From words to action: Using content analysis to explore the psychological dynamics of groups that engage in terrorism.

This study explored the psychological dynamics of terrorism based on a structured comparison of the documents issued by groups that did and did not engage in terrorism. Thirteen terrorist groups with a wide range of ideologies were matched with intra-system and/or extra-system control groups that came from the same historical contexts and endorsed similar ideologies but did not engage in terrorism. A total of 180 speeches, interviews, and manifestos representing the groups' purposes and goals were content-analyzed for motive imagery, activity inhibition, and values by trained, reliable coders who were blind to the documents' origins and the study's hypotheses. Various statistical analyses explored whether terrorist and non-terrorist groups differed on variables that previously have been linked to group conflict. As hypothesized, there was evidence that terrorist groups were higher in the power motive relative to intra-system control groups and attributed higher dominance and morality values to themselves relative to both types of control group. Further, these differences were significant when analyzing the documents terrorist groups issued before launching their initial attacks, indicating that these variables may also be predictive of terrorism. Results for the affiliation motive, which has been associated with a willingness to negotiate, were surprising: While, as predicted, terrorist groups tended to be lower than intra-system controls in the affiliation motive, terrorist groups were actually higher than extra-system controls. This finding may be explained by terrorist groups' tendency to feel a strong connection with the larger groups whom they claim to defend, thus linking affiliation with violence. The data did not offer strong support for the hypotheses that relative to control groups, terrorist groups would attribute higher dominance and lower morality values to their opponents. In fact, both terrorist and control groups tended to view their opponents as high in dominance and low in morality values. Finally, with few exceptions, these findings generalized across terrorist groups ranging from the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan to Al Qaeda, providing little evidence that ethnic-nationalist, right-wing, left-wing, and religious terrorist groups differ from each other in the motives and values that distinguish them from their non-terrorist counterparts.Ph.D.CriminologyPersonality psychologyPsychologySocial SciencesSocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123952/2/3106163.pd