Computational Simulation in Practice: ‘Simulating Religious Violence’ Documentary Interview

This episode features an interview with Dr. Jenn Lindsay and Dr. Wesley Wildman on the forthcoming documentary film, ‘Simulating Religious Violence.’ This film explores a team of researchers seeking to build the kind of computational model that I just mentioned. Dr. Lindsay directed the film. She is Professor of Sociology and Communications at John Cabot University and the CEO and head of production at So Fare Films. Dr. Lindsay is an accomplished filmmaker, including the award winning documentary film, Quarantined Faith. Dr. Wildman is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics, and of Computing and Data Sciences. He was one of the researchers involved in creating and deploying the simulation.

The film documents the Modelling Religion Project, which was a three year project made in collaboration between researchers at the Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center (VMASC), the Center for Modeling Social Systems at the University of Agder in Norway, and the Center for Mind and Culture, the home for the Digethix podcast. If you’d like to see the film, it will be premiering at Boston University on November 19th in the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences Building on the 17th Floor. You can also see it at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego on November 23rd, and in Rome on March 1st at John Cabot University in Rome.

Premiere event at BU 11/19: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/simulating-religious-violence-premiere-tickets-953785667607

Film website: https://www.sofarefilms.com/simulatingreligiousviolence
Project website: https://mindandculture.org/projects/past-projects/modeling-religion-project/

Credits:

Music: “Dreams” from Bensound.com
Episode art: Jenn Lindsay

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Seth Villegas: Computer simulation is on the cutting edge of leading research. But what is computer simulation? It’s not something like the virtual reality portrayed in the matrix. Instead, it is a sophisticated program designed to mimic a specific situation. Imagine for a second that you are a local mayor trying to make decisions about whether to add an additional lane on a busy road. You can gather data from the real world on the average number of drivers who use the road and how those drivers behave: do most of them turn onto smaller streets or do they continue forward? If we were to construct a sophisticated simulation, we could begin to model driver behavior and potential changes in driver behavior with the addition of another lane. We could even test out various options that the city is considering. Should they add in the lane in this part of the city or somewhere else? Why not input both options into the simulation and see which works better?

In academia today, computer simulation is a powerful tool to test out theories and to attempt to understand complex real world problems. For example, consider that you were looking to understand the Gurjarat riots in India, which left over a thousand people dead, the Irish Troubles, with tens of thousands of casualties over the course of four decades, and the Boston marathon bombing, which took place just down the street from my home here at Boston University. What if you could build a computational model to understand the circumstances that lead to each of these events? What if you could then use that model to look for those same circumstances where violence is next most likely to break out?

Today, I will be interviewing Dr. Jenn Lindsay and Dr. Wesley Wildman on the forthcoming documentary film, ‘Simulating Religious Violence.’ This film explores a team of researchers seeking to build the kind of computational model that I just mentioned. Dr. Lindsay directed the film. She is Professor of Sociology and Communications at John Cabot University and the CEO and head of production at So Fare Films. Dr. Lindsay is an accomplished filmmaker, including the award winning documentary film, Quarantined Faith. Dr. Wildman is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics, and of Computing and Data Sciences. He was one of the researchers involved in creating and deploying the simulation.

This interview will cover what you will see in the documentary, the kinds of questions that it both raises and answers, and the research behind it. I hope that this conversation can spur your interest and I hope to see you in person at one of the two upcoming premieres! Now, I present to you, Dr. Jenn Lindsay and Dr. Wesley Wildman.

Conversation

Seth Villegas: Please tell us about the Simulating Religious Violence film.

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.

Villegas: I think from what both of you have said, there’s a lot of scholarship that’s embedded within the film that comes out of the Modeling Religion Project. Can you tell us a little bit about how that scholarship was developed? Because it seems like there’s been a few different experts mentioned who I think have kind of different theories about how things work. But how do we actually move from a theory that someone writes in a book to something that actually ends up in a computer simulation? How does that process actually happen?

Wildman: That’s a beautiful question. What’s amazing about the academic study of religion is how multidisciplinary it is. You’ve got humanities people like historians and literary experts; you’ve got sociologists and economists and anthropologists working on it. And of course, you’ve got all sorts of scientists, neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, who are more empirical – they’re also studying religion.

