Terrorist groups substitute for failed family structures and relieve personal responsibility.
Evidence
Böllinger argues that joining a terrorist organization was the last of a series of attempts at identity formation. These potential terrorists were searching for meaning, structure, and a stable social role. They hoped to gain purpose and assurance from the terrorist organization. The group became the family that had never provided the warmth, protection, security, and support the individual had needed. The opportunity to join a terrorist organization allowed the individual to submerge himself in a collective identity and, thus, to lay down the burden of personal responsibility. The group met a need to idealize authority figures, to express aggressive tendencies, to feel omnipotent, and to belong. Its ideology of violent resistance to the state and to imperial domination allowed collective identification simultaneously with the victims of oppression and the aggressive authority figure, while neutralizing guilt through intellectual and emotional justifications. The group provided the structure and integration lacked by the isolated individual. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4124 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Radical groups recruit by supplying the family bond that fractured biological families withheld. — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 374; Terrorist groups function as substitute families meeting unmet developmental needs — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4124; Terrorist groups recruit through family and intimate personal bonds that substitute for kin. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4111 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Terrorist groups function as substitute families meeting unmet developmental needs
#expands(0.97) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4124