How to terrorists differ on psychological tests?
8th June 2017
A pioneering new study has sought to investigate the differences between “normal” controls and terrorists.
On psychological tests that measure intelligence, aggression, emotion recognition and moral judgements Colombian paramilitary terrorists were found to differ from controls on one key outcome.
The terrorists scored higher on measures of aggression, as you would expect and also showed difficulties in their ability to recognise anger, sadness and disgust. The most striking difference between the two groups however was concerned with moral judgements. The terrorist group, in contrast to the control participants, judged acts of intended harm whereby there had been a neutral outcome as more morally permissible than acts of accidental harm. For example, they viewed the act of attempting to poison someone but failing as less immoral than accidentally poisoning someone.
It is suggested by the authors that this approach to morality implies a distortion in the way terrorists weigh up intentions combined with a focus on outcome rather than intention. It is in this way that terrorists can appear to believe that any action can be justified.
With recent events across the country research like this will hopefully start to provide an insight into ways to predict risk of radicalisation or future offending as well as being able to measure the ways in which terrorist involvement may alter an individual’s moral judgements.
The full article can be read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0118