What Are Extreme Overvalued Beliefs?

Dr. Tahir Rahman • 2025-03-04

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Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to The Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, what are extreme overvalued beliefs? You will learn in this episode how Lee Harvey Oswald's mindset shaped his actions, insights from examining shootings, and key warning behaviors preceding violence. Our guest, consulted on criminal and civil cases over the last 25 years, contributed to the development of a behavioral threat assessment framework, and is the author of the book, Extreme Overvalued Beliefs. I introduce to you Dr. Tahir Rahman. I am sitting in my room one night researching a topic ahead of an important interview for the podcast, specifically episode 36, How Was the Unabomber Investigated? And in preparation for this episode with Tom Nunnamaker, who oversaw the investigation at FBI headquarters and would end up being retiring as the FBI Chief of Violent Crimes, I am reading through all of these case notes and specifically about the individual behind this case. And I have just overarching questions about not only how this was investigated, but how someone, dare I say, gets to that point. How does someone think like that? And that is what's led us to the conversation we're about to have, at least from my perspective. And with that being said, Dr. Rahman, I want to know, how did you get into psychiatry?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Oh, it's a great question. And thank you for having me on your show here, Dylan. I'm very pleased to be here to talk about my career and what we're doing in the field of threat assessment and management. The interest that I have in psychiatry comes all the way back to probably childhood because my father was a psychiatrist. And I think that that had a lot of influence on my thinking. But when I went to med school, I kind of had an interest in doing emergency medicine or anesthesia or something in that area. And as I got through it, I really started getting interested in human behavior and, and mental life and how, how it is that people come to do what they do and, and particularly with criminal behavior, I became really interested in that. And the Oklahoma City bombing had occurred right around the time that I was getting training in Kansas City, in med school and in residency. And so I was kind of on my journey to do forensic psychiatry at that point and started learning more about it. And after finishing medical school at the University of Kansas, I went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to do my residency. And there I got to meet some really well regarded forensic psychiatrists, including Fred Berlin, who worked on some really interesting cases like Jeffrey Dahmer and others. And also got to meet some national level forensic psychiatrists like Dr. Philip Resnick, who actually ironically worked on the Unabomber case sort of peripherally. And through my journey, I've met a lot of interesting people and then started doing forensic work. And there in Kansas City, there's some law firms that handle some pretty big criminal cases. And one of the biggest criminal cases at the time, when I first started practicing, after leaving residency and moving back to Kansas City, was the case of Robert Courtney. He's well known in the Kansas City area as somebody who was diluting chemotherapeutic agents for cancer. And so I was able to do his competency evaluation and found that he was competent to stand trial and responsible for his crimes. So that was a case that I worked on early in my career. And so once I really got interested in doing more forensic work, I also started doing insanity defense work in the state of Missouri and Kansas. And I, after private practice, started getting interested in academic psychiatry and wanted to delve further into the concept of overvalued ideas, which I think we're going to talk much more about today. But this is a new construct, extreme overvalued beliefs that I have been working on. And it's essentially a way of thinking about targeted attacks, school shooters, terrorism, assassins, in a different way, in a new light. And so I have a new book that's been released this month called Extreme Overvalued Beliefs, Clinical and Forensic Dimensions, that talks about this topic. And since now I am at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, I'm very interested in teaching this topic to students, residents, other psychiatrists, threat assessment professionals. So we're just getting kind of started on that mission.

