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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋu |
2004.10.10 (The Wall Street Journal, courtesy SITE) – The woman had never helped herself to so much as a paper clip from the office, but when she visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona it was as if she had had a character transplant.
A sign explained that, over the years, so many people had picked up chunks of the petrified wood scattered across the terrain that anything smaller than the gigantic logs on the desert floor could soon be gone, and it admonished visitors to therefore refrain from this illegal act.
The woman's reaction? She told her boyfriend they had better pick up some pieces this very visit or there wouldn't be any left.
This reaction stunned her boyfriend, but it shouldn't have. In study after study, social psychologists have shown that it is the group with which a person identifies, not individual personality, that often determines behavior, says Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University, who describes this incident in one of his studies. The upright woman inferred, correctly, that pocketing bits of petrified wood was normal behavior for visitors to the forest, and wanted to conform to the group norm.
Superficially, this is just peer pressure writ large. But as scientists are learning, the groups with which people identify are fungible (the woman never thought of herself as a member of the "Petrified Forest visitors" group). To understand why people do as they do, you need to look at the group with which they identify at the time.
That realization is shaping scientists' understanding of suicide bombers, whose numbers have soared. Who are they? Not the cowardly psychopaths or sociopaths you might expect. "There is little to no evidence that they are mentally unbalanced," says Todd Stewart, a retired Air Force general who now directs the Program for International and Homeland Security at Ohio State University. From the Sept. 11 attackers to 'Palestinian' suicide bombers to al Qaeda terrorists, they are educated, fairly well off and "not necessarily from fanatically religious families," he says.
Update 2014: Potential terrorist bombers seem to have evolved somewhat from the description posed by Gen. Stewart. See "Islamist-Jihadist Global Terror:", particularly Child Sacrifice (Indoctrination, Schoolbooks and Child Soldiers) and Islamist-Jihadist Global Terror: Muslim Martyrs, They Live To Die (2002.04.11a)
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