Living with terrorism or withdrawing in terror: Perceived control and consumer avoidance

Terror attacks targeting civilians are becoming more frequent and affecting more places around the globe. Given the increasing intensity of terrorism and the threat of terrorism, consumer behavioral manifestations may occur. We conducted three studies with diverse methodologies and populations to explore how concerns with terrorism affect individuals' behavior. Two studies were conducted in Israel, a Western country that in the last decade experienced frequent terror attacks targeted at civilians. Results show that concerns with frequent terrorism increase people's desire for control and may lead to avoidant behaviors. The extent of the avoidance response depends on consumers' perceptions of whether they have some control over the odds of becoming a casualty should a terror attack occur. When individuals perceive their control to be low (but not high), they exhibit more avoidant behavior, changing their preferences and consumptions. We further find that individuals' general desire for control increases when they are primed with terrorist activities compared with general mortality. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Misreading Islamist Terrorism: The "War Against Terrorism" and Just-War Theory

Abstract: The Bush administration's military war on terrorism is a blunt, ineffective, and unjust response to the threat posed to innocent civilians by terrorism. Decentralized terrorist networks can only be effectively fought by international cooperation among police and intelligence agencies representing diverse nation‐states, including ones with predominantly Islamic populations. The Bush administration's allegations of a global Islamist terrorist threat to the national interests of the United States misread the decentralized and complex nature of Islamist politics. Undoubtedly there exists a “combat fundamentalist” element within Islamism. But the threat posed to U.S. citizens by Islamist terrorism neither necessitates nor justifies as a response massive military invasions of other nations. Not only does the Bush administration's war on alleged “terrorist states” violate the doctrine of just war, but in addition these wars arise from a new, unilateral, imperial foreign‐policy doctrine of “preventive wars.” Such a doctrine will isolate the United States from international institutions and long‐standing allies. The weakening of these institutions and alliances will only weaken the ability of the international community to deter terrorism.     

Epistemic Justice and Democratic Legitimacy

The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy.     

The obedience–disobedience dynamic and the role of responsibility

Obedience has been thoroughly studied in social psychology, both in its positive and negative aspects. Nevertheless, in these empirical studies disobedience has been considered to be the opposite of obedience and indeed its negation. Instead, some recent studies suggest that if obedience to authority is important in ensuring the continuity of social and group life, disobedience is crucial, under some circumstances, in stopping the authority relationship from degenerating into an authoritarian relationship. In this perspective, disobedience may be conceived of as a protest undermining the legitimacy of authority, or else it can represent an instrument of the community for controlling the legitimacy of the authority's demands, becoming a factor safeguarding against authoritarianism. The aim of the present study was to empirically verify the dynamics existing between disobedience and obedience. The results show that people who attach importance to both obedience and disobedience in the relationship between the individual and society recognize the importance of democratic values and consider themselves responsible for the defence of human rights. Instead, people who only recognize the value of obedience and consider disobedience as a threat to the status quo are more authoritarian, individualistic people. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Realism,morality, and liberal democracy

Conclusions The picture of liberal democratic realism that we have presented can withstand a powerful set of criticisms that have emerged in the last two decades. We have argued that realism does not misconstrue the value of the state, it does not justify the ruthless suppression of every domestic threat that could face the state, it does not depend upon a conception of international politics that rules out moral constraints, and it does not misunderstand the relationship between self-interest and morality. The defense of liberal democratic reason of state depends upon the state protecting and securing the values and welfare of individuals and groups living within its domain. Realism cannot be justified if the state has lost its legitimacy.This version of realism, however, generates its own distinctive problems. The most significant of these is that it does not offer a clean, unambiguous solution to the problems raised by the survival of the liberal democratic regime. Unlike extreme realist or idealist conceptions of the role of morality in international relations, we have argued that for the liberal democratic state this problem cannot be settled without moral remainders. On this account, realism presents leaders with a moral dilemma that is theoretically unresolvable. But this is not a failure of realism. Indeed, it is an acknowledgement that the liberal democratic state can be seen as no more, and no less, than a necessary condition of value.     

The Primary Care Health System as a Core Resource in Response to Terrorism

Abstract

Living through a terrorist event or under threat of attack affects both mental and physical health. A nation's primary care system plays a critical role under such circumstances. This article reviews the American experience after September 11, 2001 and advocates for integration of mental and physical health services in primary care settings as a key counter-terrorism strategy. Americans put their trust in primary care providers. The nation's healthcare system must develop and implement a strategy that informs and supports primary care providers in meeting the mental health needs of a nation confronted by terrorism.     

