Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:54:28.827Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Normative seeds for deadly martyrdoms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

Adolf Tobeña  and
Oscar Vilarroya
Adolf Tobeña
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus de Bellaterra, 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallés (Barcelona), [email protected]
Oscar Vilarroya
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Campus de Bellaterra, 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallés (Barcelona), [email protected] Fundació Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM), Carrer Doctor Aiguader 88, 08005 Barcelona, [email protected]://dpsiquiatria.uab.cat/ca/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Even if Lankford's biographical examination of perpetrators of suicidal attacks serves to alert us on the role played by individual factors in their recruitment, psychological frailties, distress, or coercion do not exhaust the causal pathways to deadly martyrdom. Normative personality attributes must be explored further in order to ascertain plausible roots of murderous sacrifice. We have advanced (Tobeña 2004b; 2009; 2011) a template of normative temperamental traits that could lead activists to the threshold of volunteering for murderous missions.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , August 2014 , pp. 378 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychiatry Association. (2000) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV). Fourth Text Revision. American Psychiatry Association.Google Scholar
Atran, S. (2003) Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science 299:1534–39. Available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/299/5612/1534.full.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atran, S. (2010a) Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. ECCO/HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Baumgartner, T. H., Götte, L., Gügler, R. & Fher, E. (2012) The mentalizing network orchestrates the impact of parochial altruism on social norm enforcement. Human Brain Mapping 33:1452–69.Google Scholar
Benmelech, E., Berrabi, C. & Klor, E. F. (2012) Economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. The Journal of Politics 74(1):113–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bereczkei, T., Deak, A., Papp, A., Perlaki, G. & Ors, G. (2013) Neural correlates of Machiavellian strategies is a social dilemma task. Brain and Cognition 82(1):108–16.Google Scholar
Berman, E. (2009) Radical, religious and violent: The new economics of terrorism. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernhard, H., Fischbacher, U. & Fehr, E. (2006) Parochial altruism in humans. Nature 442:912–15.Google Scholar
Bruneau, E., Dufour, N. & Saxe, R. (2012) Social cognition in members of conflict groups: Behavioural and neural responses in Arabs, Israelis and South Americans to each other's misfortunes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367(1589):717–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Choi, J. K. & Bowles, S. (2007) The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science 318:636–40.Google Scholar
De Dreu, C. K., Greer, L. J., Handgraaf, M. J. J., Shalvi, S., Van Kleef, G. A., Baas, M., Velden, F. S. T., Van Dijk, E. & Feith, S. W. W. (2010) The neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans. Science 328:1408–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Dreu, C. K., Greer, L. L., Van Kleef, G. A., Shalvi, S. & Handgraaf, M. J. (2011) Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(4):1262–66.Google Scholar
De Neve, J. E., Mikhaylov, S., Dawes, C. T., Christakis, N. A. & Fowler, J. H. (2013) Born to lead? A twin design and genetic association study of leadership role occupancy. Leadership Quarterly 24(1):45–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ebstein, R.P., Israel, S., Lerer, E., Uzefovsky, F., Shalev, I., Gritsenko, I., Riebold, M., Salomon, S. & Yirmiya, N. (2009) Arginin vasopressin and oxytocin modulate human social behavior. In: Values, empathy and fairness across social barriers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1167, ed. Atran, S., Navarro, A., Ochsner, K., Tobeña, A. & Vilarroya, O., pp. 87–102. The New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Gambetta, D., ed. (2006) Making sense of suicide missions. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gill, P. (2012) Terrorist violence and the contextual, facilitative and causal qualities of group-based behaviors. Aggression and Violent Behavior 17:565–74.Google Scholar
Ginges, J. & Atran, S. (2009) What motivates participation in violent political actions: Selective incentives or parochial altruism? In: Values, empathy and fairness across social barriers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1167, ed. Atran, S., Navarro, A., Ochsner, K., Tobeña, A. & Vilarroya, O., pp. 115–23. The New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Hatemi, P. K. & McDermott, R. (2012) The genetics of politics: Discovery, challenges, and progress. Trends in Genetics 10:525–33.Google Scholar
