Does religion make people more violent? AI experiment throws light on question
Does religion make people more prone to violence – or does violence happen ‘naturally’ between different groups of people?
Oxford University researchers created an AI system to simulate human reactions – to see if religion can stoke tensions between groups, leading to violence.
The researchers found that human beings generally are peaceful by nature – but when religious people’s ‘core beliefs’ are threatened, violence can ensue.
The researchers focused on intense periods of religious violence: the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which saw 3,500 people die and 47,000 injured in a three-decade clash between Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups and the British Army.
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They also investigated the 2002 Gujarat riots in India, which saw three days of violence between Hindus and Muslims, which ended with the deaths of 2,000 people.
The researchers used ‘psychologically realistic’ AI to model a society – and how religion affected the way people react to pressures such as outside groups.
The researchers found that in some situations, particularly when outsiders threaten religious people’s core beliefs, tensions can rise.
This only leads to violence in 20% of cases, the researchers say.
But the researchers point out that some religions have a tendency to encourage extreme displays of devotion – and this can lead to violence against other groups, or people who have broken away from the group.
Researcher Justin Lane said, ‘‘Religious violence is not our default behaviour – in fact it is pretty rare in our history.’
He said, ‘99% of the general public are most familiar with AI that uses machine learning to automate human tasks like – classifying something, such as tweets to be positive or negative etc., but our study uses something called multi-agent AI to create a psychologically realistic model of a human, for example – how do they think, and particularly how do we identify with groups?
‘Why would someone identify as Christian, Jewish or Muslim etc. Essentially how do our personal beliefs align with how a group defines itself?’
‘Ultimately, to use AI to study religion or culture, we have to look at modelling human psychology because our psychology is the foundation for religion and culture, so the root causes of things like religious violence rest in how our minds process the information that our world presents it.’
