Atran has taught at
Cambridge University,
Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, the
École pratique des hautes études and
École polytechnique in Paris, and
John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is emeritus research director in anthropology at the
French National Centre for Scientific Research and member of the
Jean Nicod Institute at the
École normale supérieure. He is also research professor of
public policy and
psychology at the
University of Michigan, founding fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at
Oxford University, and cofounder of
ARTIS International. He was elected as a fellow of the
Cognitive Science Society and a member of the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences.
Early years In 1974 he originated a debate at the
Royaumont Abbey in France on the nature of universals in human thought and society. Other participants included linguist
Noam Chomsky, psychologist
Jean Piaget, anthropologists
Gregory Bateson and
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and biologists
François Jacob and
Jacques Monod.
Howard Gardner and others consider this event a milestone in the development of cognitive science and its integration into the wider scientific community.
Research Atran has experimented on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and
reason about
nature, on the
evolutionary psychology and
cognitive science of religion, and on the limits of rationality in understanding and managing deep-seated cultural and political conflict. His work has been widely published internationally in the popular press, and in scientific journals in a variety of disciplines. He has briefed members of the US Congress and the
National Security Council staff with documents and presentations including "The Devoted Actor versus the Rational Actor in World Conflict", "Comparative Anatomy and Evolution of Global Network Terrorism" and "Pathways to and from Violent Extremism". He was an early critic of U.S. intervention in Iraq and of deepening involvement in Afghanistan. In April 2015, he addressed the United Nations Security Council on "Youth, Peace, and Security." Atran has also been a staunch opponent of political attempts to eliminate government funding for social science, arguing that it is critical to the national interest, including innovation and security in business, technology, medicine and defense.
On conflict negotiation Atran has published research on the limits of
rational choice in political and cultural conflict. He has collaborated on research on how political negotiations could be made more likely to produce agreement. Atran and the psychologists Jeremy Ginges and
Douglas Medin and political scientist Khalil Shikaki conducted an experiment that surveyed "600 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than 500 Palestinian refugees, and more than 700 Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad." The researchers divided the subjects into three groups, each presented with a different "hypothetical peace deal." In the basic situation, those surveyed were presented with "a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees"; the proposal "did not go over well." For example, when the researchers asked
Mousa Abu Marzook, deputy chairman of Hamas, about a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return, he said “No.” When he was offered a trade-off with a substantial material incentive, he said “No” even more emphatically; “we do not sell ourselves for any amount.” But when he was offered an apology, he said “Yes,” although an apology would only be a beginning. “Our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” Similarly, when the researchers asked
Binyamin Netanyahu (then opposition leader), “Would you seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region?” he said, “Yes, but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations and then allow some border adjustments so that Ben Gurion [Airport] would be out of range of shoulder-fired missiles.” Atran has worked with the United Nations Security Council and has been engaged in conflict negotiations in the Middle East.
Field research on terrorism His work on the ideology and social evolution of transnational terrorism, which has included fieldwork with
mujahedin and supporters in Europe, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, has challenged common assumptions. Cognitive psychologist
Steven Pinker summarizes some of Atran's findings thus: Atran has summarized his work and conclusions: Regarding Atran's analysis of the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as a revolutionary movement of "world-historic proportions," a writer for
The New York Times considers Atran:
The Chronicle of Higher Education accompanied Atran to frontlines in the battle against ISIS in Iraq, where he and his research team were assessing "will to fight" among the combatants: A series of experimental studies directed by Atran and social psychologist Ángel Gómez performed with captured ISIS fighters, fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (
PKK),
Peshmerga, Iraq Army and Arab Sunni Militia in Iraq, as well as with thousands of ordinary European citizens, have further elaborated the Devoted Actor framework in an effort to “help to inform policy decisions for the common defense.” According to reporting from
CNN: Atran argues in an interview in
The Washington Post that: "Never in history have so few people with so few means caused so much fear." He and his research colleagues at ARTIS International contend that: Atran and colleagues propose an alternative approach, driven by theoretically framed field research that ground-truths big data and informs policy-making while maintaining intellectual independence. In 2017, Atran co-authored a groundbreaking paper with Angel Gomez, Lucia Lopez-Rodriguez, Hammad Sheikh, Jeremy Ginges, Lydia Wilson, Hoshang Waziri, Alexandra Vazquez, and Richard Davis. Titled 'The Devoted Actor's Will to Fight and the Spiritual Dimension of Human Conflict', the piece focuses on the spiritual dimensions of conflict based upon field work in Iraq with combatants and lab studies, assessing non-utilitarian dimensions of conflict. Atran and his team have validated aspects of these behavioral findings in neuroimaging studies of radicalized individuals in Europe, including greater willingness to fight and die for sacred versus non-sacred values that involves inhibition of deliberative reasoning in favor of rapid, duty-bound responses.
Other work Atran conducts ongoing research in Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. on universal and culture-specific aspects of biological categorization and environmental reasoning and decision making among
Maya and other Native Americans. His research team has focused on immigration of Spanish-speaking Ladinos and highland
Q'eqchi' people of Guatemala into the northern lowland Petén region, and their interaction with the lowland
Itza whose language is near extinction but whose agro-forestry practices, including use of dietary and medicinal plants, may still tell us much about pre-colonial management of the Maya lowlands. Atran found that the Itza' rejected majority-culture offers for exploiting natural resources as violating spiritual injunctions that may represent the summary wisdom of centuries of experience; however, later follow-up studies suggest that this wisdom, and the sustainable practices it encouraged, are vanishing as the last Itza speakers die out. Atran's debates with
Sam Harris,
Dan Dennett,
Richard Dawkins and others during the 2006
Beyond Belief symposium on the limits of reason and the role of religion in modern society highlight the differences between these authors, who see religion as fundamentally false beliefs associated with primitive cosmology, as well as politically and socially repressive, and Atran who sees unfalsifiable but semantically absurd religious beliefs and binding ritual obligations as historically critical to the formation and social cohesion of large-scale societies and current motivators for both conflict and cooperation. ==Bibliography==