So again, a bit of a departure from past research.
We also find that lone actors are less likely to be part of a radical network.
Again this makes sense this is part of the reason they're loners.
This includes they're less likely than others to
have a person that defines themselves as radical, a friend a radical family member.
A radical significant other.
They tend to be operating much more on their own.
And finally lone actors are somewhat more likely to have have some type of
crisis associated with what psychologists call a quest for significance.
Now in one of the next sessions, Dr is going to talk in much
greater detail about this phenomenal quest for significance.
But we can see here that it shows up as a distinguishing
characteristic of lone wolves versus group actors.
So it could be this person has had some kind of failed aspiration, could be abuse
as a child, abuse as an adult, could be being kicked out of the home by parents,
could be some type of trauma and so forth.
So you'll be hearing more about this in the future.
We can also use PIRUS data to map the total number of lone and group actors
over time and then to start thinking about which kinds of variables distinguish them.
In the next slide, we look at the total number of group actors and lone actors in
PIRUS for a long period of time, all the way back to the end of World War II.
First, we see a gentle increase in individuals engaged in terrorism over
time, and we've seen that in the previous slides as well.
So, in general we also see that group actors are more common than lone actors.
But note that compared to the number of group actors the number of
lone actors is increasing over time.
So much so, that in one recent year,
in 2010 I believe, we actually had more lone actors than group actors.
Now this is very important because it suggests that
this phenomena is going to be growing over time.
But it also is important because lone actors tend to be
deadlier than group actors.
In some other work we've been doing we've found that
lone actors have as much as four times, or are responsible as many as four times,
more casualties than individuals operating in groups.
And in general what the chart shows is that most of the activity from lone actors
happens after 9 11, rapidly increasing after 9 11.
We can now turn to some of the differences between lone actors and
group actors in a statistical sense.
If you look at the next slide,
we highlight some of the key differences between lone actors and group actors.
And we've highlighted here all those that are statistically significant differences.
So again, compared to group actors, lone actors are much more likely
to have psychological issues which we've talked about a little bit earlier.
Interestingly they are also more likely to have radicalized,
at least part, on the Internet.
So, this concern that as the Internet becomes more and
more important in our lives you might get a larger number of lone actors,
seems to be supported by this preliminary information from the PIRUS data.
From individuals who've radicalized in the United States.
We also see they're more likely to have committed violent acts in the past
than group actors.
And they're also more likely to have had a criminal record.
Interestingly, also, lone actors are more likely to
have had some kind of military experience compared to group actors.
Lone actors are also more likely to report what we could
call a conversion experience.
A kind of a-ha moment where they radicalize very rapidly, but
something really sets them off in a very direct way.
Group actors tend to be more gradual in terms of the radicalization experience.
So it essentially tells us that when we compare lone actors and group actors,
that the transition for lone actors may be more abrupt than it is for group actors.
Now we can also compare lone and group actors across ideologies.
And I provide an example of this in the next slide.
As we saw before, the phenomena of lone actors appears to be much more important
in recent years than in the past.
There were few cases in the 1970s and 1980s.
We see a big swing in cases after 9 11.
Relatively few lone wolves from the far left, however,
substantial numbers of Islamists and far-right lone actors.
In fact, for the most recent years after 2009, we find more lone actors
from the far-right than from either the far-left or from Islamist groups.
Okay, I'd just like to conclude this session by pointing out a few important
challenges and weaknesses with open-source data, such as PIRUS.
And by open-source, I mean unclassified data.
What are the challenges, what are the weaknesses of this kind of approach?
Well first off, there's lots of missing data.
For the 150 variables we're trying to record,
sometimes we're missing a lot of cases.
Getting information from online accounts, from court cases and
from records is complicated.
And it's fundamentally different than interviewing respondents.
If you think about it, when you interview a respondent, you'll ask them to answer,
for example, whether they have a criminal record, they can say yes or no.
And it's only missing if they refuse to give you any answer.
That's the only truly missing category.
But when we rely on open-sources on records and do not find information for
something like a criminal record, we often cannot be sure if there really
was no information, or there really was no criminal record, or whether we simply
weren't able to get the appropriate information from the available data.
So, this makes it very difficult for
you to tell whether our particular variable is truly missing or
it just was something that wasn't reported in the information you have available.
We also have greater sensitivity in releasing data
when it comes from open-sources than from some other databases.
In fact, in our own work at the Start Center,
we've sometimes had to take out names, of even convicted terrorists,
from our public databases because of privacy issues.