Terrorist behavior is probably always determined by a combination of innate biological, early developmental, cognitive and temperament factors along with environmental influences, and group dynamics. The degree to which each of these factors contributes to attacks at Brussels international airport and a city metro station probably varies between individual terrorists, between individual groups, and between types of groups. It is generally well accepted that terrorism involves aggression against non-combatants and terrorist action in itself is not expected by its perpetrator to accomplish a political goal but instead, to influence a target audience and change that audience’s behavior in a way that will serve the interests of the terrorist for a significant length of time.
Individual membership in a terrorist organization offers disciples a well-defined personal role, a righteous purpose, the opportunity for revenge for perceived humiliations, and the lifting of constraints on the expression of otherwise prohibited behaviors freeing the member from personal responsibility for attacks on out-groups. Whereas the group behavior forces ideological indoctrination, repetitive training, and peer pressures, ultimately influences the group’s violence, even when individual members are not predisposed to such behavior. This occurs because collective identity subsumes individual identity. This fusion with the group seems to provide the necessary justification for their actions with an attendant loss of felt responsibility.
The principal debate centers on whether group dynamics are sufficient in and of themselves to turn an average person into a terrorist or whether individual history and personality must be considered as well. The dynamics of living in a terrorist group tends to alienate one from others but the starting point and personal needs existing at the time of entry into the terrorist group are very different for the different terrorists. This claim of initial psychological heterogeneity followed by group-induced homogenization appears plausible, but it requires empirical verification.
In order to establish their writ, the ISIS suicide terrorist attacks seen in Brussels airport and metro red appear to have occurred as part of an organized political campaign and were generally directed towards a strategic objective which included innocent civilians because terrorists have learned that the tactic works. Although the tactic of suicide terrorism may present as the most innovative and highly anxiety provoking scenario, it is a combination of familiar methods, targets and motives. It can be interpreted as a particular case of oppositional terrorism rather than as a Sui generis phenomenon. It shares with it many properties of general terrorism. In recent years, and particularly since the Paris bombing attacks, there has been a sharp threat in suicide terrorism in Europe which has generated a hype in the media and academic literature that address a topic that is inherently fascinating –a modus operandi that requires the death of its perpetrator masked behind the religious agenda to ensure its success.
Arguably, it raises a question whether a certain type of mind is disproportionately influenced with a given political category of terrorism and teasingly invites a challenge to probe a psychological inquiry into the “mind of the terrorist.” It asks if those terrorist groups typically exhibit hierarchical organization, with various roles assumed within which are unavailable for scholarly scrutiny or attempted replication.
Attempts to account for the behavior of terrorists fall into two general categories: top-down approaches that seek the seeds of terrorism in political, social, economic, or even evolutionary circumstances and bottom-up approaches that explore the characteristics of individuals and groups that turn to terrorism. Outcasts who adhere to an anomalous scheme of values out of tune with that of the rest of society claim that there is a near similarity of fundamental characteristic in both the psychopath and the terrorist. It makes a common kind of sense that the relationship between insanity and terrorism might equally apply to the relationship between sociopathy and terrorism: sociopaths may sometimes be among the terrorists, but terrorists are not, by virtue of their political violence, necessarily sociopaths.
If neither insanity nor sociopathy nor rational choice can fully account for the genesis of terrorist behaviors, what alternative psychological explanations seem most plausible? In other words, although terrorists rarely exhibit psychological disorders, they may exhibit identifiable psychological traits or may have been influenced by identifiable social factors.
Expressions of terrorism since the last decade of the twentieth century are fundamentally new. It questions the new aspects of terrorism, such as the transnational nature of the perpetrators and their organizations, their religious inspiration and fanaticism, their use of weapons, and their indiscriminate targeting. It points out essential continuities with previous expressions of terrorist violence, such as the national and territorial focus of the new terrorists, their political motivations, their use of conventional weaponry and the symbolic targeting that is still aimed at achieving a surprise effect. It would be silly to ignore that this calls for more thorough collaborative investigations between counter-terrorism departments and behavioral analysts in order to appreciate truly new aspects of terrorism.