The pivotal role of perceived emotional synchrony in the context of terrorism: Challenges and lessons learned from the March 2016 attack in Belgium

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York City, terrorism has become one of the most distressing large‐scale societal threats. The March 22, 2016 terrorist attack in Brussels, the capital of Belgium undermined the collective sense of perceived security and social cohesion. The present research investigates Belgian civilians’ (N = 202) terrorist threat perception, personal emotions, and the role of perceived emotional synchrony in the construction of the perceived socioemotional climate in Belgium. The main purpose of the current study was to examine the role of perceived emotional synchrony emerging in collective gatherings as a regulatory mechanism improving the perceived socioemotional climate of the country. Additionally, the precise components (personal vs. collective) shaping the perceptions of terrorist threat were also examined. This study was conducted by a questionnaire during the collective gatherings in Brussels 1 week after the terrorist attack. The main results suggest that the terrorist threat has been perceived at the collective level rather than at the personal level. Furthermore, the perceived emotional synchrony with others mediated specifically the relationship between positive personal emotions and the perceived positive socioemotional climate in Belgium. Such findings point to the importance of considering the perceived emotional synchrony in order to provide a better understanding of lay people's psychosocial responses to terrorism and the subsequent construction of collective macro‐social phenomena in post‐terrorist contexts.     

Targets and tactics: The analysis of moment-to-moment decision making in animal combat

Even though injury and death are more common consequences of fighting among animals than once believed, they are still relatively infrequent. Modern evolutionary models of animal combat have emphasized that given the threat of retaliation, animals only escalate to more injurious fighting if the benefits outweigh the costs, and then only if threat and bluff fail to achieve the goal. Such models stress the role of communication as to whether animals decide to escalate or not. An alternative view is that failure to produce injury or death arises from the neutralization of one animal's attack by another's defense. That is, attack and defense end in a stalemate that may be misinterpreted by outside observers as an absence of injury producing behavior. As attack typically involves the biting or striking of specific body targets, movements and postures occurring during combat need to be analyzed with respect to their role in gaining or averting such contact. For example, in the combat of muroid rodents the attacker targets the lower dorsum and flanks (low threshold) or face (high threshold), whereas a defender may defensively launch counterstrikes against the attacker's face. Two combat tactics (supine defense and lateral attack) typically present in the fighting of muroid rodents are analyzed in detail to illustrate how targets constrain the movements of combatants. Such a functional analysis of combat assumes that the movements and postures performed are related to their role in the attack and defense of targets. Deviations from such a strict functional interpretation reveal some of the other factors that may constrain the combatants' behavior. For example, body morphology and the aggressiveness of the opponent are shown to be important in deciding the type of combat tactic to use and how it is performed. Finally, movements and postures that are neutral or even counterproductive for attack and defense may be revealed as communicatory. This approach provides a means of analyzing behavior during the "heat of combat" that is typically not dealt with in traditional evolutionary models. Aggr. Behav. 23:107–129, 1997.© 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Media exposure to terrorism and people's risk perception: The role of environmental sensitivity and psychophysiological response to stress

Terrorist attacks have a destabilizing impact on the general population, causing distress and fear. However, not all individuals are equally susceptible to the effects of terror threat. This study aimed to examine whether exposure to terrorism-related pictures interacted with individual differences in environmental sensitivity and psychophysiological response to stress to explain people's risk perception, operationalized as perceived likelihood of a terrorist attack and willingness to trade off one's privacy to increase national security. Ninety-five university students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (terrorism-related vs. neutral pictures). After watching the pictures, they answered questions concerning risk perception and completed questionnaires. Stress was induced by the Mannheim Multicomponent Stress Test, during which heart rate was recorded. Results showed that the perceived likelihood of future attacks was affected by the interaction between exposure to terrorism pictures and psychophysiological reactivity to stress, whereas willingness to trade off one's privacy to improve national security was influenced by the interaction between exposure to terrorism pictures and environmental sensitivity. The study suggests that individuals high in sensitivity and psychophysiological stress reactivity are particularly affected by terrorism-related pictures. Psychologists should direct their efforts to raise general awareness of the negative effects, especially for some people, of such media coverage.     

