Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley | The psychology of Sept. 11

On Sept. 11, 2001, four groups of Muslim Arabs, armed only with box cutters, took over four large commercial American airplanes, each with many, many more people than the hijackers.

These takeovers succeeded only because it was a deep-seated assumption in everyone involved, except the terrorists, that this was another hijacking and that the plane would be brought down safely somewhere, with subsequent negotiations for release of the passengers.

We go around the world with a number of very reasonable assumptions, assumptions that allow us to negotiate our many day-to-day encounters. Without these, we would be paralyzed.

One of these assumptions is that the people we encounter are not going to try to kill us. Another is that those we encounter will not take actions that will cause great harm to themselves or death. Suicide bombing challenges these assumptions and deeply affects the way that individuals and governments negotiate the world.

One of the major questions that Sept. 11 raises is how far are we as a society willing to go to reduce the risks of terrorism. How far will we go to prevent, say, a single successful terror attack on the scale of the World Trade Center disaster every year?

That is the loss of three thousand innocent lives per year. But, just to put it into perspective, this is a small loss in terms of other losses that we regularly tolerate: the loss of over a million lives a year to heart disease, over 40,000 lives a year in automobile accidents, more than 6,000 lives a year in pedestrians killed by motor vehicles.

Why are we willing to tolerate these and other losses, surely many preventable, at the same time we are willing to spend enormous amounts of money, restrict our freedoms and introduce many inconveniences in our life to reduce the risk of terrorism? Psychology offers a few suggestions.

First, people respond with much more fear to certain types of threats. Particularly strong fear is elicited by threats that are catastrophic in impact, uncontrollable, unpredictable and produced by human as opposed to natural forces.

Terrorism meets all of these conditions. It mobilizes all of our fears, rational and irrational. Even at the rate of one World Trade Center-scale attack a year, we are still more likely to be killed as a pedestrian than as a building occupant in a given year. So one question Sept. 11 raises is how much we should spend to deal with our fears when we can see that, rationally, our fears are out of line with reality. This is a very complex question that is not for psychologists to answer — it is a question of values and, ultimately, of politics.

Second, people generally underestimate the degree to which they will adapt to changes in their lives. One year after the event, for instance, the self-rated quality of life of individuals who became quadriplegic or paraplegic after violent accidents is only modestly lower than that of comparable individuals who, a year previously, won a very large lottery award! We get more accustomed to being rich, or living under highly unfavorable social or physical conditions, than we think we will.

Human beings respond to changes, not to steady states. So when a new risk appears, like terrorism, we respond strongly to it and assume that it will continue to loom in our lives with the importance that it holds now. But experience indicates that people also adapt, more than they think they will, to periodic bombings, as in the London Blitz during World War II, or to chronic threats of terrorism, as in Northern Ireland, Israel or Sri Lanka. That is not to say that people celebrate these risks or show no concern about them, nor that these risks do not take a toll on the quality of their lives. Rather, they assume their modest place among the many other risks of life.

We have to make some hard decisions. To what degree should our public policy be shaped by irrationally exaggerated fears and to the fears of the moment which will abate, at least by adaptation, on their own? It is not unreasonable for the government to do things which can be justified as ways to reduce the fear of the American population, even if the fears are exaggerated. The question is, how far should we go down this line?

At Penn’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict we address these and other issues raised by ethnopolitical conflict in the 21st century. It is not our job to make the difficult political and value decisions that individuals and governments must make. Rather, we work to understand what can be understood about conflict issues, and to inform the authorities and the public about what we do know.

Paul Rozin is a professor of psychology and associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. Clark McCauley is an adjunct professor of psychology, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College, and director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict.

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