TerrorismModeling terrorist behavior with Sandia social-cultural assessments

Part of what makes terrorists so frightening is their penchant for unpredictable, indiscriminate violence. One day they could attack a global financial center. And the next they could hit a neighborhood bike path.

A team of Sandia social-behavioral scientists and computational modelers recently completed a two-year effort, dubbed “Mustang,” to assess interactions and behaviors of two extremist groups. The purpose was to inform U.S. and U.K. decision-makers about the groups’ possible reactions to specific communications. The model suggested several communication options that are most likely to reduce the recruitment and violence of the extremist groups over time.

“Extremist groups are tricky to model. We can’t give them surveys. Their behaviors are purposefully hidden from us. They try not to let us know how their organizations are structured,” said Asmeret Naugle, a lead modeler for this effort.

Sandia Lab says that the Sandia team, which includes psychologists, sociologists, economists and computational modelers, integrated information gathered from experts with equations based on leading theories of human behavior and human decision-making to create their dynamic cause-and-effect model. Then they ran many simulations to see how different U.S. and U.K. actions might affect the recruitment and violence of the extremist groups and a faction within them.

“It’s not a crystal ball. 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,” said Mike Bernard, a computational psychologist and principal investigator for the overall effort.

Model tailored to answer specific questions
Before the team begins, they sit down with the sponsoring agency to determine the precise questions they want the model to answer. They sort out everything from the main question and secondary questions, to the bounds of the region of interest and the time range of the model, Bernard said.

The research is also reviewed and approved by Sandia’s Human Studies Board.

The Mustang effort was sponsored by the United States’ Counter Terrorism Technical Support Office and the United Kingdom’s Defence Science Technical Laboratory. Together they defined the range and scope of the model, but the U.K. laboratory also had a secondary goal. They sent a social scientist, Grace Williams, to Sandia to learn how the team develops their dynamic behavioral models, from start to finish, as well as the model’s strengths and limitations.