Welcome back. In this lecture, I want to move our discussion of aggression from general principles to a specific type of aggression: terrorism. This is a topic that evokes very strong feelings and strong opinions for many people, so I hope that you use the discussion forums to share what you think, openly but respectfully. Speaking personally, I have several indirect connections to tragedies involving terrorism, including a former colleague whose husband was killed in a terrorist bombing soon after they were married, and a student whose father died in the September 11th attacks in 2001. In many ways, the world became a different place after the September 11th attacks, and the magnitude of this change is clear not only from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global efforts to fight terrorism, but in research on the psychology of terrorism. Here's a graph showing the number of articles on terrorism contained in PsycINFO, the world's largest database of psychological research, and what you can see is that psychological research on terrorism was fairly minimal until 2001, at which point there was a tremendous increase in research activity. During this video I'd like to share what this new body of research— as well as political science research— has to say about the psychology of terrorism. Specifically, here are the questions I'd like to address: First, what is terrorism. How is it defined? Second, what type of people become terrorists? Are these people lunatics? Is there such a thing as a terrorist personality? What causes terrorism? And perhaps most importantly, how can terrorism be reduced? So let's turn to the first question, on what terrorism is— how it's typically defined. The word "terror" was first used to refer to political violence during the French Revolution of the 1790s when the revolutionaries created a "reign of terror." In modern times, there's no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but the U.S. State Department's definition, which is one of the most widely used, is "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets (that is, citizens, schools, hospitals, and so forth) by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." Because so much of the research since 2001 concerns Middle Eastern terrorism and al Qaeda, let me also define three other key terms: Arab, the Arab world, and Muslim. The term "Arab" is an ethnic label that refers to a cultural group united by history and the Arabic language. Most Arabs are Muslim, but there are also millions of Christian Arabs and thousands of Jewish Arabs. When people talk about the Arab world, they're usually referring to twenty-some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, including Egypt, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq— but not Iran, where the primary language is Farsi rather than Arabic. All told, there are approximately 300 million Arabs in the world. That's a lot of people, but it's only a sixth of the world's total Muslim population— that is, believers in Islam. Muslims are estimated to comprise 1.8 billion people. That's roughly a quarter of the world's population. Terms such as "Arab," "the Arab world," and "Muslim" are central to understanding not only the psychology of Middle Eastern terrorism, but the War on Terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, even though former U.S. President George W. Bush referred to Saddam Hussein as an ally of al Qaeda, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission later concluded that "Bin Laden had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan and sought to attract them into his Islamic army." Weeks before the Iraq war, Bin Laden reportedly warned Muslims who opposed the United States that "The fighting should be in the name of God only, not in the name of national ideologies nor to seek victory for the ignorant governments that rule all Arab states, including Iraq." This, then, is where it becomes critical to understand the difference between terms like "Muslim" and "Arab," because a good case can be made that in response to al Qaeda attacking the United States on September 11th, the United States waged war against an adversary of al Qaeda—not an ally. And this decision to wage war in turn raises another question, which is whether large scale military responses are effective as a way to fight terrorism—a topic that we'll return to in just a few minutes. But first, I want to consider the question of who's most likely to become a terrorist in the first place. We've all heard theories that terrorists are crazy, paranoid, or ruthless psychopaths who are indifferent to the suffering of others. For example, a year after the September 11th attacks, the mayor of New York called terrorists "madmen," and a member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee said that they weren't "rational." From a clinical point of view, though, there's no evidence that terrorists tend to be irrational, psychotic, or psychopaths. After all, a mentally unbalanced terrorist would present a security risk to the other terrorists in the group, because terrorists need to operate in secrecy. So, terrorist groups generally tend to look for highly reliable team players and screen out unstable individuals. After reviewing the evidence, one leading expert on the psychology of terrorism put it this way: "The outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality." Their normality? I still remember being surprised when I first read this, but many other researchers have come to the same conclusion. So, if terrorists