There are important psychological issues underlying terrorism. And the first step in the scientific analysis of anything is to develop a way to measure it. We need a psychological test to determine the propensity of a person to engage in terrorist activities.
Psychological Testing:
Many psychological tests are nonsense (e.g., Rorschach Inkblots), but many are not. Some make highly accurate predictions about future behavior. For example, the SAT accurately predicts success in university. "In-basket" tests accurately predict success in management positions. The propensity for terrorism is an important characteristic of people in the contemporary world, so we require a measurement tool, a Propensity for Terrorism (PT) test, that will accurately predict the amount of support that a person will give to a terrorist activity.
Note that the phrase "accurately predict" really means "predict with a high probability". There will always be outlying cases - e.g., the "underachiever" who scores highly on the SAT, but still flunks out of university. But, if you want to place a bet on who'll graduate, you'll make a lot more money betting that the people with high SAT scores than the people with low SAT scores.
Propensity for Terrorism (PT):
We have to begin with an analysis of the nature of terrorism and what it means to support it.
1) Support for terrorism is not a binary variable, it is a continuous scale. The media talks about a person either being a terrorist or not, but the real world is more complex than that. Consider the following range of behaviors: being a suicide bomber; procuring bomb-making materials for someone else; soliciting donations for the support of a terrorist organization; diverting donations from a non-terrorist organization to a terrorist organization; donating to a terrorist organization; leafleting in support of a terrorist organization; voting for the political arm of a terrorist organization; supporting a cause on its merits, regardless of the actions of terrorists; denouncing terrorism; withdrawing support (votes, donations) for a cause because it has been taken up by terrorists; joining a counter-terrorism organization (CIA, FBI, etc.). Only a few people engage in the extremes of this list (become a professional terrorist or professional counter-terrorist). Most people are moderately anti-terrorist, but do not let their distaste for terrorism influence their support for causes. For example, most anti-abortionists condemn bombing abortion clinics, but only a very few start lobbying in favor of woman's choice as a way to indicate their condemnation. In the same way, we cannot expect moderate Palestinians to suddenly start feeding information to the Mossad just to indicate that they do not support suicide bombers.
Thus, the PT test will yield a PT score that is probably normally distributed with a mean somewhere slightly against terrorism.
2) Support for terrorism is not a single scale, it depends on the situation. Some people simultaneously condemn the "evil Al Qaeda terrorists" and support "our noble civilian militias" in Montana. The United States does not have an official definition of "terrorism" because every definition that has been devised can be applied to the American government as easily as Al Qaeda (killing civilians, using WMD, covert operations, etc.). It is quite natural that Americans (and Canadians and Western Europeans) condemn the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers as a "cowardly attack" at the same time that they support an equal number of Afghani civilian casualties as the "inevitable consequences of war." Many Americans consider the torture of prisoners to be a distasteful, but necessary component of gathering intelligence in the war on terrorism. They can only distinguish themselves from terrorists by the nature and the degree of torture that they are willing to support.
By the way, I don't bring this up just to irritate Harold (though that is a bonus :-) but to counter the popular error of considering terrorism to be a psychopathy. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not insane. In some situations, a violent response can be the most rational action. The American military has planes and missiles to deliver bombs to targets. The Palestinians only have themselves. Once the decision is made that a target must be bombed, the choice of delivery mechanism is a practical issue. It is irrational to label one delivery mechanism as sane and the other insane.
Thus, the PT test will have to have questions that specifies the situation that is being tested. The PT score for a person on anti-abortion issues will be different than the PT score of that same person for Hamas, a unified Ireland, or Delta Force actions. This is reasonable. Anti-abortionists are unlikely to fly commercial airliners into buildings, so the PT score for antiabortionists would not be used to screen people applying for 747 flight training.
As well, the PT test must be careful to avoid imposing a priori value judgments about which situations are "terrorist" situations and which are not. All situations must be considered to have equal potential for a violent "terrorist" solution.
Design of the Test:
I leave the design of the test to the experts. Though I am an author on old publications in Psychometrica, Multivariate Behavioral Research, and Psychological Bulletin on reliability testing; and did spend the summer of '74 working with R. B. Cattell himself (how's that for credentials :-), I have never designed an actual psychological test.