Knafo, A., Israel, S., Darvasi, A., Bachner-Melman, R., Uzefowski, F., Cohen, L., Feldman, E., Lerer, E., Laiba, E., Raz, Y., Nemanov, L., Gritsenko, I., Dina, C., Agam, G., Dean, B., Bornstein, G. & Ebstein, R. P. (2008) Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of arginin vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation of RS3 and hippocampal mRNA. Genes Brain and Behavior 7(3):266–75.Google Scholar
Lankford, A. (2013c) The myth of martyrdom: What really drives suicide bombers, rampage shooter, and other self-destructive killers. Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Merari, A., Diamant, I., Bibi, A., Broshi, Y. & Zakin, G. (2010) Personality characteristics of “self martyrs”/“suicide bombers” and organizers of suicide attacks. Terrorism and Political Violence 22(1):87–101.Google Scholar
Mertins, V., Schte, A.B., Hoffeld, W., Griessmair, M. & Meyer, J. (2013) Genetic susceptibility for individual cooperation preferences: The role of monoamino oxidase A gene in the voluntary provision of public goods. PLoS One 6(6):e20959.Google Scholar
Morishima, Y., Schunk, D., Bruhin, A., Ruff, C. & Fher, E. (2012) Linking brain structure and activation in temporoparietal junction to explain the neurobiology of human altruism. Neuron 75:73–79.Google Scholar
Pape, R. A. (2005) Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Random House.Google Scholar
Piazza, J. A. (2008) A supply-side view of suicide terrorism: A cross-national study. Journal of Politics 70(1):28–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reuter, M., Frenzel, C., Walter, N. T., Markett, S. & Montague, C. (2011) Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: The role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6:662–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rodriguez, J. A. (2004) La red terrorista del 11-M. Revista Española de Investigaciones. Sociológicas 107:155–79.Google Scholar
Sageman, M. (2004) Understanding terror networks. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Settle, J. E., Dawes, C. T. & Fowles, J. H. (2009) The heritability of partisan attachment. Political Research Quarterly 63(3):601–13.Google Scholar
Takahashi, H., Takano, H., Camerer, C. F., Ideno, T., Okubo, S., Matsui, H., Tamari, Y., Takemura, K., Arakawa, R., Kodak, F., Yamada, M., Eguchi, Y., Murai, T., Okubo, Y., Kato, M., Ito, H. & Suhara, T. (2012) Honesty mediates the relationship between serotonin and reaction to unfairness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109(11):4281–84.Google Scholar
Tobeña, A. (2004a) Individual factors in suicide terrorism. Science 304(5667):47–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tobeña, A. (2004b) Mártires mortíferos: Biología del altruismo letal [Deadly martyrs: The biology of lethal altruism]. PUV-Bromera.Google Scholar
Tobeña, A. (2009) Lethal altruists: Itineraires along the dark outskirts of moralistic prosociality. In: Values, empathy and fairness across social barriers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1167, ed. Atran, S., Navarro, A., Ochsner, K., Tobeña, A. & Vilarroya, O., pp. 5–15. The New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Tobeña, A. (2011) Suicide attack martyrdoms: Temperament and mindset of altruistic warriors. In: Pathological altruism, ed. Oakley, B., Knafo, A., Madhavan, G. & Wilson, D.S., pp. 207–44. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Van Vugt, M. (2009) Sex differences in intergroup competition, aggression and warfare: The male warrior hypothesis. In: Values, empathy and fairness across social barriers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1167, ed. Atran, S., Navarro, A., Ochsner, K., Tobeña, A. & Vilarroya, O., pp. 124–34. The New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Van Vugt, M., Hogan, R. & Kaiser, R. B. (2008) Leadership, followership and evolution: Some lessons from the past. American Psychologist 63(3):182–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Victoroff, J., Quota, S., Adelman, J. R., Celinska, B., Stern, N., Wilcox, R. & Sapolsky, R. (2011) Support for religio-political aggression among teenaged boys in Gaza: Part II. Neuroendocrinological findings. Aggressive Behavior 37:121–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, D. S., Near, D. & Miller, R. R. (1996) Machiavellianism: A synthesis of the evolutionary and psychological literature. Psychological Bulletin 119(2):285–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wrangham, R. W., Wilson, M. L. & Muller, N. M. (2006) Comparative rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans. Primates 47:14–26.Google Scholar
Zhong, S., Israel, S., Shalev, I., Xue, H., Ebstein, R. P. & Hong Chew, S. (2010) Dopamine D4 receptor gene associated with fairness preference in ultimatum game. PLoS One 5(11):e13765.Google Scholar