The Global Sociology Blog

Via Context Crawler, sociologist Diego Gambetta gives an interview to the Independent as to why engineers are overrepresented in terrorist Islamist groups (in addition to being all men between 18-40). There are possible explanations but they are not entirely satisfactory:

“Everyone’s first reaction is that they are recruited for their technical proficiency, but there’s no evidence for this. Recruiters say they look for a personality profile rather than technical skills.

So we are left with two ideas: that certain social conditions affect engineers more than other graduates; and that certain unobservable traits attracting people more to radical Islamism are a little more frequent among engineers. My co-author Steffen Hertog and I think it’s a combination of these two things. With engineers in the Middle East we have intelligent students who found it difficult to find professional satisfaction in their ambition to help their countries develop, so they have endured relatively greater frustration than other graduates. The fact that you see no over-representation in Saudi Arabia where they have greater professional opportunities supports this view. But other graduates are equally represented among non-violent groups and even in Western countries and South East Asia, where labour market opportunities are better, engineers are more attracted to violence.”

That was actually one of the explanation proposed by Marc Sageman in Understanding Terror Networks. Ok, so, what are the alternative explanations?

“Something else is going on, and it might have something to do with personality traits. In the USA, engineers are seven times more likely to be right wing and religious, and in the 16 other countries we looked at it seems there are not more right wing and religious engineers individually. But when engineers have either of these traits, right wing or religious, they are more likely to have the other trait, too.

Piecemeal evidence suggests that traits such as a greater lack of tolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like a clock, and a dislike of democratic politics, are more frequent among engineers. The probability of a Muslim engineer becoming a violent Islamist remains minuscule but it’s still between two to four times greater than among other graduates.”

That’s more like it. Anyone familiar with PZ Myers blog, Pharyngula, knows that there are a lot of engineers within creationist ranks who specifically think in those terms. People who enjoy a liberal arts education that challenges them to question everything, authorities, traditions and mechanisms of power make right-wing conservatives and religious fundamentalists uncomfortable (too bad). We make a category mistake when we analyze Islamist groups separately from Christianists in the United States. They share the same mode of thinking and the same worldview.

Diego Gambetta’s paper (with Steffen Hertog) can be found here. I would also recommend books by Gambetta:

• The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
• Making Sense of Suicide Missions