Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T22:58:37.532Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Suicide terrorism, moral relativism, and the situationist narrative1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

David R. Mandel
David R. Mandel*
Affiliation:
Socio-Cognitive Systems Section, Defence Research and Development Canada and Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, M3K 2C9, Canada. [email protected]://sites.google.com/site/themandelian/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Lankford challenges two popular views of suicide terrorists: first, that they are psychologically normal and, second, that they are heroic, not unlike professional soldiers. I augment Lankford's critique by tracing these views to a simplistic situationist narrative and to a careless form of moral relativism to which many scholars adhere. Conceptual weaknesses of these positions are briefly discussed.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , August 2014 , pp. 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1.

© Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada 2014.

References

Atran, S. (2003) Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science 299:1534–39. Available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/299/5612/1534.full CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atran, S. (2010a) Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. ECCO/HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Barrett, F. J. & Sarbin, T. R. (2008) Honor as a moral category: A historical-linguistic analysis. Theory and Psychology 18:5–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hafez, M. M. (2006) Manufacturing human bombs: The making of Palestinian suicide bombers. U.S. Institute of Peace.Google Scholar
Lankford, A. (2013c) The myth of martyrdom: What really drives suicide bombers, rampage shooter, and other self-destructive killers. Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mandel, D. R. (1998) The obedience alibi: Milgram's account of the Holocaust reconsidered. Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fur Sozialwissenschaften 20:74–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandel, D. R. (2012) On the psychology of evil in interpersonal and corporate contexts. In: The foundations of organizational evil, ed. Jurkiewicz, C., pp. 87–102. M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Mandel, D. R. & Litt, A. (2013) The ultimate sacrifice: Perceived peer honor predicts troops' willingness to risk their lives. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 16:375–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pape, R. A. (2005) Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Random House.Google Scholar
Pastor, L. H. (2004) Countering the psychological consequences of suicide terrorism. Psychiatric Annals 34:701–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, L. (1977b) The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In: Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 10, ed. Berkowitz, L., pp. 173–220. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Stouffer, S. A., Lumsdaine, A. A., Lumsdaine, M. H., Williams, R. M. Jr., Smith, M. B., Janis, I. L. & Cottrell, L. S. Jr. (1949) The American soldier: Combat and its aftermath. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vaughan, D. K. & Schum, W. A. (2001) Motivation in U.S. narrative accounts of the ground war in Vietnam. Armed Forces and Society 28:7–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimbardo, P. G. (2004) A situationist perspective on the psychology of evil: Understanding how good people are transformed into perpetrators. In: The social psychology of good and evil, ed. Miller, A. G., pp. 102–23. Guilford Press.Google Scholar