If there’s one thing psychologists know, it’s that they can’t predict human behavior with certainty.

That’s a scary notion when it comes to terrorism and efforts to prevent it, but it was a consensus reached by researchers attending a conference Monday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“Uncertainty is at the core of all of this,” said Stephen Hart, a forensic psychologist from Simon Fraser University.

But all is not lost, he said.

“At the very least, we can understand the uncertainty and the sources of it.”

Security and terrorism scholars from across the country are taking part in the UNL Conference on Terrorism and Security in the Modern World, which runs through Wednesday and is hosted by the UNL Department of Psychology and the College of Law.

The conference features speakers from UNL, the U.S. Strategic Command, University of South Florida, Simon Fraser and other institutions.

On Monday, much of the discussion focused on how threat assessors can identify potential terrorists. To do so, assessors first must examine the social and political environments in which they live, Hart said.

“There’s always a social context to violence,” he said.

For example, to understand the actions of Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea, an assessor would need to examine the influence on him of the North Korean military, Hart said.

It’s also important to understand that violent Islamic extremists are not the only terrorist groups, he said. Youth gangs and even organized crime organizations can be considered terrorist groups, he said.

An organization’s beliefs don’t determine whether it’s a terrorist group, but its commitment to violent activity to alter government policy does, he said. He said the Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terrorist organization once responsible for killing nearly 4,000 people in the United States.

“We tend to forget about groups like that,” Hart said.

Members of groups with extremist ideologies aren’t necessarily going to commit terrorist acts, he said, but someone who has a strong commitment to a group that is dedicated to violent activity might be a threat.

In addition, people who aren’t very ideological have been known to commit terroristic acts on behalf of violent organizations.

“Groups can exert a tremendous influence on people’s behavior,” Hart said.

He said assessors must consider such risk factors as past victimization, violent history, level of commitment to violent organizations and the group’s social status and perceived sense of injustice.

With so many imprisoned terrorists being released around the world, assessors will need to understand the potential for a return to terroristic activity to offer recommendations to courts about whether to set them free, Hart said.

“It’s a big problem now, and it’s only going to get bigger,” he said.

Randy Borum, professor of strategy and information analysis at the University of South Florida, said it would  be important for assessors to lean on a variety of analytical tools to identify potential terrorists. However, they also must be willing to use their  professional judgment -- which comes from careers spent identifying potential threats -- to decide whether a person might commit a violent act, he said.

“People can become involved in terrorism in a variety of ways, and those ways evolve over time,” he said. “This is far from a perfect science.”