Inside twisted minds

For a person who engages in terrorist activity like that in Boston, the immediate victims are meaningless. They’re simply a means to an end, writes Stephanie Pappas

A video of the scene from the Boston Marathon bombing showed people running toward the wounded, trying to help. A flood of support and sympathy poured out all across the internet. And Bostonians rushed to donate blood and offer spare bedrooms to those displaced by the blast.

Even though a human or humans caused the carnage at the finish line, such acts of kindness, as well as a sense of empathy, are actually hard to overcome — even for the terrorists, psychologists say.

“A whole industry of propaganda is aimed” at convincing potential terrorists that their intended victims are worthy of death, said Arie Kruglanski, a psychologist at the University of Maryland who has researched the roots of terrorism.

“Part of the ideological persuasion to get them to do these things is to reduce the humanity of the victims,” said Kruglanski. “So the victims are perceived not as other human beings, but rather as vermin, as subhuman creatures.”

Two bombs — stuffed with metal shards, ball bearings, and headless nails as shrapnel — exploded on Monday just before 3pm EDT near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. At least 176 people were wounded, and three killed, from the blast. Among the fatalities was eight-year-old Martin Richard. Martin’s mother and sister were seriously wounded.

Terrorists do not fit into a simple mould, said John Horgan, director of the International Centre for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University. “There’s no profile, there’s no personality, there’s no checklist and there is no silver-bullet solution that helps explain why and how people become involved in terrorism,” said Horgan.

However, there may be some common psychology necessary to carry out such an act, Kruglanski said.

“The underlying motivation is what we call a ‘quest for personal significance’,” he said. “They try to do something important, either because they feel insignificant on their own... they were humiliated in some way, or their group was denigrated.”

While some people respond to feelings of powerlessness and insignificance by turning to humanitarian aims — becoming a peace activist, for example — would-be terrorists draw on violent ideologies. Violence is a quick shortcut to feelings of significance.

“Violence enjoys this very clear advantage that, by striking, by shooting, by exploding a device, a very simple action immediately makes you out to be a significant, heroic kind of person,” Kruglanski said.

In this worldview, the innocent victims of a bomb are subhuman, at worst, and incidental, at best. Timothy McVeigh, whose 1995 bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City killed 168, famously described the 19 children who died in the blast as “collateral damage”.

“For a person who engages in this kind of activity, the immediate victims are meaningless. They’re simply a means to an end,” Horgan said.

It’s hard work maintaining that belief. Horgan, who has interviewed nearly 200 terrorists around the world, said some eventually come to feel remorse for the innocent lives they have taken. But, especially in the moment, many “work very hard to convince themselves that what they’ve done is righteous”.

However, though stories of violence may dominate the news, there’s good scientific evidence to suggest humans are wired to care for others. By early childhood, children take it upon themselves to be helpful, for example. Even 6- and 10-month-olds prefer helpful characters over mean ones, studies suggest. As adults, we quite literally feel others’ pain. A study published in January in the journal, Molecular Psychology, found that when doctors see their patients in pain, the pain-processing regions in their own brains activate.

It’s easiest for terrorists to reduce their guilt when they choose a method such as bombing, so they don’t have to be nearby to see the damage they’ve done, Horgan said.

Although it is a major goal of both the US and the UN, terrorism is hard to pre-empt, because terrorists don’t fit one demographic profile, Kruglanski said. Radicals tend to speak their minds, making them easy enough to identify in the community, Kruglanski said, though not all of those radicals would ever turn to terrorism in any case. Detention centres and prisons also run deradicalisation programmes for suspected and convicted terrorists.

Typically, these programmes run along two lines, direct and indirect, Kruglanski said. A direct approach would be to confront the terrorist’s belief system. In the case of an Islamic terrorist, for example, clerics might explain how fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran are flawed.

This “dialogue” approach can work, Kruglanski said, but not for terrorists, who are very firm in their beliefs, or for leaders who don’t appreciate criticism of their interpretations. In these cases, an indirect approach can sometimes help. The goal of these programmes is to give a radicalised individual something else to live for, whether a vocation, art or even spiritual practices, such as yoga, Kruglanski said.

“It directs their attention from these collectivistic goals and on to their individualistic lives,” he said.

Measuring whether you’ve prevented someone from participating in terrorism in the future is a difficult task, Horgan said, but it’s important to remember that, even among radicals, most people won’t resort to violence — though terrorists rely on the randomness of their acts to make civilians feel like they or their loved ones could be next.

“The way in which we’re talking about the nature of the threat, the way in which we talk about this as some sort of existential problem, I think we need to be very, very careful to avoid that,” Horgan said. “The fact of the matter is, this is a very low-probability event. We should never, ever lose sight of that.”