shoulders slumped, hands in his pockets, just kind of a shell of the guy that I remember with so much charisma. And he knows I want to talk to him about something related to what he's been showing me. And he comes and he sits next to me on the bench, his arms are crossed, he's not even really looking at me, he's kind of looking off in the other direction. And I just start telling him, you know, these videos you're watching, these are crazy, this is propaganda, they're just taking advantage of you, you don't even understand who these people are, these are terrorist groups, they're murderers, they're killing everyone, and they're just completely brainwashing you and taking advantage of your vulnerable state.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And what was his reaction when you said this? Did he say, thanks for setting me straight? I mean, he looked up to you as an older brother. Did he have the reaction of basically saying, you've shown me something that I hadn't seen?

NAFEES HAMID: He tried to placate me. He just stared down at the ground while I was talking. He was nodding his head listening to me, but not really looking at me, not really taking in what I was saying. And he just kind of, in a way that even I didn't quite believe at the time, just said, thank you, Nafees Pai. Thank you. I understand. I understand what you're saying. And then he just basically agreed that we would pick up the fieldwork again. We would do it in a few days. And he said, thank you. And then he just got up and just walked away. He didn't really even turn to me or anything. He just stood right up and just walked back towards where he came from.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And then the research assistant broke off all contact with Nafees.

NAFEES HAMID: I sent him messages. I was asking him, are we going to meet up? I tried to call him. I realized the phone had been disconnected. We were following each other on social media. So I went and checked the social media profile, and I saw that the user had been deleted, essentially. And I feared the worst. My mind goes into the direction of, did he go off and join a group or something or go to Syria?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees considered trying to track the research assistant down, but he didn't know where he lived. So he tried an alternate route. He went to one of the assistant's cousins to do some digging for him.

NAFEES HAMID: That guy says, okay, he'll do some investigation. He didn't want to talk to me on the phone. He said, just come back one week later. So for a whole week, I'm just kind of sweating bullets, you know, metaphorically speaking. Like, I just don't really know what's going on, what happened to him. I come back and I meet with the cousin, and he tells me basically that the parents sort of found out what was going on with him. And then the parents basically said, okay, we can send you abroad to another western country where you can get a job at a family acquaintance's business, work part time, send some of that money back to us, and then you can pursue some of your grander ambitions that you have while you're there. So that way we get the money that we need and you can still pursue the things you want to pursue. And supposedly that's what he went off and did.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Ironically, the parents did what Nafees should have done. Instead of trying to convince the young man that his beliefs were wrong, they offered him an opportunity to chase his dreams.

NAFEES HAMID: As soon as those pathways for purpose and meaning and really inclusion in terms of his life and his dreams, once those pathways opened back up to him again, he dropped his flirtation with radicalization and went off and pursued his ambitions.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, Nafees discovers more methods we can use to deter the spread of radicalization.

NAFEES HAMID: And he said to me, he goes, Nafees, I can't live in that world. That world gives me anxiety. The world of QAnon, even if it's wrong, it at least tells me where the bad guy is. It gives me a direction of which way to point my gun.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Across the world, politically-fueled violence is on the rise. People from different backgrounds are joining extremist groups, willing to fight and even die for their beliefs. Nafees Hamid studies the psychology of extremism. In his initial research, he was able to identify how social exclusion often paves the path to radical ideologies, which left him to wonder, is there a way to pull people from the grip of such ideologies? So he set out on another study. This time, he gathered a group of Pakistani men living in Barcelona. Unlike the volunteers in the initial study, these men were fully radicalized, or what Nafees calls devoted actors.

NAFEES HAMID: Devoted actors is a term that basically just means that there are some people who sometimes think about the world in very duty-bound ways, and they're willing to commit extreme costly sacrifices for their group or for their values. They're going to fight and die for it. They'll kill people. They'll even kill themselves if they need to.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The Pakistani men he recruited for the study were devoted actors to Lashkar-e-Tayeba, an extremist Islamic group whose main mission is to fight India and force it to turn over the disputed state of Kashmir to Pakistan.

