Project assesses extremist group interactions, behaviors

A group of Sandia National Laboratories researchers, social-behavioral scientists, and computational modelers recently completed a program designed to assess extremist group interactions and behaviors.

The purpose of “Mustang,” a two-year effort, stemmed from the goal of informing U.S. and U.K. decision-makers about possible reactions to specific communications. The model suggested several communication options are most likely to reduce the recruitment and violence of extremist groups over time.

The work involved Sandia National Laboratories psychologists, sociologists, economists and computational modelers integrating information gathered from experts, with equations based on leading theories of human behavior and human decision-making to create a cause-and-effect model.

The next step involved initiating simulations as a means of determining how different U.S. and U.K. actions might impact the recruitment and violence of extremist groups and a faction within them.

“It’s not a crystal ball,” Mike Bernard, a computational psychologist and principal investigator, said. “We model how humans make decisions at many scales. We take well-established theories to help model individual leaders, groups, even whole countries depending what the question requires.”

Bernard said team members meet with the sponsoring agency to determine the precise questions they want the model to answer, sorting out everything from the main question and secondary questions to the bounds of the region of interest and the time range of the model.