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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."
An alternate explanation:
People from countries whose predominant religion is Islam tend to be Muslim.
Many of those countries are poor compared to Western nations.
People like wealth, and wish to escape poverty.
One popular method for escaping poverty is education.
However, only certain kinds of education correlate strongly with financial independence.
Islamic Studies majors, for instance, are a dime a dozen in Islamic countries.
In the long run, a career in engineering is likely to be far more lucrative.
But educational and economic opportunities in poor Islamic countries are limited.
By contrast, there is a relative abundance of jobs and respected educational institutions in the Western world.
But you can really only get into an math, science, or engineering program there, because the liberal arts programs are strongly biased towards the local culture.
But math and science don't pay all that well.
Therefore, people of college age in those countries look abroad to choose a college, and tend to choose engineering as their field of study.
When they arrive in the West to attend college, they are immigrants, don't speak the language, and don't share the culture.
They are also usually young.
Young adults really want to socialize, especially with those of the opposite sex.
The immigrant students can't socialize effectively with the local population, because of cultural differences, prejudices, and ordinary human nature.
Also, they can't hook up with the opposite sex effectively, because there's no support structure in their host country to do that in compliance with their cultural restrictions.
Young people who can't socialize tend to get depressed and angry.
These students tend to blame the culture of their host country for their depression and anger.
They become chronically homesick, and reject their host country in every way they can.
A terrorist recruiter is trained to spot these disaffected students.
The recruiter fulfills the student's need for socializing and the comforts of a familiar culture, by introducing them to other terrorist recruits.
Having found community at last, the student stops seeking it elsewhere, and cuts off any other contacts he may have had.
The community encourages and reinforces each other's anger, and directs it towards revenge.
And that's why a lot of terrorists are engineers.