Alien­ation, a belief that mem­ber­ship of a move­ment offers social and psy­cho­log­i­cal rewards (e.g. adven­ture, cama­raderie, a height­ened sense of iden­tity) and the need to take action rather than just talk: three psy­cho­log­i­cal traits that together cre­ate part of the pro­file of those most “open to ter­ror­ist recruit­ment and radicalization”.

In addi­tion to pro­files like that above and dif­fer­ent the­o­ries about what can lead to rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion, this overview of the psy­cho­log­i­cal research into ter­ror­ism also dis­cusses ter­ror man­age­ment the­ory:

Para­dox­i­cally, an uncon­scious fear of death may under­lie much of the moti­va­tion behind ter­ror­ism and reac­tions to ter­ror­ism, main­tains psy­chol­o­gist Tom Pyszczyn­ski [et al.]. Pyszczyn­ski devel­oped “ter­ror man­age­ment the­ory,” which holds that peo­ple use cul­ture and reli­gion to pro­tect them­selves from a fear of death that lies on the fringes of awareness.

Across dozens of stud­ies, the team has induced thoughts of death by sub­lim­i­nally pre­sent­ing peo­ple with death-related stim­uli or by insert­ing a delay-and-distraction task between a reminder of death and people’s assess­ment of its effects. This sub­lim­i­nal prompt­ing induces peo­ple to psy­cho­log­i­cally defend them­selves against death in ways that bear lit­tle sur­face rela­tion­ship to the prob­lem of death, Pyszczynski’s team has found. These include cling­ing to their cul­tural iden­ti­ties, work­ing hard to live up to their culture’s val­ues and going to great lengths to defend those val­ues. (Con­versely, the inves­ti­ga­tors have shown that get­ting peo­ple to con­sciously con­tem­plate their mor­tal­ity increases their inten­tion to engage in life-enhancing behav­iors, such as exercise.)

via Mind Hacks