Terrorists neutralize guilt by abstracting victims into mere institutional representatives.

Evidence

Terrorists engage in what Bandura (1973, pp. 238–239) calls “slighting aggression by advantageous comparison”—that is, emphasizing the gross misdeeds of the government as justification for terrorism against it. Schmidtchen (1981, pp. 54–55) noted in West German terrorist groups a process of socialization resulting in a demarcation between friend and enemy that reserved all positive identifications for friends, all negative identifications for the enemy. The enemy was perceived as an abstraction, a structure rather than a group of individuals. Victims have no personal value to terrorists; they are merely representatives of institutions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4151

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘slighting aggression by advantageous comparison’ as a moral-disengagement mechanism terrorists use.
• XREF: Connects to Bandura’s moral disengagement theory and to the general psychology of dehumanization in military contexts.