The end result is a large, complicated conversation, often broken into bits where people aren’t talking to each other that much. For example, the medical people who look at the health effects of religion, are usually not talking to the humanities people, who are thinking about the texts and history of religion. That’s really unfortunate. What we need is an integrated basis for good conversations about religion.

To create a good computer simulation of any aspect of religion, the very first thing that has to happen is building teams with people who know all of these different disciplines. Then you need a way to get those various theories into the same room, around the same conference table. After that, you have a shot at finding common ideas, common themes to show how all of these different perspectives might fit together. The task of building a synthetic interpretation of something as complicated as religion or the immigration process takes a tremendous amount of work.

It’s also incredibly exciting. Picture these varied experts in a room together, actually talking about how to build a computer simulation. We experienced this over and over again, and Jenn tries to capture it in the film Simulating Religious Violence. It’s a lot of fun trying to think through these things, but it’s exhausting work as well. After a couple of days of doing this, you just feel like you need to go and have a vacation. It’s mentally very tiring, but extremely satisfying at the same time.

Lindsay: The story of how I got roped into making this movie begins after Wesley had secured the first grant for the Modeling Religion Project. He asked me for a Skype meeting, and he said, you know, “If I can pull together the support for you, can you make a documentary about the application of computer modeling and simulation to the scientific study of religion?” And like any good freelance artist, I said, “Yes, yes, I can,” with total confidence.

Then I quickly got off the call, and I started Googling, “What is computer modeling and simulation?” And hence began a long journey of trying to wrap my head around questions like the ones you’re asking here, but also trying to understand how to visualize simulations and the process of building them, because film is a visual medium. I realized in the process that I was essentially making a model of the Modeling Religion Project, a visual model, a purposeful abstraction of what they were doing, because I was the only one that was watching them for three years.

But I had to boil it all down to a digestible, 60-minute piece. And I realized, also, that I didn’t need, as the storyteller and as the sort of visual diplomat here, to understand the deep, granulated details of the technology they were using or the theories they were integrating. The fact that I didn’t know about it was actually a great narrative asset because I was going to be asking exactly the questions that our audience members would have.

Villegas: My next question is about the sort of stakes surrounding both the film and the research. It’d be great to know more about who you hope that the scholarship will reach and how that might concern regular people who might view the film who are interested in the topic but maybe don’t quite understand what’s going on about the bigger impact of these sorts of topics?

Wildman: That’s a great question. When a new area starts, like computational simulation of religion and associated social dynamics, it can take quite a bit of time to get to the point where you’ve got directly applicable research. In some ways, the humanities and social sciences are much faster to come up with advice that policy professionals or international relations people would be able to use.

So we’re sort of coming up behind that existing set of connections into the policy world with computational models that can be used to support particular policy proposals or evaluate them or criticize them. Sometimes we discover brand new insights, and sometimes what we’re doing is producing evidence for things that we deeply suspect are true. In the latter case, we’re not getting anything particularly new from the simulation, apart from a rigorous kind of support for an intuition that someone has in the policy world. Both of those things – new insights and support for existing intuitions – can be valuable in the policy world.

It takes a bit of time to get all of that going, but there’s lots of applications. I’ll give you an example. One of the things that came out of this project is an evaluation of weapons of mass destruction. This computational simulation looked at basic materials for weapons manufacture, means for delivering weapons, and the human expertise needed to build the weapons. This simulation tried to understand, through connections between nations, which nations would have the best opportunity of building weapons of mass destruction of any kind — nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The data that sits behind that is very rich.

Conclusion

Seth Villegas: I hope that this interview was able to answer some of your questions and to explain the basics of computational simulation. If you have some questions and would like to meet Dr. Lindsay, Dr. Wildman, or some of the other researchers shown in the documentary, you should definitely consider coming to one of the upcoming premieres on November 19th here at BU, November 23rd in San Diego, and March 1st in Rome. The film also furthers to show things that we are only able to discuss in passing here.

If you’d like to respond to this conversation computational simulation, you can email us digethix@mindandculture.org. You can find more information about DigEthix at digethix.org. You can find us on Facebook and twitter, @digethix, and on Instagram, @digethix future. The intro and outro song dreams was composed by Benjamin Tissot. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you at one of our upcoming premieres.