20 Years Later: Psychology of Terror

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Jami Floyd: I'm Jami Floyd, senior editor for Race and Justice, filling in for Brian Lehrer. September 11th transformed the nation and New York City. At least in the beginning weeks and months and years, it seemed to unite Americans with a common sense of national security, but now, faced with a global pandemic that has killed more than 650,000 Americans, according to the latest numbers from the CDC, many of us are wondering what happened to that sense of American unity when we needed it during COVID.

Joining me now to discuss this is Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. He's also the co-author of The Power of Us. Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, which is out today. Professor, we need that book. Welcome to WNYC.

Jay Van Bavel: Thanks for having me on. The book is finally available as of today. I encourage people to pick it up if they can.

Jami Floyd: Let's talk about some of what's in the book. I'm sure people will. Let's cast our minds back to the early days after 9/11, September 11, 2001. As you know, WNYC's Health and Science Editor, Nsikan Akpan, is reporting for our series that we're running in the newsroom on the aftermath of 9/11 and its impact on our city, that President George Bush's approval ratings went from 52% to 90%. Here's President Bush speaking at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

President George Bush: My fellow Americans, for as long as our country stands, people will look to the resurrection of New York City and they will say, "Here buildings fell, here a nation rose."

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Jami Floyd: I think, professor, we can all remember that feeling of national unity, and even talking at the time about whether it would last, how long it would last. We're going to ask listeners to call in if you have a question or a comment for the professor about that time of national unity, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 for NYU Professor Jay Van Bavel. We're talking about how the terrorist attacks and the psychology of terror might transfer or did not to the COVID pandemic.

Professor, coming out of President Bush, can you talk a little bit about that collective trauma we felt post 9/11 and how it shaped or maybe reshaped our sense of collective identity?

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. It's hard for Americans who are young right now to imagine a time when we weren't polarized, but that's exactly what happened after 9/11. Bush had 51% approval rating right before the attacks, and then that almost doubled, it was almost 100% approval, was at ceiling. Part of it was because he was able to express empathy for the victims, he went down to 9/11 and, at least in the short term, he was really crucial for allowing Americans to process the trauma and heal together.

Jami Floyd: This is something that is we need a leader, but your research also reveals that human beings have a natural evolutionary need to partner and collaborate, right?

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. Humans, we evolved in small groups over hundreds of thousands of years, and we don't have poison, and we can't fly, we can't run very fast. We succeeded in evolutionary sense by cooperating and working together, and that's really our evolutionary advantage.

We have a tendency to form groups. Every single society on Earth that's ever been studied, people form coalitions with other people. This can be around a partisan identity, around a political party, it can be around a national identity, or it can be around our community or any other type of identity that we build.

Jami Floyd: You mentioned we don't have poison and we don't have-- I think of Marvel Comics. We can't leave tall buildings at a single bound, that kind of thing, but isn't some of this partnership, alliance, drive, and even the leadership of President Bush at the time, some of it is us versus them, isn't it? I'm thinking about the war in Afghanistan, the US decision to invade Afghanistan, which we lead the show with today when we talked about President Biden, and his efforts to withdraw and approval rates falling.

Now we're talking about George Bush going in, 9 out of 10 Americans supported that just one month after September 11. Now, it did drop to 70% by 2003, spring of 2003, but why was the war so supported? Was it the fear of external threat? Was it just some surging feeling of patriotism? What was going on there?

Jay Van Bavel: It was a little bit of both. It wasn't just a vague threat in the way that, say, climate change is to many people. This was a very specific threat from an out-group targeted specifically to Americans and symbols of American identity. It felt, for many Americans, like an attack on them, even if they were living hundreds or thousands of miles away from New York City, people in Nebraska were traumatized by this too.

That's one of the reasons why it allowed people to develop a national identity, it made it salient to them. That's one of the things that happens when you have an out-group who's threatening you.

Jami Floyd: Like World War II did the same thing. Let's go to Derek in Brooklyn. Derek, thank you so much for calling in. I'm curious to see where you're going to take the conversation for us. You're on with Professor Van Bavel.

