The Terrorist Personality Trait You Might Have

According to a new study published by the Association of Psychological Science, terrorists become suicide bombers because they have a “fused” personality type. Supposedly, people with “fused” personalities have a bond much stronger than just simple group identification with their group and are willing to take extreme action to protect that group, including sacrificing themselves for the group. The researchers use this “newly discovered” personality type to explain why terrorists are willing to become suicide bombers. I guess it’s easier to blame terrorism on a personality type which differs “them” from “us” than to focus on what really makes someone willing to commit a terrorist act, like not having basic human needs met for example. Before terrorists became terrorists, they were just like you and me. So let’s focus on what would make your and my personality type become a terrorist. 

Assuming Terrorists Are Different

Unlike most other psychology studies I read about, this one documents the researcher’s thought process in initiating their research:

Psychological scientist William B. Swann, Jr., of the University of Texas, came up with the concept of identity fusion when talking with a graduate student and a Spanish colleague about terrorism. “We started talking about terrorists and what can cause somebody to engage in terrorism. We all came up with the same idea: That there is something really unique about terrorists and other extremists that goes beyond simple identification.”

In other words, the researchers already decided that terrorists were unique before they even started the study.

Predicting Drastic Actions While Sitting In A Comfortable Chair

To test this concept, Swann had Spanish participant identify how they saw themselves in relation with Spain by overlapping two circles (one representing themselves and one representing Spain). Participants who placed their circle inside of the Spain circle were considered “fused”. Swann then had participants identify how they would react in certain deadly situations. For example, if a runnaway train is a about to kill 5 Spaniards, would you jump onto the train tracks to save them? Or, on the day of the Madrid bombing, a martyr is about to jump in front of the train to kill himself and the bomber before the bombing takes place, what would you do?

Swann found that those who were “fused” with Spain were more likely to state that they would jump on the train tracks to save 5 Spaniards, and even for a group of some Europeans that includes Spaniards, but not for Americans (even though the Spaniards did not have any anti-American feelings). Most interestingly, the “fused” Spaniards were more likely to state that, in the second scenario of the Madrid bombings, they would jump in front of the martyr to kill themselves and the bomber (saving the martyr and everybody else).

Now, these are very interesting results. However, first of all, saying that you would kill yourself for others in this type of situation is not nearly equivalent to the action of killing yourself. I would imagine that you have very different feelings and emotions when you are actually in a situation (versus imagining it) of where you have the choice of killing yourself to help others. The “fused” Spaniards in this study are not in a battlefield defending Spain – they are comfortably going about their daily lives and not hurting anybody (there must have been someone they met in their lives who said something bad about Spain but they are not in jail for hurting that person). Terrorists, on the other hand, are actively going out and killing their perceived enemies.

You Would Be Willing To Hurt Too

Instead of philosophizing about how much of a martyr we would be in a given situation, let’s look at recent history. Hitler convinced an entire nation that Jews must be killed by creating a “fused” identity of Aryan race in Germans who were suffering from a bad economic depression following World War I. He even convinced way too many Germans to torture and kill Jews for no good reason – keep in mind that these Germans weren’t even killing to save other Germans (as in Swann’s scenarios), they were just killing Jews because they were Jews.

In 1961, just as Swann is currently assuming that terrorists are unique and that there is something fundamentally different about them that causes them to commit a suicide bombing (in this case, their personality), Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram assumed that there was something different about the Germans who were willing to kill Jews (he thought it was their sense of morality). To test his assumption, in a world-famous experiment, Milgram asked participants to deliver increasingly painful electric shocks to a perceived person in the other room every time that person answered a question wrong. If the participant showed hesitation (as the person in the other room “screamed” in pain with increasing electric shocks), the experimenter simply told the participant to continue.

The results shocked Milgrim and the world. Sixty-five percent of participants went all the way to administrating 450-volts of shock to who they believed was another person, just because the experimenter told them to do so! You can watch a demonstration of the experiment below. Keep in mind that unlike Swann, Milgrim’s participants actually took the action of hurting another person (do you think any of the participants would have said they would hurt somebody else if they were just asked instead?).

Humanizing Terrorists And Winning

Now, going back to Swann’s original question – what causes somebody to engage in terrorism? The answer to this question comes from reframing the question to the following: What causes a human being to engage in terrorism? If you promise to fully provide for the family of a devastatingly poor person who has nothing to live for if they killed themselves and a few others, that might drive them to commit terrorism, especially if they go to a better place themselves (who can refuse 72 virgins?). Of course not all terrorists are poor, and some, like Osama Bin Laden, come from very rich backgrounds. Like I said before, I don’t know what goes on in the mind of a suicide bomber, but I do believe the drive to commit the horrible act does come from our human nature. To clarify, I’m not here to defend terrorism. There is nothing that can justify it. However, I do believe that terrorists are humans that are driven to terrorism through simple human needs.

If anything, Milgrim’s experiments showed that we are all human and there are ways to convince us to hurt others – it could be as easy as an authority figure telling us to do it! What causes terrorism is a complicated question, and I do not have the answer. But I do know that the answer lies in assuming that terrorists are just like everybody else first, and that there is something simply human that drives them to become terrorists. If we spend our time approaching the research by assuming that terrorists are in some way different, then we will not find the underlying cause.

This type of thinking is what led us to go to war, devastating the people in Iraq and Afghanistan and further fueling the terrorist movement (we just gave them more reasons to “fuse” with their group if you do agree with Swann’s analysis). Instead, if we focus on finding and providing the basic human needs that terrorism fulfills for these individuals, we might have a chance of winning.

Article image via hubpages.