The idea that terrorists all share a particular psychological profile is widely disputed, which makes sense, since there's little agreement on what terrorism itself is. But that doesn't mean that there haven't been a few efforts to try to find the psychological predictors of terrorism.
Since the 1970s, researchers have tried to create terrorist psychological profiles based on available data. The data itself has, of course, changed as trends in terrorism have changed from nationalist, left-wing terrorism in the 1970s to intenationally focuses, religiously based terrorism, of late.
Jeff Victoroff, a professor in the department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, has compiled these efforts. The following summaries of the first attempts to create terrorist profiles are quoted from his article, "The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches," which was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in February 2005.
1970s – 1980s: Studies of Left and Right wing Secular Terrorists
"On the basis of unstructured interviews, American psychiatrist David Hubbard in 1971 reported five traits of skyjackers [as hijackers were often called then]:
- violent, often alcoholic father
- deeply religious mother
- sexually shy, timid and passive
- younger sisters toward whom the terrorist acted protectively
- poor social achievement"
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"On the basis of primarily secondhand source material regarding a subsample of 908 right-wing terrorists in Italy, Ferracuti and Bruno in 1981 claimed to have identified nine typical characteristics:
- ambivalence toward authority
- defective insight
- adherence to convention
- emotional detachment from the consequences of their actions
- sexual role uncertainties
- magical thinking
- destructiveness
- low education
- adherence to violent subculture norms and weapons fetishes"
Yet a third study, "the largest of this kind," was undertaken by the West German Ministry of the Interior from 1981-1983. The researchers interviewed 227 left-wing terrorists and 23 right wing extremists. Some psychological factors appeared with high frequency, such as that:
- "25 percent of leftist terrorists had lost one or both parents by age fourteen"
- "33 percent reported severe conflict with parents
- 33 percent had a history of juvenile court conviction
Studies of Islamist violence
Psychiatrist Marc Sageman in 2004 "compiled data from public sources on 172 individuals he identified as members of a "global Salafi mujahedin, meaning Muslims engaged in terrorist acts against the "far enemy" in the service of a new Islamic world order … Sagement excluded terrorists engaged in local jihads, such as Chechnyans, Kashmiris, Afghans and Palestintians." Sageman drew a number of impressionistic conclusions, which he admits are of limited statistical value, because the sample group was so small and not controlled as a scientific study would be. Of the 61 cases including some childhood information, Sageman found that:
- "Only four had histories suggestive of conduct disorder"
- "Only 1 case (Habib Zacarias Moussaoui) was suggestive of a childhood trauma'
- "One-quarter of the group had histories of petty crime."
- On the evidence of ten of the cases, "Sageman claims that he found 'no evidence of pathological narcissm' and 'no pattern of paranoid personality disorder' . . . with the exception of possible traits of al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri."
United Nations relief worker Nasra Hassan interviewed about 250 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members from 1996 to 1999. Hassan offered that:.
- suicide bombers ranged from 18 to 28 years old
- Two were sons of millionaires
- None were depressed.
