In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror

This text explores the emotions of despair, fear and anger that arose after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the Autumn of 2001. The authors analyse reactions to the attacks through the lens of terror management theory, an existenial psychological model that explains why humans react the way they do to the threat of death and how this reaction influences their post-threat cognition and emotion. The theory provides ways to understand and reduce terrorism's effect and possibly find resolutions to conflicts involving terrorism. The authors focus primarily on the reaction in the US to the 9/11 attack, but their model is applicable to all instances of terrorism, and they expand their discussion to include the Israeli-Palastinian conflict.