Exploring the Relationship between Value References and a Group ’ s Willingness to Engage in Terrorism Allison

This study explored the dynamics of terrorism through a content analysis of terrorist and nonterrorist groups’ documents. Thirteen terrorist groups were matched with non-terrorist controls, and their documents were coded for the values they attributed to their opponents and their own group. Relative to controls, terrorist groups attributed higher dominance values to their opponents and higher dominance, morality, and culture values to themselves in the full sample and in a predictive sample of documents issued before terrorism. These findings indicate that the values groups express in their documents – and particularly the values they attribute to themselves – may be used to predict whether they will engage in terrorism. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Funding for this project was provided by the Psychology Department, the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, and the International Institute at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank David Winter, Abigail Stewart, Rowell Huesmann, and Christopher Peterson for their advice on conceptual and methodological aspects of this project, and Rebekah Moeller and Morgan Smith for their work coding documents. Please address all correspondence to Allison Smith, Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, 426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248 or send an email to [email protected]. Value References and Terrorism 2