Robert Fredric Jeffers

Examining the, Ideological, Sociopolitical, and Contextual Factors Underlying the Appeal of Extremism

This paper discusses and seeks to synthesize theories regarding the role of ideology and psychosocial contextual factors in shaping motivations and behaviors of individuals within violent extremist movements. To better understand how these factors give birth to and nurture extremist social movements, theory from a multitude of disciplines was incorporated into a conceptual model of the drivers associated with terrorist behaviors. This model draws upon empirically supported theoretical notions, such as the violation of socioeconomic and geopolitical expectations, the concept of perceived threat, one’s mental construction of the world and group polarization. It also draws upon the importance of one’s social identity, sense of belonging, and the perceived “glamour” associated with extremist group behaviors.

Simulating smoking behaviors based on cognition-determined, opinion-based system dynamics

We created a cognition-focused system dynamics model to simulate the dynamics of smoking tendencies based on media influences and communication of opinions. We based this model on the premise that the dynamics of attitudes about smoking can be more deeply understood by combining opinion dynamics with more in-depth psychological models that explicitly explore the root causes of behaviors of interest. Results of the model show the relative effectiveness of two different policies as compared to a baseline: a decrease in advertising spending, and an increase in educational spending. The initial results presented here indicate the utility of this type of simulation for analyzing various policies meant to influence the dynamics of opinions in a population.