Dylan Carnahan:Well, firstly, I'd like to say, you know, in talking about your personal journey, it seems like you have a large amount of curiosity.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yes, I think that that's a really good way of summarizing my interests. One of the, my first book was actually called We Came in Peace for All Mankind, The Untold Story of the Apollo 11 Silicon Disc, which is kind of an unknown story of a miniaturized silicon wafer the size of a half dollar that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left on the land. So yes, diverse interests and may seem very unrelated, but it is sort of in a way because mankind, humankind sort of united in the cause of space exploration and the moon landing. And so we'll talk a little bit about how the brain can be very positive when uniting with other people, but also sometimes can have a darker side too.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. And I want to go back to the extreme overvalued beliefs. In reading your book, I got this sense that this was some mental construct, extreme overvalued beliefs that was discussed early on, many, many years ago. However, you're bringing new light to this paradigm.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:That's exactly correct, Dylan. So the first description of this was 1892 by neuroscientist Carl Wernicke. And most people don't know who Wernicke is, but there was a neuroanatomist by the name of Theodore Maynard. And there's a structure in the brain named after Maynard. But Maynard had two students, one was Sigmund Freud, the other was Carl Wernicke. So we all know who Sigmund Freud was. And Wernicke is also very well known by doctors and students of medicine, because there's a structure in the brain called Wernicke's area, that is one of the first things you learn about when you learn about aphasia, and inability to speak and how the speech centers are impaired in people who've had certain kinds of strokes. So Wernicke is very well known in medicine. But what most people don't know about Wernicke's work is that he was very interested in psychiatry as well. And back in the 1800s, early 1900s, there wasn't a separate field of psychiatry and neurology. There was sort of one field, neuropsychiatry, neuroscience had one following or one category, one specialty. And Wernicke was very interested in how people developed abnormal thinking. And the first thing that you learn about in psychiatry when you become a psychiatrist is delusional thinking. Because people with schizophrenia, for instance, will sometimes develop fixed false beliefs. Example of that would be believing that your neighbor is a space alien and is going to try to take over the world or kill people and then preemptively killing that person because you think you're defending the universe, defending the earth. That's an example of a delusion. That's usually associated with other symptoms, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized behavior, things like that. Most people are familiar with that. Then the other one is obsessions. We all use the term obsessions loosely and interchangeably with delusions. My work is really saying we need to stop doing that and think of these more as three different cognitive drivers, so delusion, obsession, extreme overvalued beliefs are separate. An obsession is ego-dystonic, which means that the person fights or resists the thoughts. For example, that their hands are contaminated with terms or that they need to do things in certain order or rituals, which are called compulsions. Beliefs and obsessions are things that the person wants to stop their unwanted thoughts and the person resists them, fights them, seeks help for them often by going to a mental health professional, like a psychiatrist, to get medication. That's called obsessional thinking. That usually is a very low risk of harm to the public or to others. Then the third one, extreme overvalued beliefs, is one that I think is very intuitive. That is that some people share beliefs in their culture, religion, or subculture, and that those beliefs are relished, amplified, and defended by the person. That they're not a delusion or an obsession, and that the individual, not only do they relish, amplify, and defend them, but the belief becomes more refined, more binary, more simplistic, and absolute. They may carry out violent behavior in the service of this belief. This binary thinking you see in attackers. Examples would be, on the US Capitol attack, we saw people say Biden is a communist, Trump won the election, hang Mike Pence. That's very binary, simplistic, absolute thinking. On the September 11 attacks, we saw individuals, 19 hijackers, fly airplanes into buildings in a horrific attack against our country, and believe fundamentally that the West is at war with Islam, in addition to some other beliefs about the West leaving holy lands in the Middle East. There were several kinds of binary, simplistic, and absolute thinking in those kinds of attacks. And the important thing to remember, to summarize sort of the three cognitive drivers are, a delusion is fixed, false, idiosyncratic, which means only that person believes what they're thinking. And another example is Andrea Yates, who had delusional beliefs that she was possessed by Satan, and she drowned five of her children in a bathtub at home, sequentially drowned each one face down in the bathtub under this power of the delusional thinking that if her children died before the age of accountability in the Bible, that their souls would not be condemned to hell. And so somehow she believed that her children's souls would be saved in this distorted thinking that she had from her postpartum depression, which is a very treatable condition, actually. So only Yates believed that her children should be drowned for this bizarre reason. Other people did not believe that. And that's very different than when a group of people, or even a lone actor, terrorist, or school shooter acts in a way that is shared by others in their distorted subculture.

Dylan Carnahan:What, I mean, it sounds almost like when we talk about these distorted beliefs that can be shared, that it's ideologically driven.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yes, absolutely. So we know from data that around 81% of attackers, terrorists, school shooters, assassins, lone actor, attackers will have a fixation. And usually that fixation is ideologically driven. So examples could include white supremacists, neo-Nazis, radical jihadists, even school shooters who will develop an ideological framework. And so we call that a frame by an ideology in threat assessment lexicon.

