By Heather Graci
September 18, 2024
“How do you balance dreams of peace with the complex reality of achieving it,” said conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus, “without giving up on the dream, but without ignoring the reality?”
Tensions permeate the work of those trying to understand the roots of conflict and pathways to peace. What motivates people to accept those they’ve only ever learned to hate? Why do people join extremist groups, and how do some get out? How do institutions contribute to violence, and how can they foster peace?
The answers to questions like these are far from simple. They are nuanced and context-dependent, but not out of reach. Recently, a group of people who have dedicated their careers to finding those answers convened at the third annual Neuropaz conference in Medellín, Colombia.
One of those people is Andrés Casas, the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, an annual conference in Colombia that explores how the behavioral sciences can promote peace. Casas led this year’s conference with support from local and international organizations, including Comfama, Fundación Corona, UNDP Colombia, and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism. Across the four-day conference and workshop, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from within Colombia and around the world came together to share what they’ve learned.
Colombia was a fitting setting for the gathering. After more than 60 years of war between the government and guerrilla and paramilitary groups, a peace deal in 2016 brought a formal end to the conflict. It was a significant step for the peace builders who had spent years dedicated to the cause. But their work was far from over. Since then, they’ve been working to ensure that the declaration of peace translates to peace in practice. Neuropaz is part of that ongoing mission.
During the conference, I spoke with eight of the local and international experts who have worked on conflicts in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. and U.K. These are behavioral scientists who have convinced members of al-Qaeda to have their brains scanned in an fMRI machine, consulted with decision-makers on the ground in South Sudan in the years leading up to independence, and provided a platform for former guerrilla combatants and their victims to share their stories together.
Below are their reflections on the questions that define their work, the answers they’ve found so far, and their aspirations for what’s yet to come.
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Economist Pablo Abitbol asks: “How can we build democracy in local communities to nurture more dignified human development?”
Pablo Abitbol is an economist at the Technological University of Bolívar and a member of the Montes de María Regional Space for Peace Construction in Colombia. He studies collective memory, cultural change, and deliberative democracy in an effort to restabilize the territories in Montes de María and Cartagena that were impacted by years of violence. Many of those territories are still governed by corrupt actors that neglect public institutions like education and mental health services. Abitbol works with local leaders to restore the voices of those who have been excluded from the democratic process and political decision-making within their own communities.
“Our approach is to create spaces and processes of democratic deliberation within these communities. We are trying to reincorporate into the democratic process its heart, which is what Amartya Sen calls government by discussion—exchange of arguments, being able to listen attentively and respectfully to others’ positions and worldviews, and being open to reconciling your own worldviews and perceptions with those of other people.
“One thing that emerged from these deliberative assemblies, which is what we call our specific design, is the precariousness of mental health services for these kinds of rural communities. They’re often totally absent or harm-producing.
“But given the absence of good mental services for these communities, many have developed their own practices for taking care of themselves. A paradigmatic example is the tejedoras, the weavers of Mampuján, a group of displaced women from the town of Mampuján. They were displaced by paramilitaries and had to resettle. A lot of pain, a lot of trauma. The women started gathering to make sancocho, which is a delicious soup that is typical of the region, and to take care of their hair. And then they started producing tapestries. Those tapestries tell the memory of their displacement and their resistance, and they have become an incredible work of art that is now in the National Museum of Colombia. And now they have their own museum of Mampuján. That is a clear example of how, in the absence of the institutional service of mental health, they developed their own way of healing anchored in their traditions.
“We have deliberated about how to connect local practices with institutions so that institutions might offer a better kind of service that is more connected with their communities. If you want to have better mental health services, or any other kind of service—state services, public services—you have to change the way that politics is done.”
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Psychologist Boaz Hameiri asks: “Why is it so difficult to change people’s views about conflict?”
Boaz Hameiri is a senior lecturer and head of the Conflict Management and Mediation Program at Tel Aviv University. He studies the psychological barriers to conflict resolution and how we might overcome them. One of those barriers is cognitive freezing—a hallmark of intractable conflict. When our views about a conflict are characterized by closed-mindedness and rigidity, there’s little that activists and policymakers can do to garner support for peace. Unfreezing, then, is central to moving toward peaceful conflict resolution. A useful tool for unfreezing people’s views, Hameiri believes, are metaperceptions.
“Metaperceptions are what we think others think. When we talk about intergroup relations, they refer to what we think members of the outgroup think about us. If I’m Jewish Israeli, a metaperception is what I think Palestinians think about Israelis.
