What Can Brain Imaging Tell Us About Violent Extremism?

In this study,Sacred Values included:Palestinian right of returnWestern military forces being expelled from all Muslim landsStrict sharia as the rule of law in all Muslim countriesArmed jihad being waged against enemies of MuslimsForbidding of caricatures of Prophet MohammedVeiling of women in publicWhat were theNonsacred Values? We don ' t know. I couldn ' t find examples anywhere in the paper. It ' s crucial that we know what these were, to help understand the “sacralization” of nonsacred values, which was observed in an fMRI experiment (described later). So I turned to the Supplemental Material ofBerns et al. (2012), inferring that the statements below are good examples of nonsacred values in a population of adults in Atlanta.You are a dog person.You are a cat person.You are a Pepsi drinker.You are a Coke drinker.You believe that Target is superior to Walmart.You believe that Walmart is superior to Target.But what if the nonsacred values in the present study of violent extremism were a little more contentious and meaningful?You are a fan of FC Barcelona.You are a fan of AC Milan.Anyway, to choose participants for the fMRI experiment, the investigators first divided the entire group into those who were more (n=267) or less (n=268) vulnerable to recruitment into violent extremism (seeAppendixfor details). An important comparison would have been to directly contrast brain activity in these two groups, but that wasn ' t done here. Out of the 267 men more vulnerable to viol...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs