Investigating the Role of Morality in Lone-Actor Terrorist Motivations and Attack Severity

Lindsay Hahn, Katherine Schibler, Zena Toh, Tahleen A. Lattimer, John O’Leary and Ramón Spaaij

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2025, vol. 37, issue 2, 169-185

Abstract: Extending previous work suggesting that group-based extremist violence is morally-motivated, we investigated whether lone-actor terrorists are similarly morally-driven, and if so, whether their moral motivations may predict the severity of their attacks. Examining a database containing details of n = 121 lone-actor terrorist attacks, we applied a coding scheme derived from moral foundations theory to extract the main moral motivation driving each violent lone-actor, if any. Using the results of the content analysis, we then examined whether actors’ moral motivations predicted the injuries and fatalities associated with their attacks. Findings suggested: (1) ingroup loyalty-motivated attacks were 2.42 times deadlier and care-motivated acts were 10.73 times more injurious compared to acts driven by other motivations, (2) lone-actors were most likely to be driven by binding motivations overall, and (3) lone-actors’ moral motivations largely align with the moral motivation of extremist groups for which they have an affinity. We discuss the utility of moral foundations theory for describing, explaining, and predicting the moral motivations of violent actors.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2023.2282461 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:37:y:2025:i:2:p:169-185

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2023.2282461

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().