Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T01:19:16.042Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Weighing dispositional and situational factors in accounting for suicide terrorism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

David C. Funder
David C. Funder*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521. [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Lankford's book makes the important point that analyses of suicide terrorists often commit the error of overestimating the importance of situational causes of behavior and underestimating dispositional causes, such as underlying pathology. Personality and individual differences are important; suicide terrorists are not ordinary people driven by situational pressures. However, citation of empirical evidence is haphazard; the scholarly argument is not well-developed.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , August 2014 , pp. 367 - 368
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.)

References

Funder, D. C. (1982) On the accuracy of dispositional vs. situational attributions. Social Cognition 1:205–22.Google Scholar
Funder, D. C. & Fast, L. A. (2010) Personality in social psychology. In: Handbook of social psychology, 5th edition, ed. Gilbert, D. & Fiske, S., pp. 668–97. Wiley.Google Scholar
Krueger, J. I. & Funder, D. C. (2004) Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27(3):313–27.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
Ross, L (1977a) The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13(3):279–301.Google 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
Ross, L. & Nisbett, R. E. (2011) The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology, 2nd edition. Pinter and Martin.Google Scholar