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Engineers Nine Times More Likely Than Expected To Become Terrorists (washingtonpost.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Henry Farrel writes in the Washington Post that there's a group of people who appear to be somewhat prone to violent extremism: Engineers. They are nine times more likely to be terrorists than you would expect by chance. In a forthcoming book, Engineers of Jihad, published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog provide a new theory explaining why engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. They say it's caused by the way engineers think about the world. Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists. Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers.
Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries (PDF), and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs. This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran.
Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn't seem to be true. Terrorist organizations don't seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy and they don't actually need many people with engineering skills. "Bomb-making and the technical stuff that is done in most groups is performed by very few people (PDF), so you don't need, if you have a large group, 40 or 50 percent engineers," says Hertog. "You just need a few guys to put together the bombs. So the scale of the overrepresentation, especially in the larger groups is not easily explained."
Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries (PDF), and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs. This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran.
Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn't seem to be true. Terrorist organizations don't seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy and they don't actually need many people with engineering skills. "Bomb-making and the technical stuff that is done in most groups is performed by very few people (PDF), so you don't need, if you have a large group, 40 or 50 percent engineers," says Hertog. "You just need a few guys to put together the bombs. So the scale of the overrepresentation, especially in the larger groups is not easily explained."
...that I am totally not a terrorist, despite my nickname.
Damned infidels...
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Well, we have the push to get more females into science and engineering. Let's just amend that to also include the push to deter Muslims from going into engineering, and that should help alleviate the terrorist problem a bit....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Engineers are wanted by all kinds of organizations... on other hand, social studies majors (that published this study) are 9 times less likely to even get a job as a suicide bombers.
I can hear Trump already: Build a wall and keep those engineers out! Close all the engineering schools!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Hey look buddy, I'm an Engineer. That means I solve problems.
Not problems like 'what is beauty?' Because that would fall
within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve
practical problems. For instance, how am I gonna stop some
big mean motherhubbard from tearin' me a structurally
superfluous new behind? The answer? Use a gun. And if that
don' work, use MORE gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-
mounted little ol' number designed by me... Built by me...
And you best hope...not pointed at YOU.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I can tell you're an engineer because apparently you've never heard of a paragraph.
Although you might be a manager, since you speak in PowerPoint.
What do you mean? My last post was a PowerPoint. Shit, did Slashdot mangle the formatting? Yeah, looks like it. That's too bad, because it's just not the same without the pictures. They were all really relevant, and not superfluous at all. There was one that was a picture of a Mercator projection. Another showed a cross-ethnic cross-gender couple, one standing behind the other's chair and pointing at something on a computer screen. There were various geometric forms in primary colors. The pictures also served to break the tension at regular intervals through judicious use of LOLcats.
(More seriously, I wanted every step in my chain of reasoning on its own line, but I couldn't figure out how to do that on Slashdot without it adding an extra line in between. I wasn't really happy with the results either, but I still liked it better than a single wall of text. Sorry for the lack of elegance.)
Too many engineers here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!