NAFEES HAMID: For them, we want to understand what will bring them back from the edge of violence, because they're already very close to it and they're already pretty extreme.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Once again, Nafees asked the men to get into an FMRI machine. The volunteers were presented with a series of sacred and non-sacred values and then asked about their willingness to fight and die for those values.When the men were asked about sacred values, Nafees found one part of their brains appeared to be deactivated.

NAFEES HAMID: Called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with many things, but including sort of executive functions, deliberative cognition, self-control, emotional regulation, et cetera.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Essentially, this is the part of the brain that makes you take a moment to stop and think. Should I do this? Why am I doing this? Simultaneously, another part of the brain, and that's the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, seem to show heightened activation. This part of the brain is involved with emotion, reward, motivation, and fear. But when asked about non-sacred values, the researchers did not see differences between these two areas of the brain.

NAFEES HAMID: I mean, the standard example that I usually give when I tell people about the study is, imagine you're out at a restaurant, and you've had a nice dinner, and the waiter comes and offers you a menu, and there's some nice dessert in there. You might see a nice tiramisu or something, and you go, oh, I want that. That, if I was scanning your brain, there's a pretty good chance I would be seeing the ventromedial prefrontal cortex active in that moment, going, oh, I want. Then you go, oh, you know, I gotta go to, I'm trying to lose weight. I'm going to the gym. I went to the gym yesterday. I didn't go today. Maybe I'll go tomorrow. I don't know. This is not really a good decision here. If I was scanning your brain at that moment, I might see the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex active. And you'll see these two parts of the brain competing over each other. And maybe one will win out. You might say, hey, you know, I want that. I want that term of sewer. I might not. So that's normal decision making that takes place. And when it comes to non-sacred values, it's basically the same. Even for these supporters of Lushkriyat Deva, when there's non-sacred values, you see that normal activity of decision making going on. But you don't see it when it comes to sacred values. It's just the I want part of the brain that seems to be online.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees and his team wanted to see if it was possible to counter that I want response with more measured and thoughtful brain activity. As he'd learned with his research assistant, it usually doesn't work to try and convince someone that their beliefs are wrong. So Nafees and his colleagues took a different tack.

NAFEES HAMID: We thought to ourselves, okay, maybe what we can do is we can't change their sacred value, but we can change what they're willing to do for their sacred values. We can change their intentions. We can change their action propensity. Maybe we can lower their willingness to fight and die for these beliefs without changing the beliefs themselves. Okay, that's probably a more realistic goal.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: How do you change someone's intentions? How do you get someone to back away from their sacred values, let alone say no to the tiramisu? Again, it comes back to that basic human need to belong.

NAFEES HAMID: If you want to stay belonging into a particular group, you have to follow the social norms of that group. The more you deviate from the social norms of the group, the more you're sort of othering yourself. You're hacking away at your own sense of belonging. And we normally wouldn't want to do that. We want to follow the social norms. If the social norms shift, we shift along with it oftentimes in order to maintain our sense of safety that comes with belonging.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Was it possible, in other words, not to shift the views of the volunteers, but to shift their perception of the social norms of the groups they cared about? The researchers once again had the men climb into the fMRI scanner. They could see each sacred and non-sacred value that had been shown in the first half of the study, along with a little green square that represented how willing they were to fight and die for each value. But that wasn't all they saw.

NAFEES HAMID: They see in a red square what the general opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona was in terms of their willingness to fight and die for this particular value. And they knew that we were out there doing surveys with lots of people, so they knew that we had access to this data.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The radicalized man saw there was a large gap between their views and the views of the broader Pakistani community. Suddenly, the researchers noticed a shift in the brain imaging data. Parts of the volunteers' brains that focused on executive functioning, asking, should I do this? And does this really make sense? Showed increased activation.

