The growing concern with ‘bedroom radicalisation’

How do you radicalise a young mind? How do you take opinions that are healthy, open and flexible, and somehow transform them into a set of dangerous, dogmatic and warped beliefs?

Increasingly, malevolent and deluded individuals are exposing young people to ideas and persuasive arguments that can lead to so-called “bedroom radicalisation”. In recent research undertaken by the Henry Jackson Society, a rightwing think tank in London, more than 50 per cent of the cases studied involved online radicalisation as part of a broad- er socialisation process. Terrorists are made, not born.

Understanding the radicalisation process is essential to preventing it. The observation that people can persuade others into accepting, and acting on, new ideas is not new, and it is certainly not unique to radicalisation. Psychology’s interest in this topic goes back at least 70 years, when the US military wanted to better understand the effectiveness of wartime propaganda. How best to motivate and influence the troops?

This US military interest gave rise to decades of research known as the Hovland tradition. This extensive body of work primarily attempted to identify the ingredients that make a message particularly persuasive.

One thing we learnt from the Hovland research is that persuasion isn’t easy – there is no secret sauce.

However, under the right conditions, some methods are more effective than others. This line of persuasion research continues, with today’s scientists more interested in what goes on inside the minds of those receiving persuasive messages.

One area where psychology’s exploration of persuasion has found a happy home is in the world of marketing and advertising. What is an advertisement if not a persuasive attempt to make us think, feel and behave a certain way towards a product or service?

Before the internet, the channels of mass communication were pretty much in the hands of the few. Over the past three decades, however, we have witnessed the democratisation of the media.

I used to have a choice of three channels on my old TV, today I can choose from millions of YouTube channels, not to mention the many other sources of social media providing news, entertainment and more.

Getting a message out – especially a warped message – has never been easier. Similarly, with intuitive interface design and intelligent search engines, receiving such messages is also child’s play.

Understanding the biases that human beings are susceptible to, and being aware of what influences our behaviour, can enable us to better identify and resist persuasion. Concerning inoculating our young people against propagandists, demagogues and radicalisers, one key strategy is to increase their levels of psychological literacy, that is, their ability to apply psychological knowledge to personal, familial and societal challenges. Understanding how persuasion and social influence work would go some way towards protecting young minds from those who would sell them bad ideas. Unfortunately, in most schools and colleges psychology is still just an option. In some, it isn’t even that.

We can’t close the internet or wholly control the content viewed, or monitor our young people all the time. There is an old joke that goes: if you want your children to read more, then put all the household’s books in a big box marked: “Keep out!”. Monitoring or restricting internet use, for some, just makes it all the more attractive. What we can influence, through psychological literacy, is how susceptible the person using the internet is to persuasion.

We expect our children to be IT literate. This is a prerequisite for using technology such as the internet. Shouldn’t we have at least an equal concern that our children are psychologically literate, that is, mentally prepared to use the internet in relative safety?