Speaking of Psychology - Understanding mass violence (SOP44)

Episode Date: December 16, 2016

Are terrorists flooding into our country? Are we facing an epidemic of mass shootings and violence? Whatever your thoughts are on gun control or terrorism, psychologists who study human behavior, specifically thrill-seeking and risk taking behaviors, have a lot to contribute to the discussion. In this episode, Frank Farley, PhD, talks about why mental health experts need to be on the front lines of violence prevention efforts. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a mass shooting or a terrorist attack, people want to know how did this happen or why didn't we see it coming? Friends and family members of the perpetrator rarely seem to have clear answers. Can psychological science step in and put together the pieces of this unsolved puzzle? We speak with a psychologist about fear and violence and why mental health experts need to be on the front lines of violence prevention efforts. But maybe not in the way you think. I'm Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology. Frank Farley is the Laura H. Carnell professor of psychological studies and education at Temple University and an internationally recognized authority on psychology and human behavior.

He has extensively researched and published on extreme behavior, specifically risk-taking, as well as crime and violence. A former president of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Farley, is experienced in translating psychological science for the media. Welcome, Dr. Farley. Happy to be here. A lot of psychologists have been on the news lately. including you, talking about the psychology of mass shooters and terrorists.

Do you think psychologists have something valuable to contribute to these stories? If so, you know, tell us what you think that is. Well, one of the key things in psychology is understanding individual behavior. We're also good at large group behavior and social behavior, etc. But historically, one of our greatest strengths was understanding the individual. And so things like motive and motivation, influences in the, the individuals' upbringing, et cetera, can all come into play. One of the problems is that we don't get to study many mass shooters.

Why? Because they're dead. So we don't get to really study a whole lot of them in depth. We know quite a bit, but there's also a lot of speculation. But the way we work is typically we take a look at sort of how we understand normal behavior. And then can we understand anything about these deviations? from normal. And so that requires that we know a lot about normal behavior, which is itself difficult. In fact, often more difficult than the abnormal behavior, because the abnormal behavior is so unusual and so stark and stands out so much from everything else. It's often easier

to study it because it's so extreme, whereas everyday normal behavior is sometimes hard to get your arms around, you know? It's too great. But of all the disciplines, there's no discipline in the world that has more to offer in understanding terrorists, mass shooters, et cetera. We're a long way from, you know, predictive power. And I think that's what's so unsettling for a lot of people these days. Indeed. So when we have a terrorist incident, what typically happens is we go digging into everything,

the whole autobiography of this person. who they knew, who they talked to. We searched their computers. You know, what websites were they hanging out on? Were they in touch with ISIS or some other group of relevance? What about family? So we talk to neighbors, you know. And so we hope to find individual qualities that will help us in the next instance,

because this mass murderer or this terrorist is probably dead. but can we learn something that might help us next time round? And that's typically the M.O. You know, of psychologists' contributions. We sometimes do what some people call a post-mortem, you know, a psychological post-mortem, and that's kind of what I'm talking about here. If we do find things, that can then be fed into the work of the profiler, the FBI profilers, all the other profilers, giving them some clues,

that they might look for. One problem there is that what happens if you come up with a pretty good profile of a mass murderer? And by the way, we don't have one yet. But what if we did? One issue there is, what are you going to do about it? So let's say that there's some guy, and by the way, most mass murderers are males between 20 and 40, what do you do about it? Let's say you know of somebody who meets those criteria.

Now, there might be thousands of people who meet those criteria, but somehow or other, one comes into the purview of the police, and they look and say, boy, this guy, he meets all of the criteria that we know of so far. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to arrest him before the crime is committed? You can't do that. That's called preventive detention, you know. You can't arrest a person before they've committed a crime.

they've got to commit the crime, presumably. So in the years ahead, as we get better and better at it, we're going to run right into this issue. If we have some good predictive power vis-a-vis crimes, then we come into a huge issue, what do we do about that? Right now, everything's ex post facto. It's looking back, and it's interesting and often helpful. But one day from now, in the future,

we're going to have to decide, once we've got a lot of really valuable and valid information, what does society do about it? What about the idea, and I think a lot about what you're talking about is, you know, the biography of the shooter, who did they know, what did they do before they committed this act? You know, how can we put together all the clues that led to this event? You know, it's one of the things that I know has been sort of a topic of controversies, the idea of media contagion and its role in... mass shootings. Media contagion, this is the idea that mass shooters want the sort of media

tension other perpetrators get after these attacks. Do you think it exists and how should the media deal with it? I look at all these things as caused by a recipe with several ingredients. There's almost none of this behavior that can be said to be due to one thing. And that's very typical of psychology. And so most of human behavior is cause, the source of it is, the source of it is, a recipe with several ingredients. So one terrorist or one mass shooter might have one set of ingredients, and some of those ingredients might be found in another mass shooter, but not all the same ingredients.

