In an interview with Nick Jackson recently published in The Independent, University of Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta explains why engineers are more likely to become terrorists based on current and ongoing research.
“So why is this? Everyone’s first reaction is that they are recruited for their technical proficiency, but there’s no evidence for this. Recruiters say they look for a personality profile rather than technical skills.”
“So we are left with two ideas: that certain social conditions affect engineers more than other graduates; and that certain unobservable traits attracting people more to radical Islamism are a little more frequent among engineers. My co-author Steffen Hertog and I think it’s a combination of these two things.” Read on from The Independent.
Comments 2
Sociologists in the News: Engineers and Terrorists | The Global Sociology Blog — March 27, 2008
[...] March 27th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Religious Fundamentalism, Sociology, Terrorism Via Context Crawler, sociologist Diego Gambetta gives an interview to the Independent as to why engineers are [...]
Ingenieure des Terrors « homo sociologicus — March 30, 2008
[...] Das Zitat aus einem kurzen Artikel im Independent. Die Schrift der beiden Soziologen Engineers of Jihad gibt es in voller Länge online (pdf, ca. 80 Seiten). Und entdeckt habe ich die story in dem ausgezeichneten Blog contextscrawler. [...]