This is a really important point to be considering. And one that is really tied up with social media use in general. I've been around a bit on it and seen a lot, so I had many many years to give this thought. More than most; I've been in online communities since 1998 - some much more healthy than others. And it also fits with my degree in terms of media use and understanding propaganda. We aren't talking about the subject of radicalisation isn't something we are doing nearly enough.
I started this thread years ago on the subject of pink brain / blue brain. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3610447-Pink-Brain-Blue-Brain-Some-research-on-radicalisation-and-brains
Please take the time to read the text and links in the above thread. It's fascinating. Note the date on that and reflect on it of where we are now in the context of Cricketgate.
Summary of above thread: There was some research starting to come through about how research was showing that the brains of terrorist extremists were wired differently to other people.
There's also more in this excellent article which touches on similar (if you don't want to trawl through old threads).
https://time.com/5881567/extremism-violence-causes-research/
What they then found was that exposure to a broad range of ideas and thoughts, not only helped to deradicalise them, but also rewired their brain.
In the 1990s, social psychologists Jonathan Baron at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Tetlock at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of “sacred values” to counter economic theories that suggested everything had a price. Certain values (like human life, justice, civil liberties, environmental or religious devotion) could be so sacred to people that they would be unwilling to act against them, no matter the cost or consequence.
Atran, who had been studying values for decades through the lens of anthropology, began applying this concept to the study of violent extremists after 9/11. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, the perpetrators had committed the suicide attacks in defense of deep values the rest of the world had been overlooking. By 2007, Atran had advanced this line of thinking in several articles about jihadist terrorists. His Artis colleagues found evidence that material incentives may backfire when adversaries see the issues at the heart of a dispute (like land and nationhood) as “sacred.”
The Artis team continued to hone the connection between sacred values and violence into 2014, when a comment from President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., gave them a renewed sense of purpose. In an interview, Clapper said that the U.S. had underestimated ISIS militants because predicting a group’s will to fight was “an imponderable.” In response to that comment, Atran and his colleagues decided to use their knowledge of sacred values to measure militants’ will to fight, which they believed was indeed “ponderable.”
That same year, they did survey-based research on networks in Spain and Morocco responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings. It found that people were more willing to sacrifice their lives if they were part of a close-knit group that shared their sacred values. They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in 2017, that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.
AND
Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values. More interesting were what parts of the brain appeared involved with each question. When participants rated their willingness to sacrifice for their sacred values (defending the Qur’an, for example), parts of the brain linked to deliberation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex, which Pretus describes as parts of the fronto-parietal or “executive-control network”) were far less active than when they rated their willingness to kill and die for issues they cared about less (like the availability of halal food in public schools). Dr. Oscar Vilarroya, the lead neuro-scientist on the team, says this indicates that humans don’t deliberate about their sacred values: “We just act on them.”
While this may seem like common sense, the finding was significant, since nearly all sacred-values research to that point had been based on surveys and other tools that assessed what people said—not tied to brain activity. “When you’re taking a social survey, you can lie,” explains Atran. “But brain patterns can’t be faked.” It was the first published study scanning the brains of extremists.
Knowing extremists essentially don’t deliberate when considering the values most important to them confirmed something Atran long believed: that deradicalization programs focused on altering extremists’ beliefs through logic and reasoning, or through trade-offs and material incentives, are doomed to fail. Others had made this argument to explain why programs like France’s civics- and reward-focused deradicalization program, launched in late 2016, had flopped within a year. Here was brain science to support the case.
There was one finding of the study, though, that provided a glimmer of hope for an alternative approach: the areas in the brain linked to deliberation lit up when extremists realized their “peers” weren’t as willing to resort to violence to defend a particular value. And when given the opportunity, post–brain scan, to revise their initial answers to the question “How willing are you to fight and die for this value?” many of them adjusted their rating to better align with their peers. Hamid says this shows that peer groups, like family and friends, play a powerful role in determining whether an extremist will become violent. They will never be able to change the extremist’s core views or values, he says, but they can convince that person that violence is or is not an acceptable way to defend those values. This finding, Atran believes, could have real implications for governments and organizations working in counterterrorism.
“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”
And if this hasn't started to make you wonder about whether this is being deliberately weaponised:
And, in a twist, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado got in touch in 2016 seeking to collaborate and study how a cadet’s sacred values and identity with varying groups affect their willingness to fight and die. This April, the Academy, with Artis’ assistance, completed a small study that found that cadets who both viewed religion as a sacred value and strongly identified as a member of a religious group took greater risks than their peers in virtual combat situations. One key takeaway, according to Lieut. Colonel Chad C. Tossell, the director of the school’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, is that the “spiritual strength” of soldiers is as important as the weapons and technology they use. An early draft of the study says the simulation designed for the research could be “useful for selection and training.”
Further to this we also have research on the effects to the brain of cults. Again cults have this notion of 'sacred values'
https://www.labroots.com/trending/neuroscience/15729/cults-change-brain
I don't want to expand further on the C word for obvious reasons, but it's necessary to mention it and let people make up their own minds.
We have a situation here with trans activism where children and young adults are being encouraged to live in an echo chamber of their own making with social media, repeating the same messages over and over again without exposure to an alternative view. Indeed 'no debate' was all about silencing that and making it impossible. And the Cricket Children were told to act to stop the one talk which aligned with this finding as the most effective way to deradicalise:
“Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”
'Trans Values' would very much fall under the concept of 'sacred values'. Also see groups like 'Just Stop Oil' for the concept of political values as 'sacred values'. Just as much as nefarious religious groups have. And we are starting to see extremist behaviour along these lines in secular society.
We know that cults and extremists are higher risk to people who have a history of:
Emotional vulnerability
Dissociative states
Poor family relationships
Inadequate coping mechanisms
History of abuse or neglect
Exposure to eccentric family patterns
Substance abuse
Situational stress
Socioeconomic conditions
Various studies, including the Cass Review, have highlighted that kids who identify as trans are much more likely to exhibit the above. A history of family breakdown and abuse are particularly note worthy.
The other really interesting thing about the emergence of trans activism and extreme environmentalism is this clash with religion and how secular populations are much more supportive of these ideas. It's almost as if there is a human need for 'sacred values' particularly for certain more vulnerable individuals. Crucially they both prove a support network and community. I note the point in the first article on this thread about people in a close knit group being more likely to carry out extremist behaviour.
The research into 'the extremist brain' has been controversial and it makes people squeamish because of its implications. Likewise we see talk of parallels with cults regularly deleted.
But if we are to truly understand what's happening we need to consider the implications of echo chambers to the brain. And by this token, I actively encourage people to listen and read things by genderists rather than staying in a GC box and to also look for other points of reference in terms of behaviour patterns in other groups.
Given that the acts carried out by this group very much fit the current government definition of extremism as detailed here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-definition-of-extremism-2024/new-definition-of-extremism-2024
I think it wholly appropriate to be having this conversation that no one wants to address and acknowledge properly. We NEED to. This isn't going to get better unless we do. It's highly relevant to children's use of social media more widely and algorithms and to a vast range of issues parents might face: everything from beautification and obsessive habits relating to appearance, incelism, anorexia, environmentalism, extremism, recent riots, conspiracy theories... I could go on as the list is potentially limitless. And why the obsessive nature of any of these potentially puts any neuro diverse kid at particular risk.
I hope MN lets this post stand in view of that need for parents - as I'm sure there will be the usual monitors along shortly.
I'm also minded to reflect on the actions of various parents on MN and this notion of
“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”