Lone‐Actor Terrorists’ Emotions and Cognition: An Evaluation Beyond Stereotypes

Abstract

Lone‐actor terrorists are very often presented as emotionally and/or cognitively impaired—yet is it really the case? The present article provides the first rigorous assessment of the hypotheses according to which a high level of negative emotions, especially anger, and a lack of cognitive flexibility and complexity play a role in lone‐actor terrorists’ violent actions. Using a sample of lone‐actor terrorists’ writings, we use the LIWC (a fully automated language use analysis software) to compare terrorists’ cognition and emotion with those of other control groups, most notably nonviolent radical activists. Results strongly support the first hypothesis but clearly refute the second one, suggesting that lone‐actor terrorists are in fact characterized by a specific combination of high‐anger and high‐cognitive complexity. These method and results lay the groundwork for a more systematic and nuanced analysis of the psychology of terrorists, which is currently in a deadlock.

Radicalization Through the Lens of Situated Affectivity

“…In contrast to already established views that mainly address negative emotions such as humiliation, fear, hate, anger, guilt, contempt, and disgust (e.g., Lindner, 2001;Bar-Tal et al, 2007;Wright-Neville and Smith, 2009;Feddes et al, 2012;Baele et al, 2014;Matsumoto et al, 2015;Baele, 2017;van Stekelenburg, 2017), we would like to also stress the importance of positive emotions, which in combination with negative emotions play a vital role in paving the path to radicalization. A radical organization in its ideology provides its followers with various positive emotions such as hope for a better future, pride of belonging to a certain group or religion, feeling of power as being member of a strong and feared group, and love for the radical ideology and those who follow it, fostering a sense of brotherhood among the members of the group.…”

Learning from the parallel field of terrorism studies.

“…It has been argued that terrorists are limited to black-and-white thinking and oversimplified 'us versus them' reasoning. Baele (2017) examined the anger and cognitive inflexibility hypotheses by testing lone-actor terrorist writings for LIWC categories related to emotion and cognitive processes. The scores for the lone-actor texts were compared to scores for texts written by non-violent activists (e.g.…”

“…Furthermore, the lone-actor texts showed high cognitive sophistication and low cognitive inflexibility, based on the proportions of LIWC categories for 'cognitive processes', 'causality', 'certainty', 'tentative', words with more than six letters, and a separate measure of cognitively complex language. 19 In short, Baele (2017) argued that the psycho-social characteristics of lone-actor terrorist texts support the idea that perpetrators exhibit high levels of anger but are characterized by high cognitive complexity rather than inflexibility.…”

The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding threatening language use

“…They are also often signaled ahead of time in some form of written communication (Gill, 2020). Typically, research on automatic linguistic threat assessment tries to discriminate between texts authored by perpetrators of grievance-fueled violence from some form of non-violent control or comparison group (Baele, 2017;Kaati, Shrestha, & Cohen, 2016).…”

“…Although the LIWC provides categories such as anxiety and anger, we propose that key concepts for threat assessment and violence research are absent in this and other dictionaries. As a result, previous work on grievance-fueled violence that used the LIWC (e.g., Baele, 2017;Kaati, Shrestha, & Cohen, 2016) may not have been specific enough in terms of the linguistic measures used to indicate potential violence. Second, the content and construction procedure of existing dictionaries is often unclear because descriptions of how and why certain words have been selected are scarce.…”