“POLICE FOIL Bomb Attack” is the kind of headline that, unfortunately, is all too common nowadays. However, the psychology behind it is intriguing – the authorities would like us to believe that a fresh terrorist attempt to wreak havoc has been averted by diligent security efforts.
The mistaken assumption underlying this view is that the key target of a terrorist campaign is a particular physical target and the public is involved like the passengers using an airline or railway. However it is the fundamental psychology of terrorism which has been neglected in most current analyses.
Essentially there are always two targets in the mind of a terrorist. One might well be the immediate unfortunate victims who bear the brunt of an explosion, but this is only a minor dimension of the actual but more clandestine aim.
The second, but indeed primary, target of any terrorist incident is the psyche of the population. The mind is the key battleground where this new and peculiarly 21st century conflict is being fought. Governments are desperately hoping that we won’t focus on this aspect of the “war on terror”, because the latest research evidence suggests that when it comes to this confrontation – in the real hostilities involving the battle of the mind – it’s the terrorists who are carrying all before them.
This applies whether or not bombs are found before they detonate – indeed, because the fear of rail travel engendered by this new discovery on the Spanish tracks, the supposed security victory was actually another covert triumph for the terrorists.
This is because a new study just about to be published in the prestigious academic journal Psychological Science demonstrates that the key effect of a terrorist incident is not the atrocity itself, but instead the way it affects everyone else who wasn’t even directly involved.
The ironic effect is that often more deaths occur because of how a population responds to a terrorist incident than in the actual massacre itself. For example, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, an expert on the psychology of risk at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, has published a new study into how travel behaviour of Americans changed in the months following the September 11 attacks.
Domestic air-passenger miles fell roughly 16 per cent in the final quarter of the year, according to the Air Trans-port Association, the trade organization of US airlines. Americans dramatically switched from flying to using the roads in an effort to avoid the risk of being taken hostage by terrorists on planes sent crashing into buildings.
But Gigerenzer demonstrates that as a direct result there was a significant increase in the number of fatal car crashes in the last three months of 2001, compared with the same period in the year before the attacks. The US Office of Highway Policy Information found monthly miles driven in the US went up three per cent in October, November and December of 2001, and the largest traffic increase occurred on rural inter-state highways, which is consistent with the hypothesis that long distance travel by road increased.
Because of the extra road traffic, 353 more people died in traffic accidents than would otherwise have done before the end of 2001. This represents a rise in the rate of fatal car accidents of eight per cent. “This number of lost lives is an estimate of the price Americans paid for trying to avoid the risk of flying”, Professor Gigerenzer says. It is perhaps particularly sobering to consider that the risk the millions of Americans were trying to avoid in not flying, was that of the fate suffered by 266 passengers and crew members on board the four flights that crashed. In other words, more people died trying to avoid becoming victims of terrorism, than actually did flying on board the fated planes.
Because the data isn’t in yet, we still don’t know the total increased mortality on the roads due to those switching to driving for the two years since September 11. But it is entirely possible from the initial trend for the final figure to reach a total that even rivals the number of Americans that died in the Twin Towers.
Another recent study by Dr David Vlahov and colleagues of the New York Academy of Medicine found a third of New Yorkers reported an increase in personal cigarette smoking, alcohol or marijuana consumption in the two months after the September 11 attacks. Yet another study found 44 per cent of Americans were bothered by at least one of the five symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder in the first week after September 11. The mental and physical health implications on the population are potentially colossal.
This accumulating data demonstrates that the community is profoundly affected at an emotional level by terrorist acts. These emotions of panic, fear and depression in turn produce behaviour whose effects ripple outwards, causing more negative effects than could be envisaged simply by focusing on a terrorist act.
Maybe the reason governments are reluctant to address the key issue, which is the effect of terrorism on our psyche, is because to do so would also necessarily involve examining the wider impact of terrorism: the cost in terms of extra security and disruption to a society. Once you start to look at the outward ripples of the shock of a terrorist incident, the realisation dawns that the large complex societies that make up Western democracies have a huge amount at stake – while the terrorists themselves suffer a negligible downside, as they are suicidal anyway.
This raises the key question which no one is presently asking – if you take all the ramifications of what terrorism does to our minds and our behaviour into account, is it indeed possible to win a war on terrorism, relying on just sheer military might, as seems to be the current strategy?
Does the battleground not have to be redrawn to incorporate the key clash, which is inside the mind?
