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Speaking of terrorist behaviour

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Abstract

Using prospect theory as our core descriptive model of the decision-making process, we explore how behavioural economics can be used to expand what can be said about terrorist behaviour and align the inferences about terrorist behaviour that have been drawn from a diverse collection of disciplines. Prospect theory played a key role in the emergence of behavioural economics and provided many leads that were followed up by subsequent generations of researchers to reveal and explain various interesting quirks and anomalies in human decision-making, especially under conditions of risk and uncertainty. The decision-maker that emerges from behavioural economics is one who makes decisions shaped by a mixture of rationality, emotions, aspirations, reference-dependent choices, loss aversion and habits. When we speak of terrorist decision-making and draw inferences about it from different analytical perspectives, behavioural economics can help us to ensure that our inferences are in accordance with each other and, furthermore, help us to deepen our ‘thinking about terrorists’ thinking’.

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Notes

  1. Belfast News Letter (2020).

  2. Mueller (2015).

  3. Nemeth (2014), B.J. Phillips (2019).

  4. Gill et al. (2020), p.7) quote Action directe’s Ann Hansen who said, among other things, “A steady diet of small illegal activities had boosted my confidence in our abilities to get away with things.”

  5. There are four articles, written for a more general audience, that summarise the main findings. These are Kahneman and Tversky (1984) and Tversky and Kahneman (1974, 1981, 1986).

  6. Loss aversion is a very robust result in economics and psychology. It also appears to have a neural basis (Tom et al., 2007).

  7. Also see Glaser (1956), D.P. Phillips (1980, 1983), Barak (1994), Felson (1996), Dahl and Dellavigna (2009), Surette (2014), Helfgott (2015) and Rios and Ferguson (2019).

  8. Proportion here refers to the ‘magnitude’ or ‘scale’ of the effect of the terrorist action. RAF members decided that their next action had to be ‘bigger’ than the kidnapping of Lorenz (Winkler, 2007, p.252).

  9. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

  10. The analysis applies to any similar choice situation. For example, instead of terrorism and legitimate activity, it could be two different types of terrorist attack methods.

  11. It is important to note that identity can be lost as well as gained (Aron et al., 2004; Weigert & Hastings, 1977).

  12. Such as, for instance, in the case of Carlos, The Jackal (e.g. Rose, 2010).

  13. For reviews of the earlier literature see Hines (1987), Hofbauer and Sigmund (1988), Nachbar (1990) and Friedman (1991).

  14. Plants survive and thrive by maximising their share of sunlight. They do so by growing marginally taller than their competitors. Plants do not waste resources growing to the greatest possible height.

  15. Earlier research is less decided on this point. Some researchers contend that positive emotions fostered risk aversion while negative emotions fostered risk seeking (Isen & Patrick, 1983) while others contended the opposite (Forgas, 1995).

  16. Also see Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2000), De Houwer (2019) and Marien et al. (2019).

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    Peter J. Phillips & Gabriela Pohl

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Phillips, P.J., Pohl, G. Speaking of terrorist behaviour. Crime Law Soc Change 77, 555–576 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-10010-1

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