ABSTRACT
Psychologists have debated who is a terrorist since the earliest conversations about terrorism and psychology. An intuitive view of terrorism is that because terrorist attacks are so “extreme”, the people who engage in such attacks must also display this characteristic. In the early 1970s and 1980s, for example, several psychologists argued that terrorists were either sociopaths or psychopaths, or that terrorism, in general, was an outlet for those with underlying mental illnesses. A scientifically sound conclusion that terrorists have no common personality traits must be based on many comparative studies of terrorists from different countries and functions, using standard psychological tests and clinical interviews. Emily Corner and Paul Gill also sought to disaggregate what specific mental illnesses were prevalent in sample. Smallest space analysis have been used extensively in criminology and forensic psychology to develop typologies of actors, and they are a mathematical way of identifying groups, or themes, of behaviors that are likely to co-occur at the same time.