Dylan Carnahan:When something, I want to explore it a little bit, is the escalation to violence, right? It's one thing to maybe have beliefs and then to believe them to a high degree. It's another thing to maim or kill someone in the name of those beliefs. What is the escalation between those two? Because it seems like that would be very hard for someone to empathize with.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yeah, it's a very good question because many people hold these kinds of extreme overvalued beliefs but never do anything about it. And so there are other psychological factors that come into play, which you're alluding to and you're very intuitive in thinking about that. You know, what are the other factors? And one of those factors can be changes in thinking or emotion and losses in love or work or psychosocially can accelerate some of this thinking. So an example would be an individual might have one of these radical thoughts or beliefs and other things in life are not going well. Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's their job, and there's a warning sign called last resort warning behavior where there's sort of this imperative I must act now as things change in their environment. And threat assessment is very dynamic, it's not static. So as an individual's life keeps changing, these aspects of their psychology are also so important to keep in mind. And I've written an entire chapter on Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK SS. And I use that case as a good example of extreme overvalued beliefs and threat assessment because most people are familiar with the facts of the case. Obviously, there's tons of conspiracy theories about Oswald too, but most people understand the basic facts of what Lee Harvey Oswald did on November 22nd, 1963. But a good teaching case in that, a good teaching example is his last resort warning sign. So he knew, and by the way, Oswald had a very tumultuous life, and lots of difficulties in his childhood and went to numerous schools as a child, and first heard about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were going to be executed for espionage. Around this time, Oswald would have been around age 15. Oswald had been interacting with the juvenile courts because he had been in trouble for doing different things, not going to school, stuff like that. And he probably identified with these protestors who were protesting the execution as an example of how the justice system victimizes people. And so at a young age, Oswald's already got these seeds planted about how the system is somehow stacked against him and against people. And as he goes through his life, he joins the Marines. He really complains a lot to his fellow Marines about being forced to go on marches and things that they have to do. And he would complain about it. In fact, he'd complained also about the United States capitalism system. And so much so that his fellow Marines nicknamed him Oswaldovich, to make fun of him for being a Marxist Leninist, which is what he ended up saying that he was. He was really studying Marxism. And he at one point shot himself, his fellow Marines think, in the arm to they were stationed in Japan. He didn't want to leave Japan. He had met a new girl there and his unit was ordered to go elsewhere. And so he claimed that a Derringer 22 handgun fell out of his locker and shot him in the arm at the Deltoid. But his fellow Marines all thought that that was that was BS, that he actually did that intentionally to stay there. And that that just gives you an example of some of his self harm, self injury. He then eventually defected to live in the Soviet Union. And while he was in Russia, he when he first entered, the Russians didn't want him. They were wondering, why is this former American Marine in our country? What is he up to? So that the KGB really started following him and monitoring him. But they also thought that he was unstable. And a great example of his instability is that he cut his wrist and was found unconscious in his hotel room and nearly died from this self-inflicted harm. And the reason he did that is they were trying to send him back to the United States. And he adamantly refused to go, because he said he didn't like capitalism and wanted to be a part of communism. And so in this very manipulative gesture where he cuts his wrist and is found unconscious bleeding in his, in his bathtub in a hotel, he's brought to the emergency room and they treat him there. And they finally just kind of gave up and said, all right, if you want to stay here, then stay here. And that's where he met Marina and lived there for a while, got married, came back to the United States, and always was seeking fame. So his, really his extreme overvalued belief was not only about Marxism and being against capitalism at various points in his life, but also was just plain old fame seeking, so legacy seeking. And many assassins and many terrorists, and even school shooters have this mentality of legacy, that their death or their attack for both is going to have meaning to them forever. And so Oswald always wanted to leave his mark on society. And this is all seen in his behavior. He tried to convince Marina to hijack an airplane to Cuba, which was sort of in vogue in the 60s to hijack planes to Cuba. For attention, really, more than anything. He tried to pass out flyers, fair play for Cuba in New Orleans, and not one, not a single person took these flyers. He just was out there passing them out, trying to get attention, really. And eventually, a few months before the attack on JFK, Oswald took a shot at Senator, or rather at General Edwin Walker, who had been running for Governor of Texas. And he just barely missed his target, because the bullet grazed the window of the home of General Walker, who had been sitting by the, in his desk. And the, so the bullet grazed the wood frame and barely missed, and so General Walker was spared. And Oswald then, he had been working at the Texas Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, and realized through newspaper and excitement in Dallas, the JFK was coming. His motorcade would be passing right in front of where he works. In fact, the Dallas newspaper printed the motorcade route just days before the assassination. And so that's called pathway, is learning, preparing for an attack. And he already had his rifle, which he had used to try to assassinate General Walker, the Carcano rifle, which he then stashed in the Texas Book Depository building. But the last resort warning behavior on him is really interesting because he and Marina have been fighting quite a bit. And Oswald had engaged in domestic violence towards her numerous times. And they were fighting. He was rooming in a house in Dallas and she was in a separate household with the kids. And he was trying really hard to reconcile their marriage and relationship. And she kept rejecting him because of the erratic behavior that he really exhibited. And the day before the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald went to Marina and tried to convince her to take him back. And so much so that in the bedroom, he said to her, you know, kiss me. And she refused. And so he asked again, you know, to kiss him and she wouldn't do it. And on the third time, he actually blocked the door. And so she kissed him just to be able to get out of the room, sort of by force. And Oswald left his wedding ring inside of a cup in the bedroom. That was discovered after the assassination. And what this was, was a last resort behavior, because he had two choices in his mind, either to become a famous assassin by killing JFK, or being back together with his wife. And since she refused his overtures to come back to be together, he viewed that as psychologically as a reason why he would seek fame instead. So that's called last resort warning behavior. And you'll see that with some school shooters, too, who will be fantasizing about killing others in their school and becoming sort of a famous school shooter. Nicholas Cruz famously posted, I'm going to be a professional school shooter a few months before his attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And so you'll see this last resort warning behavior in some cases where an individual may have something going on at home or with a person that they are romantically involved in or at their workplace or school place where there's rejection, humiliation, or grievances involved in that relationship. And so they'll choose the act of violence as a split from their other relationship. And that's sometimes called splitting in psychology.