NAFEES HAMID: They lowered their willingness to fight and die to get closer to what the actual general community said. And the degree to which they conformed was predicted by the degree of reactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in other words, really what's happening here, if you can tell a story about this research, is that they are seeing that their views, in some ways, are more extreme than the views of people whom they consider to be their in-group. And something is happening in their brains that basically says, let me become more in line with the views of people in my in-group.

NAFEES HAMID: Yeah, so basically, what I think is going on here is essentially, yeah, they see that this, my in-group doesn't agree with my willingness to fight and die. I think that's sort of like this error detection, right? It's like, oh, I'm out of, maybe I shouldn't be so confident about my answer to this willingness to fight and die, because I'm out of line. And again, there's a threat, there's a danger here. These are a group of people that I want to belong to.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The story painted by this research has been demonstrated in many other settings. Princeton University psychologist Betsy Palak found that when Hutus and Tutsis in post-genocide Rwanda were led to think that most Rwandans were for reconciliation, they started to favor reconciliation themselves. We explored that research in an earlier episode of Hidden Brain, titled Romeo and Juliet in Kigali. For his own part, Nafees says he has come to see the pointlessness of trying to argue people out of their beliefs. Debates on social media or across the dinner table rarely change the minds of people with strong pre-existing views. A better approach is to focus again on building bonds with our interlocutors and then counting on those bonds to change how people think. Nafees got to try this approach himself when he noticed a former flatmate behaving oddly.

NAFEES HAMID: So this was someone who I had lived with many years earlier, almost a decade earlier at that point. And I had known him as a young person. I was maybe eight years older than him or so. And he also looked up to me. He was a white American. And he and I sort of lost touch over the years. I mean, we stayed in touch over social media. We sent messages to each other. And then the pandemic hit in 2020. And I could see on social media that he was kind of posting a lot of extreme content. I noticed that he was specifically going after some people on social media, some people that we mutually knew who were Jewish or at least it seemed like he was targeting them and calling them out and saying that they're just believing whatever the Kabbal tells them and that they need to trust the plan and they need to trust Q and Q has all the answers and that they're part of the problem.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The Q that Nafees' former flatmate was referring to is a person or people responsible for the group QAnon, which spreads misinformation about a variety of topics in the United States and beyond. Rather than calling out his friend online or chastising him like he had done with his research assistant, Nafees asked his former flatmate if he'd be willing to talk. When they got on a video call, it was clear his friend was having a rough time.

NAFEES HAMID: He didn't look like that nice, starry-eyed, cute little boy that I knew when he was younger. He was now a man who looked like he had aged quite a bit as well and seemed like he had seen a lot of stress in his life. And the initial conversation was a bit stilted. He was a bit ideological. But at this point, I had actually had so much experience talking to people with ideas that are very different than my own. I really knew how to navigate the situation, which was just to ask a lot of questions and for him to feel like he's being heard. And he eventually revealed to me his whole journey down the QAnon rabbit hole and even into more far-right wing ideology. And what basically ended up happening was that he had a series of sort of events that happened in his life, losing his job, relationship breaking up, family members, loved ones dying, and it all happened in very short order. And this really created a sense of being lost in his life, because all the things that gave him a sense of who he was and a sense of stability were just sort of stripped away from him in quite short order.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Unemployed, lonely, and stuck at home during the pandemic, Nafees' friend had started spending a lot of time on YouTube. It began with popular alt-right channels, which led to conspiracy theory videos, and eventually to QAnon.