“We find that people tend to have pessimistic metaperceptions. They often think that people from the outgroup think much more negative things about them than they actually do. In a study published in 2020, led by Samantha Moore-Berg, we found that Democrats and Republicans in the United States are essentially in complete agreement: both of them think that the other party thinks much more negative things about them than they do in reality. They think that the other side dehumanizes them much more than reality. They think the other side dislikes them much more than reality. And the differences are staggering—on a 100-point dehumanization scale, the perceived dehumanization and dislike was 20 to 40 points higher than actual dehumanization and dislike.
You’re not trying to change people’s views about the outgroup . . . The only thing that you’re saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else.
“But it’s not only that the divide is so big—it’s also consequential. If you think that the other side dislikes you, you dislike them in return. There’s a reciprocal response. If they dehumanize you, you dehumanize them.
“So metaperceptions are overly pessimistic and completely false in the vast majority of cases. If that’s the case, then you can correct these kinds of perceptions. And if you correct those erroneous metaperceptions, you can also reduce dehumanization and dislike.
“You’re not trying to change people’s views about the outgroup. You’re not trying to contest anything that they think about the outgroup. You’re not trying to persuade them to think something different. The only thing that you’re saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else. It’s much easier to do—people will be less defensive.”
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Conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus asks: “When working toward peace, how do we make visible the tension between an idealized version of the future and the reality of getting there?”
Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara, an organization working to incorporate behavioral science into development work in the Global South, and author of Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (open access here). She studies the emotions, memories, experiences, and actions of people in situations of violent conflict to better understand how we might facilitate peace. Lately, Schomerus has been thinking about the mental models of conflict held by practitioners working toward peace and the cognitive dissonance that arises when reality is at odds with those models.
“I worked on the conflict in South Sudan five or six years before independence. Although this was a seemingly happy moment for a country about to become independent, we could see that conflict dynamics were already developing.
“I was trying to convey that concern to decision-makers. They would patiently and politely listen to me, but at some point you could see this cognitive dissonance click into action. They would go, ‘Yeah, but people wouldn’t throw away newly gained independence to go back to war.’ The decision-makers would dig in their heels and effectively say, ‘I just cannot imagine that this would be any other way than exactly how I imagine it to be.’
“There was this international wave of consensus that carrying South Sudan through the democratization process, elections, and a referendum on independence was going to be a huge international freedom fighter success story. After South Sudan went into horrific civil war, a lot of senior decision-makers said, ‘Well, if we’d only known.’ But people had written about this—it just didn’t fit into the narrative, the mental model of peacemaking, so it couldn’t be heard.
“People often imagine peace processes to be romantic, but the reality is human. The romanticism can be detrimental because it means you ignore the real problems. But sometimes it’s also quite beautiful—that’s where human dignity, hope, and beauty lie. How do you balance dreams with realities without giving up on the dreams, but without ignoring the reality? And if we know this tension to be true—the cognitive dissonance between dream and reality—how do we make it visible?”
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Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid asks: “Why do people join and leave extremist groups?”
Nafees Hamid is the research and policy director of XCEPT at King’s College London. He investigates how trauma and mental health influence an individual’s propensity for peace or violence. He has also studied political violence among groups spanning jihadists, white nationalists, and QAnon to better understand how individuals get pulled into extremist groups, and how we might pull them back out again.
“When people hold sacred values—values so morally important that they’re willing to give their lives—the material incentives that governments typically use to dissuade violence not only fail but actually backfire. If you’re trying to get people to compromise on their sacred values (if you’re trying to negotiate with the Taliban or trying to convince someone to not join a neo-Nazi group, for example), then you would be better off avoiding material incentives or disincentives. Instead, things like social inclusion, social norms, acknowledgment, symbolic concessions, making people feel like they’re heard, giving them space to talk—all become useful.
“Tools like social inclusion aren’t going to get rid of your sacred values, but they can adjust what you’re willing to do for them. Maybe you’re not going to fight, maybe you’re not going to kill people. On the other hand, when you socially exclude people, as our neuroscience studies on early-stage extremists show, you can see nonsacred values turning into sacred values. You can see that at the level of the brain. You can see both an increase in sacred values and an increased willingness to fight and die for those sacred values.
How do you make the extreme group feel . . . that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?
“Now think about the wake of a terrorist attack, for example. You have political leaders telling this broader group, ‘You must condemn this extremist group in your midst. You must say they are not one of us.’ I understand where that’s coming from, but what you’re actually doing is severing the only vector of influence we have over these extreme people.