So there might be some overlapping ingredients, and then some ones that don't overlap. I think that, yes, some of these perps are motivated by fame. We don't have a number. We really don't. We have to be honest. We don't have a number. But I think definitely that some of them do it for the fame, for the attention.

And, you know, lots of people go through life, never getting any attention at all. People aren't paying attention to them in any way. And they feel they're a nobody, they're in nothing. And then they see this event happen, you know, it's some heinous event. And another person, sort of like them, they think, suddenly is being talked about all over the world. And that has a twisted appeal, I think, for some people. I would probably call them a thrill seeker in many respects. It's a thrill, it's excitement. I've done a lot of work on what I call the type T personality, the thrill seeker. I would speculate that many of these

people are in fact T-types, and it's exciting. Probably the most extreme act a person can do. take the life, the precious life of another individual. And it's that act that we in psychology have to understand. And we're not there yet. I think some people feel like these violent acts and terrorist acts are an epidemic. Are more people afraid? Should they be? Would you consider what's happening recently an epidemic of violence? I don't. I feel that it's very important to keep perspective on this whole problem. Know your probabilities. So you are more likely to die from a drunk out on the highway than you are to be died due to a terrorist. In fact, the number of people killed through terrorist acts in America since 9-11 is minuscule. It's a very small number.

They're all important, of course, and a tragedy. But compared to the other things that can happen to you, it's minor at best. And so... So it does worry me that people begin saying, oh my God, we've got an epidemic of terrorism. We don't. And that's simply a fact. And a very important lesson out of the world of psychology is for individuals, it's very important to keep perspective. There's something that's more important than the events that happen, and that is your

interpretation of those events. In psychotherapy, that's a key concept. You want to get people to reframe or reinterpret that event. And the event, you don't want to catastrophize it. The same for a nation. And we don't want to catastrophize over a very small number of isolated terrorist events. FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt said it better than anybody. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

We have to watch out for what I call tertiary terror. I believe that there's a way of looking at terrorism is there's what I call primary terror. You are there when it happens. You're in the nightclub in Orlando when the shooter comes in and starts killing people. That's primary terror. Secondary terror is when it gets reported by the media, which it does and it has to. It's got to be reported so the world knows. So the media then reports it.

That's secondary terror. tertiary terror, or the third phase of terror, is where we go on and on and talk about it and talk about it, and the whole nation starts to become afraid. That's exactly what the terrorists want to do. They are really in the business of what I call tertiary terror. They want to paralyze a nation with fear. And so, to your question, are more people afraid? I worry that they are, but it's not an epidemic.

a healthy nation has to retain appropriate balance and perspective on the events of that society. So even though we may not be facing an epidemic, you say, so some people feel like it's time to find ways to reduce violence in this country, maybe not terrorism necessarily or mass shootings, but other types of violence. You know, some people focus on gun control. Others say we need to put up walls, you know, to keep immigrants out of the country. How much of this debate is focused on emotion and gut feeling, rather than actual reason or psychological evidence?

Well, a lot of it is emotion. As you know, the U.S. Congress will not allow U.S. federal dollars to be spent on research into gun control. By legislation, researchers are prevented from doing that kind of research if they want funds from the government. Now, you might be able to get funds from somewhere else, but it's a strong restriction. So we know less than vastly less than we should. about guns and gun violence and gun control.

The main mechanism in violence in America is the gun. I remember in the wake of Sandy Hook, which had to be one of the most heinous of recent murders. Now, that's not a terrorist incident, but 26 children, I think it was, roughly 27, were slaughtered in an elementary school. That's as bad as it gets. In the aftermath of that, many of us who work in this area and think in this area felt, you know, people have got to wake up and do something about guns.

It didn't happen. And my own guess is we need to tilt in other directions like education, deal with the person who's holding the gun in particular, so that they won't commit the crime. And that's where psychology is strong. Child psychology, school psychology. schools are so important in this whole debate. Some of the newer ideas like bullying interventions, and that's been around for a while. Forgiveness education.

I think that's a really important frontier. Forgiveness education. Bob Enright out at University of Wisconsin and Madison has developed forgiveness education. And it's being adopted in a lot of war zone places. Palestine. Liberia, the president of Liberia, a woman president, has adopted forgiveness education throughout the whole country in public schooling. So that's something we can try. We need as many new ideas as possible because the old ones don't seem to be working. And violence has drifted down a little

bit over recent years, but not much. And I'm not optimistic that it's going to go down much farther. So we need all the fresh thinking that we can get. And if we can use bullying interventions, if we can use forgiveness, education with kids, any kind of psychological intervention that will reduce aggression, strength and impulse control, that's a big thing. American prisons are full of people with poor impulse control. Those things really start early. And that's our field. That's psychology. We're one of the only games in town when it comes to that, in my opinion. Well, Dr. Farley, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a wonderful pleasure. You're welcome. Thanks. Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the

topics we discussed or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website at speakingof psychology.org. With the American Psychological Association's Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.