Derek: Hey, guys, hey, Jami. Nice to talk to you. I grew up in a town out in Long Island, lost a lot of community members on 9/11. It doesn't really change the trajectory of my childhood and the way my community felt. It became a very aggressively political town as far as wanting to respond and go to war. It was even like things we would hear it from the pulpit at church and things.

I was with my parents yesterday, and my mom is concerned about my little brother going to the Yankees game on 9/11 this week because she still thinks that this is something that would be-- she considers this a time that there might be a terrorist attack. When 600,000 people have died of COVID, to be afraid of a terrorist attack on the day when arguably the greatest police presence in the world would be trying to prevent one. My partner and I were just floored when she said that to us, but it's just even how even on psyche it is.

Jami Floyd: Derek, do you mind if I ask how old you and your little brother are?

Derek: I'm 30, and he's going to be 30 soon.

Jami Floyd: You are old enough to remember the attacks but you were your kids essentially?

Derek: Oh, I vividly remember that day. Yes, I was a middle schooler.

Jami Floyd: Okay. Well, it's fascinating. Don't leave, Derek, I want to ask you one follow-up question, and it's the turn to COVID. I've talked with a lot of people and this is what inspired the conversation with Professor Van Bavel. Professor, I hope you'll lean into this and I know you will, a lot of people, Derek's age, marvel at the PTSD that Derek's mom and I [chuckles] suffered as a result of 9/11.

I'm flying, Derek, just so you know. I'm getting on a plane on 9/11 with my 18-year-old son, and I said, "Do you think we should fly that day?" and he too was floored. He just absolutely not only ran through all the statistics that's ridiculous, but TSA will be better than ever that day. All of that that you said to your mother, but the psyche is so different. Yet, Derek, it sounds as though you feel-- [crosstalk]

Derek: Oh, I didn't say to her. I just let her have it.

Jami Floyd: No.

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Jami Floyd: It sounds as though you also are frustrated about the COVID response at the same time. Am I right or am I projecting?

Derek: It was literally in the same conversation as the phrase, "I can't believe we just can't get back to normal yet." You know what happens? That scares you when you have young children. I can only imagine what that might do to you, but it's just difficult.

Jami Floyd: Professor, this is precisely why you're here. What are your thoughts about Derek's conversation with his mom or mine with my son for that matter?

Jay Van Bavel: Yes, first of all, I just want to express my empathy. It sounds incredibly difficult to talk about these things. Some people are traumatized. This is one of the quirks and almost the flaws in the design of human psychology, which is people are still scared for the trauma they suffered from 9/11, and because deeply affected many communities and changed how they thought about threats, but those threats aren't titrated to the real threats that we're facing now.

At the top of the show, you mentioned over 600,000 Americans have died from COVID. Well, that would be the equivalent of a 9/11 level disaster every day for over 200 straight days. Remember, that happened once and we're talking about it 20 years later. We're talking about that on the order of magnitude of 200 additional times.

The real threat of going to Yankee stadium is not terrorism at this point. Obviously, it's catching COVID from somebody in the bathroom between innings. There's a real degree of trauma I don't think that the country's process, but part of the way that the brain is processing it, COVID, and one of the reasons we've been having a hard time dealing with it is because we're doing it at a partisan level and huge swaths of the country because of partisanship, political identity, news sources that they've been tuned into are not taking it seriously and haven't been since January of 2020 when it was just first unfolding in the United States.

Then other people have processed it as a deep trauma. They've lost family. They've been sick. They've been stuck at home with their kids. Many people have lost jobs, some people have lost their homes. The scope of the trauma from that is-- the magnitude of it is massive and overwhelming.

Jami Floyd: I want to thank Derek so much for the call. I agree with you, professor, very, very empathetic to his experience. I also want to ask you, professor, I took a class in college about terrorism, specifically a whole seminar on terrorism, long before 9/11 happened. There's something different. Isn't there about terrorism? That's how it works. It terrorizes us, it preys upon that very thing you're talking about in the human psyche, that failing or that frailty.

Whereas COVID, even though, as you point out and my son points out as well, it's like a 9/11 every day. It's a slow roll. It's much harder to absorb. I mean, I was stressed out, I'm not going to lie, but it's much harder to absorb the magnitude of it to get your head around it. Can you speak a little bit to the dichotomy there?