Dylan Carnahan:It sounds like the last resort warning sign. It's like a door has shut.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Right. Yeah, that's a very good, simple way of putting it. You're absolutely right. So a door is shut on positive, what they perceive as a positive interest, romantically, work or other interests. And when that door is shut, then it opens the other door for them to do something violent, which usually has identifying as a warrior or identifying as, as some sort of fame legacy as part of their grievance. Just a lot of these individuals are grievance collectors. They go through their whole life collecting grievances. And when changes occur in their work, love, other aspects of their life, moving towards pathway, which is acquiring weapons, planning or seeking ways of doing an attack, becomes sort of their new fixation.

Dylan Carnahan:When you're recounting this story of Lee Harvey Oswald, it's, I'm just thinking of like the old saying of like a boiling frog in water, right?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yeah.

Dylan Carnahan:It's just slowly, slowly getting there. And I know that we kind of just hit on this last resort warning sign. But what are some other warning signs? I know some of the things that I heard, at least in that was self-harm. We kind of talked about some of the relationship turmoil, things of that nature. But what are some of these other warning signs, Dr. Rahman?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yeah, I think that there are professional instruments used to do this. And one of the biggest instruments out there used by a lot of law enforcement, Secret Service, even other countries, Australia, is called the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol, or TRAP-18, developed by Dr. Reed Malloy in California. He's a forensic psychologist. And what he's done is taken data sets from different attackers, different researchers, and put them together and devised a way, a professional tool or instrument that's based on valid data, looking at different aspects of the psychology in attackers. And some of those features, you know, it would take a professional to interpret those tools and use them in a setting such as law enforcement or threat assessment. And so these attackers will often display different signs, and I do think that they are signs that people should learn about, particularly when we're in the community or in schools or workplace or other areas where we interact with a lot of other people. And I do think society could play a role in learning about warning signs. So fixation is a big one. And I think we see these all around us all the time where people fixate on a political, religious, cultural system. And those can involve a wide variety of cultural aspects. And it's important to note that beliefs can be alien to people who are outside of a culture. And let's look at cults real quick. For example, the Heaven's Gate cult had 39 members who followed a pastor, Applewhite, and this pastor led them to believe that their souls would be taken to the Comet Halebot and that their empty vessels, their bodies would be left behind after they died. And they all committed suicide together wearing the same clothes, Nike shoes, black garments that were athletic garments. And you can read about this really chilling story that happened in Southern California in the 1990s. And so the Heaven's Gate cult is a great example of fixation, fixation on a religious movement. And the emotions were really positive in these individuals. So people often equate suicide with being a depressive or negative emotional state. Whereas in some of these extreme overvalued beliefs, you'll see positive emotional states associated with death or suicide or destruction. And if you watch some of the videos of the individuals that were in the Heaven's Gate cult, even, you know, days prior to their deaths, they were exhilarated and very happy to be going on this, in their mind, spiritual journey. So you'll see that sometimes with extreme overvalued beliefs. On September 11, the hijackers, Mohammed Atta was the sole leader of 9-11. And he really signaled to his followers to be optimistic about their mission to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. And so you'll see, you know, with martyrdom in that sense, you'll see people fixate on things with these positive emotions. And believing that they may even be ushering in some sort of a utopia or