Viewing Terrorism through Social Psychology Essay -- Psychology

Acts of terrorism are becoming increasingly common in today's society. From the frequent suicide bombings in Israel, the recent violence in the Russian village of Beslan, to the attacks on the world trade centers on September the eleventh of 2001 that so violently shook the world; terrorism is rarely far from our minds. Terrorist groups have a variety of aims, acts of revenge, politics, but by far the most common, and arguably most disturbing reason for these actions is religion. It is exceptionally important that we can learn to understand the forces that drive people to commit such wanton acts of destruction, and social psychology can help us to do that. Social psychology is a diverse field of study, it is "the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations" (Social Psychology, Baron and Byrne). In social psychology we study the social factors which influence the individual to carry out certain actions, thus it is invaluable in studying terrorism. Social psychologists study both the immediate social context (the influence of whatever group we are in the immediate company of) and the wider social context (the effects of family, culture etc) both of which have great effect on personality, belief and behavior. An example of the effect of the immediate social context are the experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram. Milgram carried out a series of social psychology experiments into proximity and willingness of humans to cause pain to others using an electrocution device. The test also involved however the use of an authority figure to issue orders to carry out the electric shock. Milgram put volunteers in pairs and assigned one the role of teache... ...e understanding, to change an attitude so vastly of a devout person into a vicious killer it takes a depth of belief that no experimentation can understand, it goes beyond measurement and scale. Social psychology can indeed help us to understand terrorism, but I does not tell the full story, in the words of David Hume (A treatise of human nature) "this difficulty is to hard for my understanding." References David Hume: A treatise of human nature (Penguin Classics, 1969) L.B.Brown: Psychology and Religion (Penguin Education,1973) Baron and Byrne: Social Psychology ( Mark Juergensmeyer: Terror in the mind of God (University of California press, 2000) Roy F Baumeister: Evil, inside human violence and cruelty (W.H. Freeman and company, 1997) The Holy Bible: Mt 10:34 John Radford and Ernest Govier: A textbook of Psychology (Sheldon press, 1980)