Jay Van Bavel: Yes. With terrorism, almost by definition, it is designed to get us in a state of fear, and ideally, an irrational fear. It's one of the reasons why they attack symbols of American identity because it'll get everybody talking, people have seen them on TV or been to them. It looms larger in your mind's eye, and it leads you to often misidentify the scope and nature on danger of the terror.

Also, one of the things we haven't talked about here is that hate crime incidents that the FBI was tracking into Muslims spiked after 9/11 from about 28 a year to 481 the next year. That's 2,000 times as much, or, sorry, percentage as much, 2,000% as much. We're talking about people misidentifying the scope of danger, whereas the problem with a pandemic, and this was documented in a paper 100 years ago after the Spanish Flu is that people fail to recognize the risks.

It's one of the reasons people have been taking the wrong risks and not wearing masks and gathering with friends and family in homes unprotected. We're 20 months in, we should know better by now. People are still taking these risks and getting infected.

America is one of the worst places in the world for the level of the pandemic right now in terms of cases even though we were one of the very first countries on Earth to have access to an effective vaccine. Even with all the world's best scientists and innovations and Nobel Prize level winning scientific vaccinations, we're failing at this more than almost any country on Earth.

Jami Floyd: Let's take Jonathan who is calling in, I think, from Manhattan. Jonathan, welcome to WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.

Jonathan: Hi, how are you?

Jami Floyd: We're well, please. You're on with Professor Van Bavel, so take advantage.

Jonathan: Great. Well, I just wanted to say that I was in New York City on 9/11, and I remember that feeling of unity in the city in the days afterwards, but I felt very disconnected and so did my circles of friends with the national idea of unity that was going on. We really resented, and I think this must be part of the story, it must be remembered. We really resented the militarization of the United States, the pro-military feel in our name, and our name as New Yorkers.

We were the ones who were traumatized. We were the ones who lost friends. We were the ones who dealt with the situation on the ground for days and weeks and months. To us, we felt very disconnected from what was going on in the country and we really wanted to know part of it and that extended all the way through that 2004 Republican Convention, which most New Yorkers I believe did not want to have here.

There was massive protests. I'm connecting this to Jami. You were talking about the police earlier that 2004 moment really changed policing in the city as far as protesting and free speech and how protests were dealt with. I needed to put that out there as part of this conversation. Thank you very much.

Jami Floyd: Thank you for connecting the policing conversation with this one. You're right about the RNC convention in 2004. Professor, how bout that? A lot of New Yorkers felt disconnected as Jonathan says, or some felt resentful that this was being used for military might and opportunism as some sort.

Jay Van Bavel: One of the key responsibilities of leaders in times of crisis is to create norms about what it means to be us and what is the appropriate thing that we are going to do. This is, I think, where George Bush had the biggest failing of his presidency is that in the short term, as I said, he built a sense of shared national purpose, but he leveraged that national purpose to invade Afghanistan. We're here 20 years later talking about what a disaster that was, and then Iraq, which turned out to be an even as big or maybe even a bigger disaster and squandered a lot of goodwill towards Americans around the world. Did it, in part, in the name of Americans, ah, sorry, New Yorkers as well.

One of the key things that could have happened is that a leader at that moment when they have national support could have decided to handle it differently. Maybe a more targeted response to the terrorist organization specifically, rather than these global nation-building exercises or rhetoric in a way that would have reduced the chances of anti-Muslim hate crimes happening to innocent people around the country.

That's one of the key things about leadership, is having a national sense of unity is one thing, but that unity can get directed in all kinds of different directions, and that's where leadership plays the biggest role.

Jami Floyd: I think that's a wonderful place to leave it to leaders, not just creating unity, but using that unity to positive outcomes and positive advantage. Professor Jay Van Bavel, thank you so much, of New York University, and the author of The Power of Us. Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony. I got the plugin, professor. Thank you, and congratulations on the new book.

Jay Van Bavel: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Jami Floyd: I'm Jami Floyd. Brian will be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

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