Unit 6.2 Flashcards
(18 cards)
Quest for significance theory
1) The motivation to engage in terrorism is the search to be meaningful and recognised as someone significant.
This quest may be activated in three ways:
1) Significant loss
2) The threat of significant loss
3) The opportunity for significant loss
Violent and nonviolent extremists
1) Radicalization does not automatically lead to extreme violence.
2) NVEs normally do not experience the same levels or variety of insignificance.
3) Dangerous, violent group memberships frequently come after exclusion from other socially important group memberships
Suicidal terrorism:
1) - Terrorists on a suicide mission believe that their death is for a just cause and that the act provides a ticket to another form of eternal life.
2) Most terrorists lack the early developmental antisocial patterns found in chronic violent criminal offenders.
3) The young persons who join terrorist groups may come from families who may even support their cause and their supreme sacrifice
Becoming a terrorist: the process of radicalization
1) You eventually stop chastising oneself for thinking violence is wrong.
2) The process involves small groups engaging in long periods of intense social interactions.
3) The individuals gradually adopt the beliefs of the extreme members in a psychological process called risky shift
Terrorist leaders
1) Leaders of terrorist organization often have some level of charisma.
2)Many are seen as profoundly significant and influential.
3) Many recruits of terrorist organizations want to attain some degree of the leader’s significance for themselves or submit themselves to powerful leaders.
Fail-safe procedure
1) Terrorists eventually have the difficult task of coping with the realization that they must kill people, most often innocent men, women, and children.
2) This can become psychologically stressful to maintain a terrorist lifestyle during the early stages of membership.
3) The organization takes part in a series of point-of-no-return rituals to ensure compliance.
Lone wolf terrorists
1) When terrorist acts are carried out by isolated small groups, they are called cells.
2)The US is especially vulnerable to lone wolf terrorists
The psychosocial context of terrorism
1) It refers to those social and psychological circumstances that encourage certain behaviours to develop and expand.
2) It is a cognitively constructed world that is sustained through the socialization process associated with each culture.
3) Culture in this sense may be as broad as an entire country or as narrow as a small group of individuals.
Cultural devaluation
1) Process that occurs when a group of culture is selected by another group or culture as a scapegoat or an ideological, or manipulative, or morally bad, or a dangerous enemy that intends to destroy society or one’s own group.
Relative Deprivation
1) There is also a promise of belonging.
2) What makes terrorist groups particularly attractive is their simplistic worldview that offers recruits a clear collective identity.
3) Terrorist groups also fill a necessary psychological void.
4) Some may join because they have moral principles that lead them to identify with those who are affected by difficult conditions or are unjustly treated.
Respect for Authority
1) Some join simply to relinquish their unfulfilled selves and submit themselves to powerful leaders and chain-of-command organizations.
2) They feel most comfortable in hierarchical social structures organized for a challenging or exciting mission
Cognitive restructuring
1) A psychological process that allows one to justify committing reprehensible actions, typically involves moral justification, euphemistic language, and advantageous comparison.
2) This is like the concept of moral disengagement, except that terrorists strive to publicise their activities rather than camouflage or neutralize them.
Moral justification
1) Enables people to engage in reprehensible conduct by telling themselves that their actions are socially worthy and have an ultimate moral and good purpose.
Euphemistic Language
1) People can display more cruelty or at least can feel better about what they are doing when their conduct is given a sanitized or neutral label.
2) They also use the term as ‘waste’ people rather than killing them.
3) Or collateral damage to innocent people who got killed during a bombing.
4) Bombing missions rereferred to as serving the target and bombers call themselves vertically deployed anti-personal devices.
Advantageous Comparison
1) Where terrorists are convinced that their way of life and fundamental cultural values are superior to those they attack.
2) This is further advanced when terrorists are told and come to believe that the enemy engages in widespread cruelties and inhumane treatment of the people the terrorist represent.
Dehumanization
1) Based on the premise that mistreating or randomly killing humanized or known persons significantly increases the risk of self-condemnation.
2) It is easier to mistreat strangers who are divested of human qualities.
3) Once dehumanized they are no longer viewed as persons with feelings, hopes, and concerns, but as subhuman forms
Displacement of responsibility
1) Terrorists may view their actions as stemming from the dictates of authorities and leaders rather than from their own personal responsibility.
2) They avoid self-condemning reactions because they are not personally responsible for their conduct.
3) Some serial killers also use this to justify their crimes
