My Road to Violent Extremism (As Its Researcher, That Is…)

What a is a “card-carrying” experimental social psychologist like me doing interviewing militant Tamil Tigers in deradicalization camps in Sri Lanka (Webber et al., 2017), administering surveys to members of the Abu Sayyaf organization in a Manila prison (Kruglanski et al., 2016), studying jihadist groups in Indonesia, coding open-source data on the Internet to infer the motivation of suicide bombers (Webber, Klein, Kruglanski, Brizi, & Merari, 2015) or of U.S. perpetrators of ideological crimes (Jasko, LaFree, & Kruglanski, 2016), coding the speeches of Al Qaeda propagandists in the Pakistan-Afghanistan and Iraq regions (including Bin Laden and Zarqawi) to identify the secrets of their persuasive appeal (Cohen, Kruglanski, Gelfand, Webber, & Gunaratna, 2016), or trekking to North Uganda to study South Sudanese refugees’ potential for radicalization?