Aaron Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy

"Explaining the Inexplicable: Suicide Bombers' Motivation as the Quest for Personal Significance"

Arie W. Kruglanski is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award (Career Award), the Senior Humboldt Award, the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and social Psychology (SPSP), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), The Award for Scholarship and Creativity from the Regents of the University of Maryland, and the Revesz Award from the University of Amsterdam.

Professor Kruglanski was also Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and is Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He has served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and associate editor of the American Psychologist.

He has recently served as member of the National Academy of Science panels on counterterrorism, and educational paradigms in homeland security, and is serving on the NAS Board for Cognitive, Social and Sensory Processes. Kruglanski also serves as a co- PI at START (National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism), at the University of Maryland.

Professor Kruglanski's lecture will examine recent analyses of the motivations for suicidal terrorism. This lecture will suggest that heterogeneous factors identified as personal causes of suicidal terrorism (e.g. trauma, humiliation, social exclusion), the various ideological reasons assumed to justify it (e.g. liberation from foreign occupation, defense of one?s nation or religion), and the social pressures brought upon candidates for suicidal terrorism may be profitably subsumed within an integrative framework that explains diverse instances of suicidal terrorism as attempts at significance restoration, significance gain, and prevention of significance loss.