Terrorism incites outsized public fear through unpredictability, lethality, and uncontrollability

Evidence

Terrorist acts include several features that allow a few incidents to incite widespread public fear even though the likelihood of being a victim of a terrorist attack is exceedingly low. The first feature is the unpredictability of who will be targeted and when or where terrorists will strike. Terrorists could attack busy markets, crowded streets, public events, public transportation, or airliners, making anyone a potential victim. The second feature is the gravity of terrorist acts. With the increasing lethality of conventional and improvised weapons, terrorists can wreak destruction on a massive scale. … The third feature is the sense of uncontrollability that they instill. People feel that there is little they can do personally to protect themselves from becoming victims of a terrorist attack. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2111

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This mechanism of psychology — how low-probability, high-gravity, uncontrollable threats generate disproportionate fear — parallels risk-perception research by Paul Slovic and Daniel Kahneman.

Related

• Unpredictability, scale, and uncontrollability make rare attacks terrorize whole publics (similarity 0.95)
• Terrorism’s psychological impact depends on perceived intentionality and random anonymity (similarity 0.87)
• Vague, unidentifiable threats like terrorism prove harder for victims to comprehend or counter (similarity 0.85)
• Low-probability high-consequence risks inflate fear and enable extreme policies (similarity 0.85)
• A few violent incidents spread widespread fear through unpredictability, severity, and uncontrollability (similarity 0.84)
• Terrorism’s political impact exceeds its physical destructiveness via media amplification. (similarity 0.82)
• Terrorism aims at political influence through emotional arousal rather than destruction (similarity 0.82)
• Terrorism succeeds mainly by provoking costly state surveillance, not by toppling regimes (similarity 0.81)
• Three features make rare violent crimes generate disproportionate public fear (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorism requires reflective violence and delayed gratification, unlike impulsive aggression (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorism must escalate in drama and novelty as its audiences grow distant (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorism results from predispositions interacting with political context, not personality alone (similarity 0.80)
• Terrorism’s causal effects resist separation from other social phenomena (similarity 0.80)
• Fear can drive frightened citizens to endorse extreme countermeasures without moral deliberation (similarity 0.80)
• Terrorism’s political context shapes its motivations and psychological effects (similarity 0.80)