On psychological tests comparing 66 terrorists with controls, one key difference stood out

By Christian Jarrett After a terror attack, amidst the shock and sadness, there is simple incomprehension: how could anyone be so brutal, so inhuman? In Nature Human Behaviour, Sandra Baez and her colleagues offer rare insight based on their tests of 66 incarcerated paramilitary terrorists in Colombia, who had murdered an average of 33 victims each. The terrorists completed measures of their intelligence, aggression, emotion recognition, and crucially, their moral judgments. On most measures, such as intelligence and executive function, there were no differences between the terrorists and 66 non-terrorist control participants from the same region. The terrorists admitted to more aggression, as you’d expect, and they showed difficulties recognising anger, sadness and disgust. From Baez et al, Nat Hum Beh However, the most striking group difference concerned moral judgments on 24 different scenarios. Unlike control participants, the terrorists judged acts of intended harm with neutral outcomes (such as intending to poison someone, but failing) to be more morally permissible than acts of accidental harm (such as poisoning someone by mistake). In a follow-up, the terrorists also rated attempted harm as more morally permissible than accidental harm, as compared with a group of incarcerated non-terrorist murderers. Baez and her team said this distorted approach to morality implies a problem weighing intentions combined with an excessive focus on outcomes, and it is similar t...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Morality Terrorism Source Type: blogs