There is no distinctive terrorist personality that explains their violence.

Evidence

There has been much debate on where to look for the causes of terroristic violence. Dispositional theorists place causes in the individual. They search for defining attributes of terrorists. Studies that include only terrorists, as is often the case, can be misleading because the attributes that are singled out may not be unique to terrorists. Previously, it was widely believed that terrorists generally are impoverished, poorly educated, mentally unstable, and driven to violence by a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. This characterization did not survive empirical scrutiny (Bandura, 1973). The search for a distinctive “terrorist personality” is misdirected. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2118

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the vault’s push against dispositional/social-conservatism personality explanations; terrorist traits resemble authoritarianism claims in being misdirected dispositional searches.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if no terrorist personality exists, does the authoritarian-personality research tradition fail the same selection-bias test Bandura applies here?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2118