“It’s like telling people who have a child or relative in a cult to condemn them for being part of the group—to stop talking to them, to stop listening. Guess what’s going to happen if you do that? They become more a part of the cult. If you want to influence the cult, you want to make sure that each of those cult members still has multiple connections to the outside world—that’s the only way you can influence who they are and what they do.
“This is why demands for the broader population to condemn the more extreme population can, in some cases, make the problem worse, rather than better. And so the balance that the broader population must find is: How do you make the extreme group feel like they belong, that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?”
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Economist Sandra Polanía-Reyes asks: “How do we influence people’s preferences to achieve a less divided, more integrated society?”
Sandra Polanía-Reyes is an associate professor at the University of Navarra and a research associate at the Navarra Center for International Development. She studies social norms, trust, and cooperation and works to steer people toward prosocial behavior—to help them make decisions for the common good in contexts including migration and peace building.
“Mainstream economics would describe endogenous preferences—those shaped by our economic and sociocultural environment—as complex. But actually, in one word, it’s education. As we learn, we define our preferences, and then we behave according to our preferences. This is why early intervention is crucial. The brain is still developing, so helping children, teenagers, or young adults adopt prosocial behaviors during these formative years can have a lasting impact.
“For example, when kids are exposed to different phenotypical groups—in Europe, you have Black and Caucasian Europeans, African communities, refugees from Syria—in their public school classrooms when they are very young, there is evidence that when they are teenagers, it’s completely normal to interact with people that are different from them. We play together. We make the same mistakes. We both like soccer.
“This is an example in terms of phenotype, but of course there are many kinds of differences. In Colombia, we have Venezuelans and Colombians, and we are very similar physically, ethnically, religiously—so why does this still happen?
“Across contexts, we find that influencing endogenous preferences in kids by exposing them to diverse groups results in adults who are more generous, care about others, and are open to diversity—so many positive attributes that otherwise would have been much harder to cultivate in adults whose past experiences have shaped preferences that are far more difficult to change.”
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Technologist and innovation researcher Martin Waehlisch asks: “How do we use new technologies to address global challenges in conflict prevention and peacemaking?”
Martin Waehlisch has been a leader in innovation at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and is now a researcher at the University of Birmingham. He focuses on how we can borrow knowledge from disciplines that haven’t typically played a role in the peace process—with a particular focus on computational social science—to measure things we haven’t been measuring, to communicate more accurately and effectively with peace constituencies, and to bring voices to the forefront that aren’t usually part of the peace process.
“Technology can play a role in the conflict prevention, management, and peace building phases equally. First, we can use new technologies to prevent conflict—for instance, to help us get a sense of public sentiments. When we know something is brewing, the data that we have on hand might ordinarily be built based on surveys or social media analysis in the best case. But now there are ways that we can multiply data sources to get a more thorough idea about what the public thinks at large, and those issues can then be addressed in order to prevent an outbreak of violence.
“Then we have the actual ongoing peace negotiation, which is right in the middle of the war. That’s where technology can help to bring people together who wouldn’t normally have the chance to be heard by politicians. One example is the digital dialogs we’ve been running for years where artificial intelligence is used to achieve the scale of a poll, but the intimacy of a focus group. Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time about the same issue in a 45-minute conversation, and then an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant.
Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time . . . and an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant.
“Trauma work usually comes at the very end of the peace process. I’m curious about how machines allow us to have conversations in a deeper way, in comparison to human-to-human conversations, when it comes to overcoming trauma. There’s research showing that people often feel more comfortable talking to a machine than a human psychologist—there seems to be some comfort in talking to an object whose memory can be deleted. It also gives more privacy and creates a sense of safety, to a certain extent. We only have a limited number of psychologists or mental health workers, so that’s where these technologies can step in. But of course, this must be approached with sensitivity and responsibility, as many questions remain around AI, including concerns about algorithmic biases and hallucinations.”
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Behavioral science specialist Josh Martin asks: “How do ‘normal’ people—those who otherwise seem like typical members of society playing typical roles—come to participate in extreme action?”
Josh Martin is a lead expert in countering extremism at the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism and former director at ideas42 and Beyond Conflict, a project dedicated to applying behavioral science toward conflict resolution. One theme of his peace and conflict work is the often subtle pathways toward extremism and how we might use our knowledge of human behavior to help people detect, avoid, and escape them.
