What Makes a Terrorist? Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ Lay Perceptions of Risk Factors and Their Consequences for Counterterrorism Policy Support

The paper, in plain language

Studying the folk theory of radicalization

Decades of research ask why people become terrorists; almost none asks what ordinary citizens believe about it — even though those beliefs are the soil counterterrorism policy grows in. With Milan Obaidi, Ann-Cathrin Coenen, Vilde Vasseljen and Paul Gill, I had British Muslims and non-Muslims describe the person they imagined at risk of committing terrorism — a minority-group member in the first study, White British right-wing and left-wing targets in the second — and then measured their support for social interventions versus stricter law enforcement.

Perception decides policy

People held multifactorial views, blending individual factors like psychopathology with structural ones like discrimination and adverse childhoods. But the blend mattered: perceiving psychopathology predicted support for punitive enforcement, while perceiving structural hardship predicted support for social programmes. Non-Muslims imagined the minority-group target as far more religious than Muslims did — a large gap that recurred when judging White targets, suggesting Muslims genuinely weigh religion as less relevant to terrorism rather than defending their in-group. The imagined right-wing extremist drew more support for harsh enforcement than the left-wing one.

Why it matters

Lay perceptions appeared to overweight psychopathology relative to what the research evidence supports — and that misperception has consequences, since it channels support toward punitive approaches. The findings speak directly to programmes like the UK's Prevent, which depend on how communities perceive at-risk individuals and which have been criticized for stigmatizing Muslims. The data are correlational and drawn from online panels; the paper calls for experiments that manipulate these perceptions directly.