12/08/2022
The most well-known terrorist training organization is the military.
• There is no “terrorist personality”, nor is there any accurate profile – psychologically or otherwise – of the terrorist. • Histories of childhood abuse and trauma and themes of perceived injustice and humiliation often are prominent in terrorist biographies, but do not really help to explain terrorism. • Terrorist ideologies tend to provide a set of beliefs that justify and mandate certain behaviors. Those beliefs are regarded as absolute, and the behaviors are seen as serving a meaningful cause. Terrorist groups, like all social collectives, have certain internal (e.g., mistrust, competition) and external (e.g. support, inter-group conflict) vulnerabilities to their existence. Effective leaders of terrorist organizations must be able to: maintain a collective belief system; establish and maintain organizational routines; control the flow of communication; manipulate incentives (and purposive goals) for followers; deflect conflict to external targets; and keep action going. Social learning theory is a simple extension of this basic idea, suggesting that behavior (e.g., aggression) is learned not only through one’s direct experience, but also through observation of how such contingencies occur in one’s environment. Some have referred to this as vicarious learning. In this model, aggression is viewed as learned behavior. Accordingly, it is argued that through observation we learn consequences for the behavior, how to do it, to whom it should be directed, what provocation justifies it, and when it is appropriate. “If aggression is a learned behavior, then terrorism, a specific type of aggressive behavior, can also be learned” (Oots & Wiegele, 1985, p. 1110
