Priming for Fear

In the past two weeks, our collective attention has been drawn to the senseless attacks on communities in France and in San Bernardino, California. Some of the responses from political and religious leaders have been as frightening as the attacks themselves. Just this week, the president of Liberty University urged students to carry concealed weapons on campus in order to “end those Muslims” who would attack the campus. And, many political candidates are promoting increased surveillance and profiling of Muslims in the United States. Then, yesterday candidate Trump touted not allowing Muslims into our country at all. Imagine this…..you’re an American citizen, born in the U.S. and you travel to see family or serve in the military and you can’t come back into your home country? This is what psychologists call — priming behavior.

Social scientists have done a lot of work on the importance of priming — that is, triggering some association or thought in such a way as to affect people’s choices and behavior. For example, if male teachers and female students are primed to think of gender, they act differently, more in conformity with gender stereotypes. Language is important in the act of priming. Words like Wall Street increase people’s propensity to compete and reduce the chances they will cooperate. In one study, if the participants thought that the name of the game they were asked to play was Community Game, they were far more likely to work together than if they thought the name was the Wall Street Game. The thing is, pyschological priming pairs one stimulus with another to shape behavior even when one is not aware of it. Politicians and religious leaders do this to reach their end game of personal and/or political goals. Right now, the American public is being primed for fear.

America has a ready market for doomsayers.

We are primed for fear. Politicians and religious extremists manipulate the public’s collective amygdala. We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time. But, is there any wonder why Americans seem more anxious and on edge? We advertise America’s vulnerabilities in congressional testimony, government reports, the news media, and a steady stream of books, as well as on the Internet. Every imaginable scenario enters the popular culture, then circles back into government, where it inspires new concerns that prompt yet further intelligence inquiries. The inquiries themselves create an eager market for information about new threats — where there are buyers, there will be sellers — and some of the information will inevitably fan the initial fears that had prompted the inquiry. This circular conversation of fear and anxiety priming is wearing on the American public.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War (513 BC)

Our current polarized atmosphere is part of the problem. Daniel Gardner in his book, The Science of Fear noted, that “[w]hen like-minded people get together and talk, their existing views tend to become more extreme. In part, this strange human foible stems from our tendency to judge ourselves by comparison with others. When we get together in a group of like-minded people, what we share is an opinion that we all believe to be correct and so we compare ourselves with others in the group by asking “How correct am I?” Inevitably, most people in the group will discover that they do not hold the most extreme opinion, which suggests they are less correct than others. And so they become more extreme. Psychologists confirmed this theory when they put people in groups and had them state their views without providing reasons why — and polarization still followed.” And Jonathan Haight notes a similar dynamic in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, that “[p]eople bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” Moreover, we are now more polarized than at any given time in history.

Fear is one of the biggest current dangers we face. Fear can erode confidence in our institutions, provoke us to overreact and tempt us to abandon our values. There is nothing wrong with being afraid, but we have spent the past 14 years scaring the hell out of ourselves. We need to spend the next several years doing things very differently. We need to get more realistic about risk. We need to increase preparedness by educating and mobilizing all Americans to participate in the homeland security ecosystem.

It is still timely advice for us to heed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s advice in his 1933 inaugural address:

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Terrorists attempt to undermine our cultural, individual and group cohesion. For the most part, terrorists do not have the military might to defeat us, so they attempt to make citizens question the government’s ability to protect its citizens. They market in priming for fear and the disruption of the community’s trust.

One major difference between the psychological effects of natural disaster and terrorist attacks is that in a terrorist attack, the fear and anxiety produced is grossly disproportionate to the actual risk by terrorism. According to Boaz Ganor, the director of the International Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) in Israel, the cognitive amplification of the threat, in turn, can cause a diminished sense of security, poor morale, and reduced confidence in the ability of citizens to survive and take care of themselves and their families in the case of an actual attack. This sense of fear and helplessness is apparently substantiated as citizens begin questioning their government’s capability to provide protection from terrorist attacks.

Our nation is built on the concept of community. The links between individuals and groups form the basis of social solidarity — they are the building blocks of communities.

We often use descriptions of America in terms of our communities, such as our “social fabric.” The social fabric of community is formed from an expanding shared sense of belonging. It is shaped by the idea that only when we are connected and care for the well-being of the whole that a civil and democratic society is created. This fabric of community is as diverse as the individuals who make up the community, creating unique language and culture specific to its needs. Is there any wonder why terrorists want to tear our community fabric?

Community offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of place. It means to be welcome, even if we are strangers. Community makes us feel we are in the right place and are affirmed for that choice. This sense of belonging is important because it will lead us from conversations about safety and comfort to other conversations, such as our relatedness and willingness to provide hospitality and generosity.

Hospitality is the welcoming of strangers, and generosity is an offer with no expectation of return. These are two elements that we want to nurture as we work to create, strengthen, and restore our communities. This will not occur in a culture dominated by isolation, and its correlate, fear. Hospitality is negated when terrorists and terrorism are able to change the interaction paradigm to an “us versus them” conversation.

The terrorists goal is to tear the community fabric, displace its members, question who belongs, displace those who are considered “different and outsiders.” The terrorists want us to turn on ourselves and if they can get us to do that, they win.

Phillip Zimbardo, in his book The Lucifer Effect, describes this dynamic with an example of the Inquisition. He said, “[t]he terrible paradox of the Inquisition is that the ardent and often sincere desire to combat evil generated evil on a grander scale than the world had ever seen before. It ushered in the use by State and Church of torture devices and tactics that were the ultimate perversion of any ideal of human perfection. The exquisite nature of the human mind, which can create great works of art, science, and philosophy, was perverted to engage in acts of “creative cruelty” that were designed to break the will.” He points out that, “under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.” Recent examples would be Abu Ghraib, Jim Jones and the mass suicide of the People’s Temple in Jonestown.

Every community creates its own culture by social construction — the way the community members learn, through time, how to survive and prosper in a particular place. Displaced people lose their culture. If terrorists are allowed to fracture communities — they win. Our current political polarization and community fragmentation into political and religious factions is just what the terrorist want. They win when we allow this to happen. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. The primary goal of terrorism is to disrupt society by provoking intense fear and shattering all sense of personal and community safety. The target is an entire nation, not only those who are killed, injured, or even directly affected.

The social network of communities all across the nation should remain steadfast in their ability to buffer anxiety and fear by fostering hospitality and generosity…..the polar opposites of exclusion and scarcity. Even small acts are transformative because they have the powerful dynamic of the social influencing of neighbors and leaders of all types. Community panic requires a sensation of great helplessness — which often grows from interaction with others. Do not give in to the doomsayers and fear mongers.

We the People, are better than this to be primed for fear by those who stand to profit personally or politically. Disasters of all sorts, including terrorists attacks can bring out the best and the worst in people. We, the People have always been hospitable and generous. Let’s remember who we are. Let’s not be primed for fear.

Angi English has a Master’s in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from Baylor University. She lives in Austin, Texas.