for something new by cleansing the bad from the world. And so that's the example of fixation warning sign. And then identification is identifying as a warrior for the cause of that fixation. So advancing a belief system through identifying as a warrior who's invested deeply in this grievance, for instance. So those are examples of how fixations then become identification. And then there are other proximal, what we call warning behaviors also. Last resort, we talked about, for instance, with Oswald and his wife and his choice between staying with her or killing JFK. So it kind of boils down to this binary, simplistic, and absolute thinking. Often these individuals start with fantasizing about their actions. And so depraved online subcultures are places people go to fantasize about doing these things. When other things in life are not going well, the sewers of the Internet bring for them some sort of fantasy, which is exhilarating for them, brings them positive reinforcement in some ways. And school shooters often do this. They will fantasize about prior shooters. So, the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, were one of the first big school shootings that happened in the United States that had a lot of press and a lot of reverberating, that kind of reverberated through America back in the late 90s when that happened. And other school shooters then started copying much of their beliefs, much of their actions. And then there are some other big events that have occurred. And one of the first descriptions of extreme overvalued beliefs that I wrote about was that of Anders Breivik. And he was the Norwegian terrorist, right-wing extremists, neo-Nazi extremists who killed roughly 70 youth in, after he detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo. He went to the island of Vittoria, where he then shot roughly 60, 70 young people that were part of the progressive party, political party of Norway. And it's really just a horrific attack. And Norway had never seen anything like this before, a mass shooting like this. And it was, it was like their 9-11. And Brevik was caught immediately after his attack, and said that his name was Anders Brevik, and he was from a 12th order, Catholic order called a Knight Templar. He said that he was a Knight Templar on a mission to cleanse Norway of immigrants, because a lot of Jews, Muslims, and other immigrants had been, in his view, taking over the country, and he was gonna do something about it. And at first, the first team that examined him thought that he had schizophrenia because of his odd beliefs were way outside of mainstream thinking. And so several months went by and the country was outraged by this idea that he could be schizophrenic. They just, people didn't believe that. So the court eventually ordered a second psychiatric evaluation, and this was done by much more experienced forensic psychiatrists. And they had a luxury of six months worth of observation time to see what this guy was all about. And they determined that he did not have schizophrenia, that he did not have delusional thinking, hallucinations, delusions, disorganized behavior and that sort of thing. And instead believed that he was just a radicalized right wing extremist, and that other people in right wing Norway, other extremists shared these similar beliefs. So that was the first description that I wrote about with my colleagues at the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the first paper that we drafted about what an extreme overvalued belief looked like. And we used Anders Brevik as the example. So Brevik identified as a warrior for his beliefs also. One of the things that he did is he dressed in a US. Marine outfit. This guy had never even been to the United States. Yet he in his mind loved the fact that the United States was at war with Iraq and with what he viewed to be as minorities and needed to be cleansed from Norway. And dressing in a US. Marine outfit gave him this bravado and sense of power. And he posted images of himself wearing these US. Marine outfits with all regalia. So that was a great example of a identification warning sign. So associating with or wearing paraphernalia or law enforcement or military uniforms and identifying as a warrior for the cause can sometimes be a warning sign of an attack. Particularly when these other warning signs are also present. So that was a good case to present, to learn a little bit about how warning behaviors occur.