“One lens through which I often view this problem is channel factors—the bucket of behavioral mechanisms that conspire to put you on a path that you may not realize you’re on. And then they keep you there by imposing some nonmonetary cost for leaving that path.
“A lot of people who end up in extremist organizations, for instance, start on a path that looks nothing like that. Channel factors are things like networks of friends or your information environment on social media, but also much more mundane things like the timing of when you’re exposed to certain messages. These things all contribute to the existence of this channel that pushes you toward extremism.
“An example is the case of Adolf Eichmann. I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s book about the banalities of evil, and there’s a quote by Eichmann: ‘It was like being swallowed up by the party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly.’ He ended up working on the Holocaust and murdering millions of people without any ideological predisposition on his part. Arendt is pretty skeptical about this—he’s not blameless. Just because people can be guided without their knowledge toward an extreme doesn’t make them blameless. We’re all still accountable for our actions. But she cites him as much more of an example of the situation acting on an individual than an individual who was violent from the beginning.
“We often want to console ourselves by thinking that people who do bad stuff are just bad because that keeps us from seeing ourselves in them. But all the evidence goes in the other direction. We are all the sort of people who might. It’s not that we’re all evil, or that there’s evil inside of us. That’s not the point. The point is that we are all people who, under the wrong set of circumstances, would do the wrong thing.
“And to be clear: you would never tell victims of armed conflict that they shouldn’t blame their perpetrators for the violence and atrocities. The distinction I would draw is between accountability and prevention. We should hold people accountable for not doing more to get themselves out of the channel. But it is totally fine to analyze the future behavior of others in a way that would lead us toward better prevention strategies. If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.”
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Psychologist Andrés Casas asks: “Can people change?”
Andrés Casas is a doctoral researcher studying neuroscience and conflict resolution across Latin America, the United States, Africa, and the Middle East. He is also the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, and the reason that all the experts quoted in this piece—among many other researchers and practitioners from Colombia and around the world—came together as a part of this effort to advance the science of peace. He shared a personal anecdote that captures the heart of his work.
“I grew up in a country where not supporting your side of the conflict was seen as inappropriate. You’re a coward—you’re not supporting your national identity while we’re fighting against these terrorists, the worst people in the world, who kidnap people, who commit massacres.
“But my grandpa was a political activist back in the 1940s. His mission, in a sense, was to educate us about the real situation of the country. And he worked with a famous political leader called Jorge Eliécer Gaitán who was an inspiration to all rebel causes—he was from one of the poorest sectors, made it through law school, and became an incredible communicator about the injustices of the country.
“Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá in 1949, and his death changed the history of Colombia. That event was called El Bogotazo because the city got destroyed, and it sparked the outbreak of violence that persisted through the next 60 years. My grandpa was working with him, yet the people who rose up to avenge his death were responsible for the atrocities that followed. In my family, the idea that things are not black-and-white and that you need to educate yourself about context and the nuances of reality was very important.
If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.
“That’s why I got into this. My mom, who has already passed away, was against FARC because she always worked to provide services for people who were victims of the insurgent violence. Colombia has the second highest rate of internal displacement after Syria, and my mother devoted the last part of her life to helping people in that situation. I’m so proud. But again, my mother was very prejudiced against FARC members because she saw the effects of what they did.
“When I was younger, difficult situations in my family made me think that people cannot change. I saw my mom working hard and doing this stuff for other people, but she was prejudiced against FARC. It was confusing. Growing up, I had a very difficult relationship with my mom, politically speaking, because she was on one side, I was on the other side.
“But my grandpa had educated me about politics. That’s why I became a political scientist. I want to go beyond just understanding political systems, I want to understand how political change happens. In a sense, my work was trying to convince my mom to think differently.
“She was diagnosed with cancer back in 2000. And before she passed, Emile [Bruneau, a peace scientist and former collaborator of mine who has also since passed away] and our team had managed to do the first stage of our project to help correct misperceptions of former FARC combatants and foster their peaceful reintegration into society. We had conducted the interviews, developed the first videos, and run the first study to find the video that worked best to reduce dehumanization and increase support for peace.
“My mother was sick already, but she was still aware. ‘Mom, I want to show you what we’re working on,’ I said to her. So we played the video, and I asked her, ‘What do you think about it?’
“And she told me, ‘Maybe I was wrong.’”
Disclosure: Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
Heather Graci is an editor at the Behavioral Scientist and an editorial researcher who has worked with authors Angela Duckworth and Dan Heath. Previously, she was a research coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative. She graduated in 2019 from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in Behavioral Economics and Psychology.
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