Where Terror Lies: Social Desirability and Support for Extremism in the Sahel

• In Event: New Explorations of Violence in Africa

Abstract

Recent research on violent extremism suggests that individuals often misrepresent their true level of support for politically- and religiously-motivated violence. While experimental survey designs can be used to both detect and minimize such underreporting biases, researchers commonly treat the social undesirability of violent extremism as a statistical nuisance rather than as a substantive area of research. This paper departs from this approach and envisages the social undesirability of violent extremism as a phenomenon of substantive interest with important policy implications. Under what conditions do individuals misrepresent their support for violent extremism? Drawing upon the existing literature on verbal reports concerning socially undesirable behaviors and attitudes, we argue that individuals' socioeconomic background as well as the social setting in which they are interviewed impact their willingness to hide their true attitudes towards violent extremism. We test our arguments by comparing responses to direct questions about religious violence to responses gauged through “endorsement experiments” administered to over 5,000 respondents in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad in 2013-2015. The results show that individuals with greater socio-economic status are substantially more likely to underreport their support for violence than others. The effects of being interviewed in private versus in the presence of families or neighbors are less pronounced. Interestingly, however, individuals with lower socio-economic status tend to provide more truthful, i.e., more similar to experimentally-derived, responses in the presence of family members and neighbors than in private. The findings imply that interventions intended to counter violent extremism need to be targeted more broadly, and not necessarily focused on the poor and less educated strata of divided African societies.

Authors

• Steven E. Finkel, University of Pittsburgh

• Christian Gineste, University of Pittsburgh

• John F. McCauley, University of Maryland, College Park

• Michael Neureiter, University of Pittsburgh

• Chris A. Belasco, University of Pittsburgh