Psychological Operations and their Impact on Civil Unrest

Violent actions in civil centers are often emotionally charged and lack logical orientation. Although they are often short-lived, they have intense psychological and political impacts. This article is aimed at analyzing the role of psychological operations in controlling the protest actions and violent gatherings. This is an applied research work and the method is survey. Developing a number of hypotheses and testing them among the commanders and the staff of the Law Enforcement Force of the Grand Tehran (the first group) and the experts familiar with psychological operations and civil unrest (the second group), 350 and 30 subjects were selected from among them, respectively. Then, their views on various functions of psychological operations, the effectiveness of different methods of containing and controlling protest gatherings were assessed using a measurement scale with a reliability index of 0.8480. The results revealed that, from the viewpoint of experts, the commanders and staff of the Law Enforcement Force, protest actions and gatherings can be contained using systematic and predevised psychological operations. Meanwhile, it was observed that the views of the groups on the effectiveness of psychological operations in controlling protest gatherings were significantly different.