An investigation of an Expanded Encapsulate Model of Social Identity in Collective Action (EMSICA) including perception of threat and intergroup contact to understand support for Islamist terrorism in Indonesia

Although there have been many empirical studies of terrorism within the psychology literature, relatively few studies have theorized terrorism from the perspective of collective action theory. The present study aimed to understand factors that predict support for Islamist terrorism by using the Encapsulate Model of Social Identity in Collective Action (EMSICA) perspective. To extend previous studies, we added perception of threat and intergroup contact to the model. A correlational study using 66 terrorism detainees in Indonesia as participants found solid support for our expanded EMSICA. The models extending EMSICA with perception of threat and quantity of contact as predictors had improved fit indices and explained more variance in the dependent variable support for Islamist terrorism, as compared to the standard model. Social identity had a significant direct effect on support for Islamist terrorism and mediated the effect of intergroup contact, perception of threat, perceived injustice, and group efficacy on support for Islamist terrorism.     

Compulsory Vaccination and Nozickian Rights

This article examines compulsory vaccination from the perspective of Nozick's theory of rights. It argues that the unvaccinated are a threat, even if unintended, to the rights of others. The reasons Nozick provides for when such threats may be forcibly prevented, such as the identifiability of the rights violator, general fear of the risky activity, probability of harm, and the general benefits of the activity, are examined, and it is argued that those reasons weigh in favour of prohibition of the threat and hence in favour of compulsory vaccination. It is also argued that anyone opposed to compulsory vaccination on Nozickian grounds faces a dilemma: if they reject compulsory vaccination, they also risk rejecting the very foundations of the legitimacy of the state.     

A Multi‐Method,Multi‐Hazard Approach to Explore the Uniqueness of Terrorism Risk Perceptions and Worry1

Developing ways to manage terrorism effectively requires a better understanding of how the public perceives this threat. In the present study, Canadians' perceptions of terrorism risk and 4 other hazards were assessed using a word‐association technique and rating scales reflecting key cognitive dimensions of risk (threat, uncertainty, control) and worry reactions. Data were collected in a national telephone survey. Canadians perceived terrorism as posing a lower threat, as more uncertain, and as less controllable, compared to the other hazards. Positive associations of perceived threat and of perceived uncertainty with worry about terrorism were observed. However, perceived control was unexpectedly positively associated with worry about terrorism. The findings also suggest that additional social contextual factors should be examined in future research.     

Can public virtues be global?

ABSTRACT

An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one's scope of obligation is circumscribed by one's community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community.     

Ethical social justice: Do the ends justify the means?

This article offers an ethical decision‐making model, informed by community psychology values, as a means for guiding psychologists when engaging in social justice‐oriented work. The applicability of this model is demonstrated through a case analysis elucidating how America's psychologists individually and collectively arrived at the decision to endorse torture—ostensibly as a means for preventing terrorism. Critics have wondered how the American Psychological Association succumbed to these involvements, and how to prevent such ethical lapses in the future. Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association's ethical codes fail to provide explicit guidance for psychologists' involvement in social justice work that impacts communities and systems. To address this gap, we present a values‐driven, ethical decision‐making framework that may be used to guide psychologists' future practices. This framework infuses fundamental community psychology values (i.e., caring and compassion; health; self‐determination and participation, human diversity, social justice; and critical reflexivity) into a 9‐step model.     

Diversity and the Imagined Community: Immigrant Diversity and Conceptions of National Identity

As immigrant diversity increases across most developed democracies, there is an increasing concern that perceived threats to mainstream interests (both cultural and economic) will produce an ethnocentric response. This study approaches the question using survey measures that explicitly tap respondents' normative conception of membership in the national community. Based on cross‐sectional and over‐time analysis of the ISSP's “National Identity Module,” it shows that more immigrant‐exclusive definitions of the national ingroup are linked to both contextual and individual measures of cultural threat. Perceived economic threat at the individual level is also powerfully linked to this outcome, but contextual measures of economic prosperity are not. This finding lends weight to the argument that increasing levels of immigrant diversity are a threat to an inclusive sense of national identity that includes both natives and immigrants.     