As an amateur, though, I would start by considering a number of types of questions.
Behavioral situations: Tests with the best validity often ask questions about specific behaviors, past and future. For example, "Would you donate money to Hezbollah?" and "Have you ever donated money to Hamas?" Obviously we would want some questions that were a little more subtle than these, but do not avoid direct questions. The answers to "Have you recently contemplated committing suicide?" and "Do you have a loaded gun at home?" are surprisingly good predictors of suicide. Most surprisingly, suicidal people tend to answer these questions honestly.
Labeling: I would guess that people who call Al Qaeda members "terrorists" have less propensity to support their actions than people who call them "jihadists". And people who call what happened at Abu Ghraib an "understandable mistake" are more likely to support the American military than those who call it "scandalous excess".
Situational Opinion: People who believe that Jews have a legitimate historical claim to territory in the Middle East are less likely to support Palestinian terrorism than those who believe that Israel has no right to exist. The converse is not necessarily true, of course. People who believe that Israel has no right to exist do not necessarily condone bombing Israeli civilians.
Propensity for Violent Resolution: Given any particular cause, people vary in their willingness to use violence to achieve their ends. Extreme pacifists are unwilling to use violence even to defend themselves from immediate harm. They are unlikely to support terrorism in any way. Sociopaths hurt people for trivial reasons. They would seek to become terrorists. I would be curious to see if the answer to a question like, "Would you throw a rock at a cat to stop it from stalking a bird?" is correlated with other indicators of terrorism.
Psychological Traits: Personally, I am becoming more convinced that narcissism is an indicator of a variety of non-biological psychopathies, from depression to neuroticism. It is likely that terrorists tend to be more narcissistic than the general population. It is one of the psychological traits that could be measured by some questions in the PT test.
Lie Scale: Of course, committed terrorists will lie to hide their propensities. The 9/11 terrorists shaved their beards and hid their extreme views because it was imperative to their aims not to be noticed when they were living in the US during the year before the attack. The standard way to detect lies is to ask questions in which there is a clear "right" answer for the liar and the "wrong" answer is already known to have a high probability of being true. For example, "Have you ever hoped that the thieves in a 'heist movie' will get away with their crime?" Even so, the likelihood that people at the extremes will lie will limit the usefulness of this test in detecting existing terrorists. Even if the test cannot reliably detect the man with the bomb already strapped to his chest, it will remain a valuable tool for identifying people who are associated with terrorists, who may eventually turn to terrorism, or who support terrorism in small ways.
I would devise questions which fall into these categories, assemble a test, and conduct a variety of psychometric studies to validate the test.
The Use of the Test:
If a PT Test with good predictive validity could be devised, there would be multiple uses for it.
Screening People: Because the PT score can only provide a likelihood of engaging in terrorism and not an absolute certainty, the results of the test can not be used to decide who is a terrorist, but can be used to sort people for further investigation. And should be a better filter than race, nationality, or religious affiliation. Given limited resources, more would be expended on investigating people with high PT scores than low PT scores. In particular, it may be effective in identifying people who are not terrorists themselves, but may have relatives or friends who are terrorists.
Measuring Policy Effectiveness: A more important use of the PT score would be to track the effectiveness of programs to reduce terrorism. For example, if Al Qaeda leaders are executed, does that reduce the propensity for terrorism among fundamentalist Muslims (because fewer terrorist leaders remain) or does it increase the propensity for terrorism (because the leaders become highly-publicized martyrs?) When moderate Muslim leaders publicly decry terrorism, does that have an reduce the propensity for terrorism among fundamentalist Muslims or not? When Israel builds walls or gives up land, does that encourage or discourage Palestinian terrorism? Right now, we don't know what effect the policies of either Western or Middle Eastern governments have on terrorism. Finding out what policies affect the motivation for terrorism will do more good in the long term than treating the symptoms by limiting our own personal freedoms.
Existing Research:
In a very quick scan of the Web, I found some work on using existing personality tests to predict potential for terrorism, but nothing on developing a new test; and particularly a test with a fairly strong behavioral approach that is likely to have good predictive validity.
I suspect that a grant application to develop such a test would have a good chance of success.
Yours,
Thom