aren't pathological lunatics, who are these "normal people"? Well, most terrorists are males in their teens and twenties— the same population that's most likely to commit violent crime in general. For example, all of the terrorists on September 11th were male, all but one were in their 20s, and most were between the ages of 20 and 23. There have certainly been cases of terrorists who are younger, older, or female, but that's the exception rather than the rule. And in the case of suicide attacks, terrorists also tend to be unmarried. Other than that, there aren't many demographic or psychological differences between terrorists and non-terrorists. So, let's dig deeper and focus specifically on suicide bombers. I'll give you a pop-up question listing several characteristics, and you take a guess which ones are associated with suicide bombers— that is, more likely to be found among suicide bombers than people their age living in the same area. Then I'll share with you what the research record shows. The image that many people have of suicide bombers is that they're religious fanatics, but research shows that before they're recruited, suicide bombers don't tend to be more religious than other people living in their area. Likewise, they're not more likely to be unemployed, fatherless, or friendless. The one psychological area in which terrorists do seem to differ from other people is that they tend to be angry. One of the most common motivations for joining a terrorist organization is a desire for revenge, for retribution, to fight a perceived injustice, or respond to a humiliation. For example, many terrorists report that violent acts by the police, soldiers, and others, are what led them to join a terrorist organization. After September 11th, the National Research Council issued a report entitled "Terrorism: Perspectives from the Behavioral and Social Sciences," and here's what the report concluded: "There is no single or typical mentality— much less a specific pathology—of terrorists. However, terrorists apparently find significant gratification in the expression of generalized rage." So, if rage is a better explanation than psychopathology, what are terrorists so outraged about that they're willing to kill? That is, what are the root causes of terrorism? Here, too, researchers have examined a number of potential factors, including political repression, poverty, lack of education, and so forth. Let's consider some of these factors. First, if it's repression, you'd expect to see terrorism with dictatorships (Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and so on), but relatively little terrorism occurs under dictatorships, in part because these regimes can crush terrorism by using unlimited force. Well, if it's not political repression, then what about poverty as a cause of terrorism? Here, too, the evidence just isn't there. Traditionally, the countries designated by the United Nations as least developed have had less terrorism than other countries. And of course, many designated as developed, including the United States and various European countries, have experienced a number of terrorist attacks. Now, of course, even if terrorism isn't directly related to poverty, it still might be a function of socioeconomic status—that is, it might be a combination of poverty and lack of education. Once again, though, the evidence suggests otherwise. For example, research has found that Palestinian suicide bombers have lower rates of poverty and higher rates of formal education than other Palestinians in the same age bracket. And all of the September 11th suicide terrorists came from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds. So, terrorism isn't limited to any particular socioeconomic class. Where does this leave us? The answer is that there doesn't seem to be any general cause of terrorism, but rather, many specific causes— just as there are many specific causes of murder. Here's how one terrorism researcher described it: "The endeavor to find a 'general theory' of terrorism, one overall explanation of its roots, is a futile and misguided enterprise. The motives of the Russian revolutionaries of 1881 have as much to do with al Qa'ida and the various Jihads as does the terrorism of Oklahoma City with Peru's Shining Path or the Colombian revolutionaries and drug dealers." Of course, this doesn't mean that there are no patterns within particular regions or directed at particular countries. When it comes to International terrorism directed at the United States, for example, researchers have reported at least one cause that's been implicated in a number of attacks. That cause is American military, financial, and political support for unpopular regimes. In many cases anti-American terrorists are trying to drive the United States out of a geographic area or to get it to end its support for a regime; retaliate in response to U.S. policies and actions (including, by extension, American-backed actions of the regime's police and soldiers); restore a sense of honor, status, or control; or any combination of these objectives. In light of these motivations, the trillion dollar question— literally—is how to reduce terrorism. Since 2001, the United States and its allies have mounted a large-scale military response: waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan; conducting hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere; holding suspected terrorists as prisoners in Guantanamo Bay; and so forth. Has this strategy succeeded? Well, if the goal is to capture or kill specific terrorist