John McCauley shares his research on social desirability bias and its role on

violent extremism

By: Julia Simms

“Everybody lies, we all lie, and for different reasons, big lies, small lies, all kinds of lies, but we
all do it,” said John McCauley.

McCauley is an Associate Professor of Government and Politics and a Research Associate in the
Center for International Development and Conflict Management, who visited the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism to share his research on
social desirability bias and its role on violent extremism.

In the beginning of his lecture McCauley refers to a certain kind of lying called social
desirability bias, which he refers to as “lying to say what is socially acceptable, or socially
desirable. In short, to tell people what you think they want to hear or what the appropriate social
thing to say is,” said McCauley. Moreover, there is a misalignment between overt, the stated
support, and covert, the true support, which yields to the notion of social desirability bias.

When this occurs, researchers don’t get accurate measures for what they are trying to measure
because people are telling them what they think they want to hear. With this in mind, McCauley
and his colleagues conducted research for a few years on a violent extremist project, a project
aimed to combat Islamist violence in the Sahel region of Africa. Midway through their research
they realized violent extremism was a counter social issue, such as race. That realization
reshaped the project because the researchers began to view social desirability bias in the context
of support for violent extremism.

This is a critical topic for researchers like McCauley because the hope is to receive as much
accurate information as possible, but if honesty is not at the forefront of these conversations it
presents a challenge for researchers to mitigate.

McCauley then posed a question to the audience, “so what do we do about violent extremism?”
As the crowd stared intensely toward him for answers, McCauley stated, “treat it as a statistical
nuisance, treat it like it’s there and try to gauge how much of what you are hearing is the truth
and how much is social desirability bias.”
McCauley suggests that there are two ways one can gauge social desirability bias effectively.
First, one can ask subtle questions. For instance, if you’re studying race you wouldn’t ask a
question such as “how racist are you on a scale form 1 to 10” instead you would ask, “how
willing would you be to allow your son or daughter to marry someone of a different race,” said
McCauley. Second, one could ask survey experimental questions, which means you give some
people information about race and others none to see if that information affects their attitude
toward another topic.

Alternatively, they went a step further in their research by asking the question “could social
desirability bias around the issue of violent extremism affect the terrorist attacks that happen?”
The answer, yes it can.

To further explain McCauley shared their research questions:

1. Who lies about their support for violent extremism?
2. Does social desirability bias affect the likelihood of terrorist attacks?
3. How do the attitudes change after a terrorist attack?

In order for McCauley and his colleagues to find answers they created surveys that would
produce data for each research question, which would then be analyzed using the alclad dataset.
The breakdown of the waves of data collected to measure the attitudes about violent extremism
in Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso are as follows:
 Researchers collected data in two rounds – wave 1 and wave 2
 In the two rounds they had a total of 5,000 respondents
 The respondents represented 34 different communities

After a full analysis of the data, the research findings indicate that those who hide their support
for violent extremism and lie are typically educated and wealthy individuals. In fact, social
desirability bias does affect the likelihood of terrorist attacks because terrorist groups attack
places where people are not openly expressing support for it. McCauley describe it as this, “a one
percent increase in under-reporting support toward violent extremism leads to a five percent
increase that a village will be attacked.” Lastly, a terrorist attack changes the attitudes of the
civilians involved because it highlights to them the government’s inability to provide security.
When this happens civilians look for support from another group who can fill this need, which
happens to be the same group who attacked them previously.
Before McCauley concluded his lecture he shared the implications of his research, expressing
how social desirability bias is a critical phenomenon with consequences for decision-making.
Emphasizing that the experimental measures are beneficial when trying to tackle research
questions such as this. While also adding how the research showcases the government’s use of
resources in the context of fighting extremism.

You can expect further research from McCauley and his colleagues in the years to come as they
begin work on wave 3 data to uncover why the safe zones overt support decreased and covert
support increased after the terrorist attacks.

###