Dylan Carnahan:Earlier, we talked about the refinement of ideas, and a large part of that too is sharing. And I think that that's sharing those ideals with other people. And kind of the collaboration, if you will. And so, I know especially in our modern era, and you mentioned this about digital environments, can you talk about what role digital environments play in indoctrinating or finding these ideas?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Sure. So in my book, I call these digital subcultures, which means that people view them, but they also identify with them because they see them as matching some of their own grievances and start to really relish them. And so relish, amplify, and defend those beliefs is an important part of radicalization with extreme overvalued beliefs. And another important warning sign that people should know about, particularly parents, teachers, is not just last resort but also leakage. So leakage is telling a third party about your intentions. And leakage, an example of that would be Nicholas Cruz posting, I'm going to be a professional school shooter on YouTube six, seven months before his attack. So leakage happens with a lot of school shooters actually. And they'll sometimes either brag or somehow let out to people on social media, online or to classmates that they want to do this attack. And it can happen even months before the actual attack. But a large percentage, up to 80% of school shooters have been known to exhibit leakage warning sign. So when a person says these things, they should be taken seriously and investigated if they seem to have a fantasy or a plan to do such an attack, particularly if they're also developing the pathway warning sign of acquiring weapons, learning how to use weapons, learning the security system of a facility like a school. And this is where I've been talking a little bit about how lockdown drills may be having the opposite effect that we want them to, and actually may be a dress rehearsal for a real school shooting event. And may even give future attackers sort of a fantasy of the power that comes with being in a lockdown drill, because you're watching people hide, have fear, angst during a lockdown drill, and practicing in their mind how a shooter might come in and have all this power. So, it's giving the shooter power in their fantasy during a lockdown drill. And then the lockdown drill also gives key aspects of security details to a potential shooter. What doors are locked, which doors might be easier to penetrate, how long it takes law enforcement to get to the school. So Nicholas Cruz actually knew all of those details when he was interviewed after his attack. He knew how long it would take for the police to arrive at the school even. So these kinds of details we may be doing the opposite that we intend to do with lockdown drills by giving too much information and also maybe even inoculating people to be thinking about that. Especially if there's grievances at the school already. So if a student is not accepted, ostracized by students, if a student holds a grievance against individuals at school, and then you do a lockdown drill, you're essentially implanting or inoculating them with ideas of what they could do next. Then they go home and fantasize about it on Discord or some other platform where there's a lot of school shooter information available. And fame-seeking a way out of life. And if other things at home are not going well, that last resort can come into play. And that pathway to violence can then develop. If that makes sense.

Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, it does. I want to take a step back and I'm going to try my best to articulate this. I know that this is somewhat difficult. And I'm going to be empathetic and kind of take on a different perspective, if you will. And what I would like to, I guess, talk through with you, Dr. Rahman, is how can we discern between over, and perhaps I'm using the wrong terminology here objectively, how can we discern between overvalued beliefs that have negative externalities and positive externalities? And I guess, I learned this in a class, which is if you want to narrate the current state of things, go back to the past. And so let's go back to the past and let's go back to the Revolutionary War. We are part of the colonies, we're underneath the crown, and we're being taxed without representation. And our founding fathers, they say, we are going to have our Continental Congress, and we are going to make a declaration, and we are going to commit high treason, and we are going to hang for our beliefs. And in fact, we are going to go to the extent to maybe even commit what would be viewed as acts of terrorism through the Boston Tea Party.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Sure.

