Terrorist Groups Aced the Deindividuation Test

Terrorism is broadly defined by the United States Department of Defense as "the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

Terrorism in the US is a formidable threat, hovering real and large over the social security of the population and political order within the government. Groups such as Al-Qaeda have employed the tactic of utilizing the deindividuation effect to push their members past their self-imposed limits of behaviors.

Al-Qaeda is notorious for suicidal attacks on civilian and military targets, much often through bombing, to create completely pure Muslim countries, cut off from the rest of the world - who are considered impurity. Their most famous attack is on the World Trade Center in New York on September 9, 2001, otherwise known as the 9/11 event.

Al-Qaeda establish training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or Sudan, where they utilize the method of alienation. The trainees are forced in interact within an enclosed area and assume a group identity, whose supreme leader is always to be obeyed. The idea that the US was an enemy, and martyrdom was the most prestigious way to "carry out God's will" against America is spoon-fed to the members day after day, until they embrace that ideology as their own.

The training creates the foundation for the effect of deindividuation to take place, and thus explains the numerous suicidal bombings whose drive would normally exceed the understanding of a standard citizen.