The Data Science Behind the Film ‘Simulating Religious Violence’
Q&A with BU Professor Wesley J. Wildman and Film Director Jenn Lindsay (GRS’18)
Boston University (BU) Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics and of Computing and Data Sciences (CDS) Wesley J. Wildman and Jenn Lindsay (GRS’18), who earned a doctorate in philosophy in the social science of religion at BU, recently appeared on the DigEthix podcast, hosted by CDS Lecturer Seth Villegas. They discussed the film Simulating Religious Violence, which Lindsay, a professor of sociology at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, directed. It focuses on research by Wildman and others predicting religious radicalization and violence using agent-based computer simulations. You can read parts of the wide-ranging discussion below, or listen to the entire podcast here.
Wesley J. Wildman, Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics and Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University
Dr. Jenn Lindsay, CEO and Head of Production, So Fare Films
Adjunct Professor of Sociology, John Cabot University
Seth Villegas, Lecturer in Computing & Data Sciences
Host of the DigEthix Podcast
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Seth Villegas: Please tell us about the film Simulating Religious Violence.
Jenn Lindsay: The film follows a group of computer scientists and religion scholars leveraging the tools of computer simulation and modeling to better understand religious radicalization and religiously rationalized violence. And it tells one part of a much larger story about a research project based at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston that Wesley can talk about more.
The film follows this team of scientists and scholars in many different places. The story begins in Boston, near the Boston University campus, right at Kenmore Square, around the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, and then heads south to the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center at Old Dominion University, which was an important project partner for the scientists, and then over to the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. They travel back south to Greece, where the scientists did some on-site fieldwork in the refugee camps on the island of Lesvos, right after the height of the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean basin.
Wesley Wildman: Sitting behind that film is a bunch of research as well as lots of people. The research occurred under the Modeling Religion Project at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, with collaborators at the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center in Old Dominion University the Center for Modeling Social Systems in Norway. It's a large network of people, all of whom are trying to make sense of religion from lots of points of view. One of those points of view is extremism.
Extremism is sometimes provoked by feeling marginalized in a society, and that's why we studied immigration and refugee issues. There's quite a bit of theory about religious extremism and social marginalization that lends itself to computational simulation. That allows us to build artificial versions of the real world and ethically experiment on those artificial societies to study the conditions under which extremism arises and how it might be mitigated.
Villegas: When you use the word "experiment," most people probably think of a lab experiment, but it's much harder to envision what an experiment in an artificial society would look like. I imagine it's more ethical than experimenting on a real society, which, unfortunately, sometimes happens. But what exactly does the simulation process entail in this context?
Wildman: A great analogy is a computer game, only built with a serious purpose. This kind of serious game is not really about the visuals, but more about the internal mechanisms, how everything fits together. If you can validate such a serious computer game in the sense that you can make it behave in the way that the real world behaves, then you've got an experimental platform.
After that, you can change the knobs and the dials, change the proportion of a particular group within a population, or change the amount of resentment that a particular immigrant group might have. Or you can change the amount of anxiety that a majority group has about minority people coming to live with them and see how the computer game, the simulation, behaves differently because of that. That's what we mean by experiments. You can also run optimization experiments, seeking specific types of outcomes within the space of parameters that defines the range of possibilities for the simulation. Let's say you want to have peaceful integration of immigrants into a new culture; you can ask what conditions need to be in place in order for that outcome to occur. That’s an optimization experiment. And there are other kinds, too.
Villegas: Religion seems to be only one part of the problem related to immigration. Both of you are in this interesting area that not everyone chooses to research. It'd be great to know why you think that this area in particular might be useful for thinking about violence and other serious issues that are going on — not just here, but also all around the world.
Lindsay: Well, a religion, like so many other aspects of our social identity, has a strong place in the constellation of experiences that define how we think about ourselves, how we identify our tribe, and what motivates our behavior over the life course. Religion is particularly interesting to me because it has such incredible existential force in terms of motivating people to go beyond their comfort zone to develop very unique rationales within their bounded cultures for how to see the world, how to interpret world news or trends like migratory flow.
I grew up in a non-religious context, so I was always looking at religion from the outside in, fascinated at sort of the different bounded cultures I saw playing out in my high school environments in San Diego. I recall wondering why certain religious groups seem so happy or so close to each other. And I was one of those kids who was always asking, “Why, why, why?” And also, I had a theater background, so I was very interested in storytelling and social dynamics and the theatricality of religion.
From a social science perspective, I've always been very interested in how people manage radical differences and also not-so-radical differences, just ordinary differences between two people. We are all in some kind of an interreligious, intersubjective dialogue at any given time. But religion gives us something very concrete to look at. It's more empirically accessible as a context for studying management of differences and the development of different behaviors and, I guess, common texts that any bounded culture might have.
So religion is an incredible cauldron of strong emotions and empirically graspable differences that became the theater that this dramaturge likes to try to follow, if not understand better.
Simulating Religious Violence Film Premiere & Panel Discussion
On Tuesday, November 19, Boston University Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, in collaboration with Boston University School of Theology, presented the North American premiere of Simulating Religious Violence. Held at the Center for Computing & Data Sciences' 17th floor conference space, the premiere welcomed over 200 attendees and included a reception, film premiere, and panel discussion.