Dylan Carnahan:And we are going to maim and kill our fellow countrymen in order to get our freedom and be out from underneath the crown. And now here we're in this lovely country that you and I are having this great free conversation in. So how do we reconcile that?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:I'll add another one to that. How about I have a dream in Martin Luther King's incredible movement to bring equality to African Americans and other minorities in the United States. You know, that's another example. So I think that the reason extreme overvalued beliefs is a forensic construct, this is important, or why it's not a clinical one is because we can't, we can't label a person's First Amendment beliefs as being pathological in some way. That would be, that would be wrong for us to do that. So a person in our country and most of the West can believe whatever they want to, that's protected free speech and we really celebrate that. It's important for advancement and you don't want to suppress people's freedom of speech or religion or other things. So extreme overvalued beliefs really belongs firmly in the realm of forensic psychiatry and threat assessment. So I think that when an individual can do something as horrific as the Oklahoma City bombing, where Timothy McVeigh detonated a 500 pound ammonium nitrate bomb in front of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 160 some people, including at daycare with children. And he did this in the name of wanting to start the second American Revolution. And he wanted to be the ultimate warrior. He wanted to be known for being the ultimate warrior. And that's a great example of the destruction forces that can come from an extreme overvalued belief. So, I think your point is important for us to acknowledge that some people have created progress through belief systems and subcultural systems, and moral thinking really comes into this a lot, moral reasoning. And I think, you know, the founding fathers were interested in a morality that involved freedom for people, for all people. And arguably, you could say, well, African Americans were not included in that because that was part of slavery back then. But in general, the US Constitution evolved into something to allow freedom for all citizens. And the same thing with the Civil Rights Movement, that was to be able to allow African Americans to have equal rights and equal schools, which was quite a fight to get to the point where black people could attend white schools. I mean, that wasn't even that long ago, if you really think about it. And so I do think that some of the moral thinking in those positive directions are important. And that's why we can never call this a disease or defect of the brain, because it's fundamentally who we are as humans. And we yearn for things like equality and freedom and liberty, which are important parts of the foundation of this country. And sometimes those things become distorted by certain individuals. And I think McVeigh is a great example of how that can go down a really negative path quickly. Same thing with the US. Capitol attack. And what's interesting about the US. Capitol attack is many of the individuals who were involved in that were professional people. And, you know, people think instinctively, oh, they must have come from, you know, red counties in the middle of the country, in the Midwest and stuff. And that's simply not true. A lot of them came from blue counties. And from places that Biden had gone is where many of these individuals came from, where roughly half of them came from. And many of them were professionals, doctors, lawyers, real estate, you know, agents, people who had successful businesses. But they got caught up in the movement, in the radicalized movement, and that the country was somehow being taken over. And so misinformation, disinformation can distort our thinking. And that's the challenge now with, you brought up social media is, is how do we navigate reality from unreality or distortions online? And that's the danger really out there now is, we saw, for instance, the hurricane on the East Coast and in Florida, and FEMA was trying hard to rescue people. And yet these militias were posting false information about how FEMA was somehow not doing their job and keeping the money for themselves instead of giving it to victims and that sort of thing. And one individual was actually arrested for planning an attack against FEMA. So all of this stuff based on falsehoods can really enter the mind of a person who's already anti-government, for instance. So I think if people already have a preconceived notion of, for instance, the government always lies, the government always distorts things, the government is always corrupt, and then you add a new piece of information, like the hurricane victims are not being helped, and urgency develops in some individuals, because it fits in with their older schema to do that. So the challenge for us is to see why it is that a new piece of information that's seen on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or wherever, how that new piece of information fits in with their prior schema of thinking. So if an individual already believes that black people are replacing white people in America because that lie has been told to them over and over by others, and then they see something online or in their community that fits in with that thinking, it really amplifies the belief. And we know that group thinking is far more powerful than individual thinking. So when millions of people believe that the COVID vaccine is dangerous, that must be true as the way people think, even though we all know that that's not true. So group think is very powerful in the human brain. And that makes sense because if you just think about it bio-evolutionarily, humans hung out together, and if somebody told you that some danger was lurking behind the corner, that there's a bunch of snakes or wasps or something in that tree over there, you better stay away from it. People listen to that and that fear guided humans away from danger. And there was no reason to disregard that at that point, right? But you could also find out the next day that that person was lying about the snakes and wasps, and maybe they were doing it because they wanted the fruit on the tree for themselves, right? So, that kind of critical thinking requires a little bit of more time, a little more engagement and frontal lobe activity. And I think that, I actually think people are coming around to better discerning information online. You know, I saw so many people, experts, that were pessimistic that online would ever be safe or, you know, normal for people to navigate, but I actually have hope that people through education and through their own experiences online have figured out that you shouldn't believe something just because other people believe it, even if it's a celebrity or a large number of other people believe it. So I think people have sort of slowly started to catch on to this, and that's a good thing. That's why what you're doing is so important, Dylan, that you're doing shows like this that educate the public about how the brain works, how these rabbit holes work, how extremism takes place. And that's how we, to answer your question in a long-winded fashion, that's how we stop this.

