Conventional wars, like World War I and World War II, are fought by uniformed armies, typically representing nations, who line up on battlefields with the goal of destroying the enemy force. Irregular warfare, an umbrella term for challenging and ambiguous forms of combat such as insurgency, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism, has different objectives. In the case of insurgency, a group within a society aims to throw of the established government or occupying power and replace it with their own government. Countering an insurgency, and other forms of irregular warfare, requires a population-centric approach, and such an approach is incomplete without a psychological element. Social psychology in particular can help the military to shift from a focus on superior weaponry to a focus on the local population- their mindsets and behaviors. But many people are unfamiliar with social psychology, and its potential for these settings.

With funding provided by the United States Airforce Office of Scientific Research and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research Engineering, I’ve been working on several projects that apply social psychology to irregular warfare.

• The 2015 publication of Trust, Attitudes, and Social Influence: The Cross-Cultural Social Psychology of Counterinsurgency by the Naval Research Laboratory, is a first step toward a comprehensive education and training program for military personnel. The manual addresses topics such as attitude change, social influence, trust-building, and cultural intelligence.

•  In partnership with Dr. David Combs of the United States Department of State, I am developing the Model of Culturally Contextualized Trust Decisions (MCCTD). This model builds upon cutting edge theory and research on the roles of attribution, emotion, and culture in trust decisions, while accounting for the unique challenges to trust building of the conflict environment, such as goal incongruence, resource competition, and the abundance of alternative trust partners.

• In collaboration with Mansoor Moaddel of the University of Maryland and Dr. David Combs, a field test of the MCCTD was recently completed in Tunisia. A representative random sample of the Tunisian population completed an experiment embedded in a traditional polling project. Analyses are underway to test the effects of in-group membership and sacrificial behavior on perceptions of trustworthiness.