Terror,Terror Everywhere? How Terrorism News Shape Support for Anti‐Muslim Policies as a Function of Perceived Threat Severity and Controllability

Terrorist attacks committed by the so‐called Islamic State are rising in Western countries. How the news media portray these attacks may crucially influence emotional responses and support for anti‐Muslim policies such as immigration bans. Based on the Extended parallel response model (EPRM, Witte, 1992), we theorize that specific features of terrorism news such as threat severity (e.g., high vs. low number of potential terrorist offenders) and threat controllability (e.g., nondiffuse, controllable threat vs. diffuse, uncontrollable threat) influence individuals’ emotional reactions and policy support. A quota‐based online experiment (N = 501) reveals that news articles featuring a high number of offenders increase individuals’ fear of terror irrespective of whether the threat is portrayed as controllable or not. News articles featuring a low number of offenders only evoke fear of terror if the threat is portrayed as diffuse. Additionally, news articles emphasizing a high number of offenders combined with a controllable terrorism threat elicit anger on the government. Both anger and fear of terror subsequently increase anti‐Muslim policy support.     

Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political: How the Weaknesses of John Rawls's Political Liberalism Can be Overcome by a Justificatory Liberalism

Under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to a plurality of reasonable, yet irreconcilable doctrines. Rawls's political liberalism is intended as a response to this fundamental feature of modern democratic life. Justifying coercive political power by appeal to any one (or sample) of these doctrines is, Rawls believes, oppressive and illiberal. If we are to achieve unity without oppression, he tells us, we must all affirm a public political conception that is supported by these diverse reasonable doctrines. The first part of this essay argues that the free use of human reason leads to reasonable pluralism over most of what we call the political. Rawls's notion of the political does not avoid the problem of state oppression under conditions of reasonable pluralism. The second part tries to show how justificatory liberalism provides (1) a conception of the political that takes seriously the fact that the free use of human reason leads us to sharply disagree in the domain of the political while (2) articulating a conception of the political according to which the coercive intervention of the state must be justified by public reasons.     

Terrorism as Collective Communication: The Collective Communication Model of Terrorism (CCMT)

This paper proposes that the psychological and behavioral effects of terrorist threat can be understood as a collective communication process that occurs between terrorists and their potential victims. Based on classic communication theory, terrorists are regarded as the senders of a specific collective message (such as ‘stop oppressing our culture’); a terrorist incident as the collective message itself (through its performance, modality and targets); and the potential victims as its collective receivers (who interpret the intention of the attack as a function of their pre-existing attributes, such as traits or salient social identities). The perception of terrorism as a dynamic and interactive process between collective senders, messages and receivers opens new theoretical perspectives regarding whether (a) terrorism can be successful in reaching its collective aim; (b) if it is interpreted as rational or irrational; and (c) how to counteract the vicious, cyclical relationship between terrorism and counter-terrorism. Previous findings on the psychology of terrorism can be organized within this theoretical framework, and the psychological impact of varying attributes of the perpetrators (senders), incident (message), and the reactions of the potential victims (receivers) systematically investigated. A series of self-conducted studies are also reviewed and found to provide direct support for the collective communication model of terrorism.     

No Doubt About It: When Doubtful Role Models Undermine Men's and Women's Math Performance Under Threat

ABSTRACT

Past work has shown that female role models are effective buffers against stereotype threat. The present research examines the boundary conditions of this role model effect. Specifically, we argue that female role models should avoid expressing doubt about their math abilities; otherwise they may cease to buffer women from stereotype threat. For men, a non-doubtful male role model should be seen as threatening, thus harming performance. A doubtful male role model, however, should be seen as non-threatening, thus allowing men to perform up to their ability in math. To test this reasoning, men and women were exposed to either an outgroup or ingroup role model who either expressed doubt or did not. Participants then took a math exam under stereotype threat conditions. As expected, doubtful ingroup role models hurt women, but helped men's performance. Outgroup role models' expressed doubt had no differential effect on performance. We also show that expressions of doubt take on a different meaning when expressed by a female rather than a male role model.     

Transnational Islamic education in Indonesia: an ideological perspective

This article analyzes how the emergence of transnational Islam with its global network has changed the face of Indonesian Islam. As part of transnational Islam, the Salafi movement has embellished its ideology through the educational sphere, so it is called transnational Islamic education. The Integrated Islamic School and the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences show the ideological nuances in the education process of these two educational institutions. In this context, there is an ideological struggle between both the Egyptian and the Saudian model of Salafi education with the national education based on Pancasila. With the main agenda of the establishment of an Islamic state and putting the Shariah into practice, the Salafi education can pose a threat to global democratic order. Many cases indicate that perpetrators of global radicalism and terrorism are graduates of Salafi model schools. This proves that global democracy is currently in an ideological struggle with transnational Islamic education.