Dylan Carnahan:I appreciate you saying that. And I think something also, you had mentioned in your book, is kind of the balancing of ideas. And you've referenced kind of black and white or binary before, and about how having contrarian perspectives actually helps to diminish the possibility of having an overvalued belief. And I think, you know, social media can present a challenge with that being that you may engage with a certain ideology, therefore, you're going to get served that content more. And I think your answer to this last question provided a lot of good takeaways. But I want to explicitly ask you, what advice do you have for the average person?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:I think the average person should learn as much as they can about extreme overvalued beliefs. Obviously, I'm biased because I've written a book on this topic, but you can go to my website, science of extremism.com and learn about it. I have free articles, free information that anyone can log in to and just briefly learn about, and to look for the signs and warning signs that are in the community. And there used to be this old saying in Homeland Security, if you see something, say something. And I think we're better now at identifying what the see something is. So, the fact that these things don't happen overnight, and we're not looking for some guy drooling on a subway with schizophrenia, that's not the dangerous person. It could be the individual that you have at work with you or at school with you, or that you briefly meet in passing. And people will leak information about their fantasies to people they don't even know that well. Sirhan Sirhan did that before he attacked Robert Kennedy, leaked information about his fantasies to a sanitation worker. So, there are some things community members can just be aware of. And, you know, I think that educating yourself about extreme overvalued beliefs can create cognitive dissonance also. So, when you see binary thinking, that might be alluring to all of us, because the brain is, I think our brains are wired to do that, because large amounts of information have to be boiled down to something small, binary simplistic thinking. We all have to do that eventually. You have to do that even to buy your coffee, or how you want your steak cooked, or whether you like it well done or rare. Eventually, you've got to bring it down to a binary level and make a choice. Unfortunately, with amplified toxic, political, or other cultural aspects of the world, those things can sometimes boil into these extreme overvalued beliefs, particularly the ones that involve moral reasoning. Abortion, anything that involves a threat to your existence or culture, your religion, the Constitution, those kinds of moral grievances, we call them. And the outrage associated with it really tend to create, I think, like you said, a metaphor, a boiling pot for. For the potential for violence. So I think people should be aware of that. You know, we get into moral areas of thinking, but that is sort of a danger zone. I'm a big Kansas City Chiefs fan. So being fixated on the Chiefs is exciting for me. And if an individual collects an entire room full of Kansas City Chief memorabilia, somebody might say, well, they're obsessed with the Kansas City Chiefs. Well, they're actually not obsessed with them. They relish it. So that's technically not an obsession using the right definitions. And sports fans don't usually want to, you know, they might get into a fight at the stadium against the opponents, but they usually don't plan an attack to kill the other teams. People, you know, they don't spend months organizing a way to destroy Raiders fans or Broncos fans, you know, they don't do that. So fixations that are in this realm of moral thinking, grievances, and moral outrage tend to be more dangerous, you know, because they're treading on things that are very near and dear to people's hearts. Religion, US. Constitution, you know, there was a man who shot and killed George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, who was an abortion-performing doctor, because he believes that by killing Dr. Tiller, in his church, by the way, he walked up to Dr. Tiller in his church and shot him in the head at close range, believed that he was saving future babies, that Dr. Tiller was going to be aborting, and making in his mind him a hero of that movement. And I'm sure that a lot of anti-abortionist people thought of him as a heroic figure too, even though they would never do that themselves. So that's another aspect of extreme overvalued beliefs is people will vicariously dismiss the behavior as or minimize the behavior often. We saw that with the US Capitol attack that they were just tourists and that they weren't really minimizing their behavior basically. And so people will sometimes secretly relish the attack themselves. And so that's the important part of the group think with extreme overvalued beliefs, that if you're part of the group that believes similar to the attacker, often it will be minimized or normalized even.

Dylan Carnahan:So, that's very interesting and that's good information for everybody to be aware of. I know you alluded to a website, but I want to ask, what's the best way for people to learn more about you and the work you do?

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Yes. So my website is probably the best place, scientific extremism.com. I'm also at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. You can find me there. My last name is Rahman, R-H-M-A-N, and I'm Associate Professor of Psychiatry here at Wash U. I do research on extremism. I also treat cancer patients here at Sightman Cancer Center in St. Louis. That's my clinical job. I also teach medical students in our medical school. I teach residents that are learning about psychiatry, and I lecture at different national level forums on threat assessment and other aspects of clinical psychiatry.

Dylan Carnahan:Fantastic. I'll be sure to include a lot of the information that you've divulged in the show notes of this episode for all of our listeners. Dr. Rahman, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and time today.

Dr. Tahir Rahman:Thank you, sir. What a pleasure being on your show. Thank you for having me.

Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Rahman. We talked about cognitive drivers, how digital environments contribute to indoctrination, and the impact of binary thinking. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Dr. Rahman mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.