ABSTRACT
At some point in their radicalization process, all lone wolf terrorists decided to plan and execute their attacks alone. This decision is not random, as it may represent systematic attitudinal, psychological, and sociological differences between lone wolf and group-based terrorists. Therefore, examining why individuals prefer to work alone may be the key in understanding lone wolf terrorism as a phenomenon on its own right, related to, but qualitatively different from, group-based terrorism. Those that conduct research on work performance have examined a similar problem—individuals that do not like to work with others. In this literature, these individuals are called “employees with lone wolf tendencies.” In this chapter, I apply the research surrounding the concept of lone wolf tendencies to the lone wolf terrorism phenomenon. Particularly, I examine how this construct can help us better understand the decision to kill alone, and importantly, the process that leads individuals vulnerable to extremist ideologies.