NAFEES HAMID: QAnon gave him a bad guy. They gave him a bad guy that could just be responsible for all the world's problems. At the end of like a 10-hour conversation, I could tell that he understood that I didn't understand really what was motivating him. And so he sat there and he goes, okay, let me try to figure myself out with you. And he says to me, he goes, listen, my family were preppers. We had like 10 guns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and enough food and water for us to survive the zombie apocalypse if it came along. I'm an anxious person. I can't handle uncertainty. I need a contingency plan for everything. And he said to me, he goes, Nafees, if there's no real good guys or bad guys, there's no one person who's creating all the trouble in the world. It's just, it's kind of chaotic. You have this chaos theory. You have all these different power players, all trying to do their own thing, and then sort of things emerge out of that complex interaction. Because even if that's the way the world is, I can't live in that world. That world gives me anxiety. The world of QAnon, even if it's wrong, it at least tells me where the bad guy is. It gives me a direction of which way to point my gun. In essence, it gives him a map to a territory. And so, he can navigate that world more easily.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Although this was unsettling, Nafees just kept having open conversations with his friend. He wanted to give him a space outside the radical world of QAnon, where he could feel understood, where he could feel like he belonged. These conversations lasted hours. Nafees gained his friend's trust, going so far as to become what psychologists call a credible messenger.

NAFEES HAMID: Credible messenger needs to have at least two qualities. One is a perception of benevolence, that this person has my best interest to hurt. And two, that this person has authority, that they know more about the topic than I do. And I knew from his eyes, he saw me as having both of those qualities. So he respected me, and he knew that I respected him as a person. And so I became a credible messenger for him, where we would have these conversations, where he would post something that was clearly a conspiracy ideology-based thinking, or what I would consider sometimes hate-mongering messages, us versus them, divisive messages, sometimes with undertones of anti-Semitism. But I knew that as the credible messenger in his life, I could in a nice way, in a polite way, in a respectful way, engage with him about it. And say, listen, I don't think this message is quite true, because look at this alternative information. And because I had brought him in and became sort of one source of inclusion for him, he was open to what I was saying.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Over time, the friend became more and more willing to have Nafees challenge his extremist beliefs. He posted less and less. He got a girlfriend who didn't support his radical ideas, and with Nafees' encouragement, pursued a new line of work. Q became a thing of his past.

NAFEES HAMID: Most people don't want to say or even admit to themselves that they believed in something, that perhaps they don't agree with anymore, but they just simply walk away from it, and they just move on with other things in their life. They don't want to talk about it anymore. And I would say he's kind of more in that phase.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I have to say though, the model that you're suggesting here, it's such a difficult model for many people to practice, because if someone does something that we find, not just wrong, but deeply offensive, deeply hurtful, that angers us, it's very hard to remember that our ability to influence them comes down to their being able to trust us, and therefore we should actually reach out to them and make them feel included, when everything in our body is screaming to us to exclude them.

NAFEES HAMID: Yeah, and you have to remember, are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for them? Because sometimes it can feel personally cathartic and feel good to get upset at them. And sometimes it's almost, we don't realize it, but maybe we're even being a bit performative in our anger, because this is what our in-group would think is the righteous way and the virtuous way to behave. And even if there's nobody else watching, we might be virtue signaling, because we've just intrinsically hold these values now. But it's not always gonna be the useful and the right way to actually help navigate someone into a different pathway. If you wanna transform another person's life, you have to really transform your relationship with them. I think this is the big myth of individualism, is we think that we can exist independently, but we don't. We only exist in relation to other people, and everyone else exists in relation to everyone else. And so if you wanna transform an individual person, in some sense, you have to transform yourself as well. You have to change the relationship, and be open to the fact that not only are you gonna maybe transform their way of thinking, but maybe you'll also change in terms of having more empathy for them and hopefully even more compassion for them as well.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Nafees Hamid is a cognitive scientist at King's College London. Nafees, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

NAFEES HAMID: Thank you, I had a great time.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy our work, there's plenty more for you to listen to as a member of our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Hidden Brain Plus is now available across podcast platforms and devices. You can sign up for a free seven-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you use Apple devices, you can find Hidden Brain Plus in Apple podcasts or at apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Once again, those links are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you soon.