The DOI matches its Crossref record; 104 of the 104 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches
Abstract
This article reviews the state of the art of available theories and data regarding the psychology of terrorism. Data and theoretical material were gathered from the world’s unclassified literature. Multiple theories and some demographic data have been published, but very few controlled empirical studies have been conducted investigating the psychological bases of terrorism. The field is largely characterized by theoretical speculation based on subjective interpretation of anecdotal observations. Moreover, most studies and theories fail to take into account the great heterogeneity of terrorists. Many practical, conceptual, and psychological barriers have slowed progress in this important field. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of terrorism studies, preliminary reports suggest that modifiable social and psychological factors contribute to the genesis of the terrorist mind-set. Psychological scholarship could possibly mitigate the risk of catastrophic attack by initiating the long overdue scientific study of terrorist mentalities.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Williams, J. B. W., & First, M. (2013) · Encyclopedia of Social Work · doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.104 · Cited by 109,519
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Widiger, T. A. (2000) · Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol. 3. · doi:10.1037/10518-009 · Cited by 19,744
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Freud, S. (1953) · Cited by 17,730
Theory of games and economic behavior
(2019) · 100 Years of Math Milestones · doi:10.1090/mbk/121/32 · Cited by 16,632
Fanon, F. (2000) · Posthumanism · doi:10.1007/978-1-137-05194-3_4 · Cited by 7,493
Erikson, E. H. (1959) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 6,863
Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Bandura, A. (1973) · Stanford Law Review · doi:10.2307/1227918 · Cited by 4,302
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
N., E., von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1945) · The Journal of Philosophy · doi:10.2307/2019327 · Cited by 4,006
(1991) · Cited by 3,844
Dollard, J., Miller, N. E., Doob, L. W., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939) · Yale University Press eBooks · doi:10.1037/10022-000 · Cited by 3,774
Cited by
The political economy of terrorism
(2006) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.43-5994 · Cited by 462
A false dichotomy? Mental illness and lone-actor terrorism.
Corner, E., & Gill, P. (2015) · Law and Human Behavior · doi:10.1037/lhb0000102 · Cited by 362
Group morality and intergroup relations: Cross-cultural and experimental evidence
Cohen, T. R., Montoya, R. M., & Insko, C. A. (2006) · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · doi:10.1177/0146167206291673 · Cited by 163
The economic impact of cyber terrorism
Hua, J., & Bapna, S. (2013) · The Journal of Strategic Information Systems · doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2012.10.004 · Cited by 75
Metadata
- Authors
- Victoroff, J.
- Venue
- Journal of Conflict Resolution
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2005-02
- Volume
- 49
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3-42
- ISSN
- 0022-0027 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-8766
- OpenAlex
- W2130534342
- Cited by
- 678
- References
- 104
- FWCI
- 43.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0022002704272040
- The paper
- Victoroff, J. (2005). The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches. Journal of Conflict Resolution. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002704272040
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
