On 7-8 February, VOX-Pol Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, participated in the EU’s Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) Communication and Narratives Working Group latest meeting in Vienna, Austria.
The meeting is focused on how research and evidence-based psychological and neuroscientific insights can be translated into practical information and tools to help practitioners develop more effective alternative and counter-narrative campaigns, including online.
Scientific findings will be explored, under several themes broadly related to what makes extremist groups attractive, from a psychological and neuroscientific perspective. These themes include major psychological and neurological concepts such as active information avoidance, the backfire effect, cognitive dissonance, cognitive opening, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning.
The workshop combines plenary exchanges and presentations with break-out sessions in which participants can exchange their experiences with a smaller group of people. Lisa will lead a break-out session on Day 1 of the workshop, which will address questions such as:
- What are lessons learned from psychology and anthropology to be considered for effective alternative and counter narratives?
- What is missing but needs to be considered? Which questions still need to be answered?