leaders, the strategy has been fairly effective. For instance, in December of 2011, President Obama reported that 22 out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders had been killed. Or, to take another example, of the 21 suspected terrorists indicted for the 1998 US Embassy bombings, 17 have been caught or killed. On the other hand, if the main goal of the War on Terror is to reduce terrorism, the best available evidence from terrorism experts who've looked carefully at the historical record, is that military responses tend to have either no effect or tend to temporarily increase the level of terrorism, and that's certainly been the case over the last 10 or 12 years. For example, before the Iraq war there had not been a single documented case of suicide terrorism in Iraq—not one case. But a 2011 study published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, found that after the war began, there were over 1,000 suicide bombings injuring over 30,000 Iraqi civilians and killing another 12,000, including more than 500 children. Similarly, suicide attacks were virtually unheard of in Afghanistan before the war began in 2001, but since 2009, they average roughly three per week. Using the global terrorism database maintained at the University of Maryland, you can see the increase in terrorist incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan between 1970 and 2010. So, here we are at the Global Terrorism Database website, and we can zoom in a bit and then click on Data Rivers, which is an interactive tool. We'll click on the chart again to start it up, and then we can type in any country of interest. So, we'll type in "Afghanistan," and what you can see is just a tremendous increase in terrorist activity beginning in 2001. Or we can type in "Iraq." And what you see is much the same story. In fact, it's even more extreme, because it's over 1,100 incidents. According to an organization morbidly called "Iraq Body Count," which counts Iraqi deaths documented in the media or by the U.S. government (in other words, almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the wartime death toll), there have been more than 122,000 Iraqi civilian deaths due to violence since the war there began in 2003. To put this number in perspective, roughly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11th attacks, roughly 40,000 died when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and roughly 140,000 died when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima—tragedies almost unimaginable in size. Now, I've been talking about the increase in terrorism within Iraq and within Afghanistan, but I should also add that since 2003, when the Iraq War began, there's been an increase in terrorism worldwide. In 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that there had been 190 terrorist incidents worldwide in 2003. But in response to criticism that it was covering up an increase in terrorism, the State Department changed the way that it measured terrorism, and reported in 2005 that there had been 651 incidents in 2004. Then it changed the methodology again, and reported over 11,000 incidents in 2005—a figure that didn't change much between 2005 and 2011. Likewise, here's a chart published by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, showing 27 terrorist plots against the United States, and as you can see, the number of plots increased over the decade following 9/11, not decreased. Here's what the report said: "Unfortunately, the appeal of the al Qaeda narrative has not diminished, and issues, like the war in Iraq, the United States and NATO presence in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, serve to inflame and, perhaps, radicalize those sympathetic to al Qaeda's ideology." The moral of the story is that if terrorists are angry young men, then military strikes are probably not going to stop them and may make matters worse rather than better. So, the sooner that we take into account the psychological issues involved, based on sound research about what works to reduce terrorism and what doesn't—rather than stereotypes about crazy terrorists— the safer all of us will be, whether we're talking about al Qaeda or any other sort of terrorism. Well, if war isn't the answer, what is? In the long run, education and socialization are critical so that the next generation doesn't see other groups as the enemy and violence as the solution. But there are also steps that can help in the short run. First, we can fortify self-protective security measures, which often works well and has the virtue of not being provocative. Second, we can improve information sharing among governments, branches of government, and intelligence organizations, as the 9/11 report advocated. Third, we can work to build strong alliances, including alliances with moderate, political, and religious leaders in countries that do harbor terrorists. Fourth, wealthy countries like the United States can export medicine and medical technologies rather than weapons. Personally, I think this is not only the right thing to do, but one of the most effective things that can be done to reduce conflict, because there's no faster way to generate goodwill than to save the life of someone's child, or parent, or friend. If thanks to medical technology someone's eyesight is restored, or limbs don't have to be amputated, or a child's life is saved, it's very dissonance arousing to hate the country that helped. And finally, find ways to take the third side. What's the third side? That's the topic of our next video.
