Why Terrorism Rarely Works
Correspondent inference theory: people tend to infer the motives of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors.
This makes evolutionary sense. In a world of simple actions and base motivations, it allows a creature to rapidly infer the motivations of another creature. (He’s attacking me because he wants to kill me.)
One place it fails is in our response to terrorism. Because terrorism often results in the horrific deaths of innocents, we mistakenly infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of the terrorist, and not the means to a different end.
Max Abrahms (”Why Terrorism Does Not Work” — .PDF file here) analyzes the political motivations of 28 terrorist groups: the complete list of “foreign terrorist organizations” designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. He lists 42 policy objectives of those groups, and found that they only achieved them 7% of the time.
According to the data, terrorism is more likely to work if 1) the terrorists attack military targets more often than civilian ones, and 2) if they have minimalist goals like evicting a foreign power from their country or winning control of a piece of territory, rather than maximalist objectives like establishing a new political system in the country or annihilating another nation. But even so, terrorism is a pretty ineffective means of influencing policy.
“Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed.”
In other words, terrorism doesn’t work, because it makes people less likely to acquiesce to the terrorists’ demands, no matter how limited they might be: people don’t believe those limited demands are the actual demands.
“The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail,” by Bruce Schneier