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The effect of critical thinking test on lesser support of violence radicalism on high school students
Last modified: 2018-08-10
Abstract
In the current internet era, terrorist organizations employ digital communications to recruit and young people as active users become more vulnerable to terrorism recruitments. In order to mitigate such threat, it is crucial to equip high school students with an ability to critically process information they read. Present study attempts to examine the effect of critical thinking on support for violence radicalism. We predicted that critical thinking would cause students be more critical to radical contents (i.e., political propaganda, invitation to join collective action, protest, political violence, etc) and in turn it would reduce their support for violence radicalism. To test the hypothesis, we conducted experiments and divided 76 students into two groups (experiment and control) randomly. We conducted two training sessions: at the first session participants were asked to identify bias information from a reading on general topic and on radicalism topic at the second session. The analysis revealed that critical thinking negatively affect support for radicalism (i.e., using violence for political purposes). Further, after include some covariates in the analysis (i.e., intratextual fundamentalism, dual identity, gender, religious conservatism, and amount of monthly spending), we found that experimental groups showed lower support for radicalism. In the post-test cross-section analysis, we found that the less participants believe in propaganda messages that they read after critical thinking manipulations, the less their support for radicalism. In conclusion, present study indicates how a simple critical thinking training could be a buffer to prevent the influence of radical contents on young people
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