The 9/11 effect: Toward a social science of the terrorist threat

Abstract

After 9/11, public attitudes on numerous social issues changed. While many studies have examined post-9/11 attitude trends on specific topics, such as civil liberties or war, few have investigated the scope and variety of these effects. Did the events of 9/11 have a brief effect on a limited number of attitudes, or did they produce numerous, long-term changes in the way Americans think, feel and act? Drawing on a broad range of pre–post-9/11 studies, this review essay begins to answer this question by developing a framework for categorizing these effects and distinguishing short-term changes from long-term ones. The framework is intended to help facilitate an interdisciplinary social scientific research agenda on the effects of 9/11 and other terrorist acts. The essay concludes by explaining the social importance of the public's response to terrorism and the need for further research on this topic.

Keywords:

• Civic engagement
• Civil liberties
• Helping behavior
• Ideology
• Islam
• Patriotism
• September 11
• Terrorism
• Trust
• War
• Social science

Acknowledgements

I would like to convey my gratitude to Stan Kaplowitz and Peter Miller for their helpful comments and suggestions on this paper. My thanks also go to SSJ Editor N. Prabha Unnithan and the three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and guidance on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

1 The purpose of the essay is not to propose a causal explanation for the post-9/11 shifts in attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, but rather to explore and synthesize a wide range of correlations that have been reported across the social sciences. Nevertheless, many studies have and should examine the politics of 9/11 and particularly the Bush Administration's efforts to use the terrorist threat for political and ideological purposes (see, for instance, Jackson, 2005; Kellner, 2004; Merolla & Zechmeister, 2009).

2 Gallup Organization, Terrorism in the United States (accessed online July 18, 2007 at: http://www.galluppoll.com/content/%3Fci=4909%26pg=1); see Kuzma (2000).

3 Gallup Organization, Terrorism in the United States (accessed online July 18, 2007 at: http://www.galluppoll.com/content/%3Fci=4909%26pg=1); see Davis (2007), Moore (2004), and Sjöberg (2005).

4 Other researchers offer different psychological explanations of how people process threat, but make similar predictions about its effects. According to terror management theory (Greenberg et al., 1990), violent attacks, such as those seen on 9/11, heighten people's awareness of “the inevitability and potential finality of death” (Pyszczynski et al., 2006, p. 526). This heightened “mortality salience,” in turn, is known to increase authoritarian tendencies and out-group derogation, as discussed above (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997).

5 Posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychological ailments became a serious problem for many Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 (Ford, Udry, Gleiter, & Chantala, 2003; Herman, Felton, & Susser, 2002; Piotrkowski & Brannen, 2002; Schlenger et al., 2002; Schuster et al., 2001; Silver, Holman, McIntosh, Poulin, & Gil-Rivas, 2002). Mental health researchers also showed, however, that the various symptoms of psychological harm diminished substantially over time, returning to near pre-9/11 levels in six months or less (Stein et al., 2004; Silver et al., 2002; Ford et al., 2003).

6 The heightened stress after 9/11 was also shown to increase the number of heart attacks, as well as the use of cigarettes and alcohol (Allegra, Mostashari, Rothman, Milano, & Cochrane, 2005; Cardenas, Williams, Wilson, Fanouraki, & Singh, 2003; Richman, Wislar, Flaherty, Fendrich, & Rospenda, 2004; Vlahov, Galea, Ahern, Resnick, & Kilpatrick, 2004). Holman et al. (2008) found that stress responses to 9/11 were associated with a significant increase in cardiovascular ailments over a three-year period following the attacks, even after controlling for pre-9/11 health status factors and a number of demographic variables.

7 Gallup Organization, Gallup's Pulse of Democracy (accessed online August 17, 2007 at: http://www.galluppoll.com/content/default.aspx%3Fci=27286%26pg=1).

8 After the attacks, the size of the evening news audience more than doubled, from 13 percent of American adults in early September 2001 to more than 26 percent in the first five days following 9/11. Nielsen Media Research reported that 79.5 million people watched the news on the night of the attacks; to put this number in perspective, roughly the same number of viewers watched the January 2001 Super Bowl (De Moraes, 2001). Within one week, however, the evening news audience returned to near pre-9/11 levels (15 percent) and never rose more than 1.5 percent in the next seven months (Althaus, 2002).

9 These ratings were based on general polling questions with dichotomous alternatives, such as “should” or “should not,” “favor” or “oppose” and so forth.

10 This figure (69 percent) represents an average across six national polls that used comparable questions; the findings from the individual polls included 74, 61, 55, 63, 79 and 79 percent (Huddy et al., 2002).

11 Support for the personal-freedoms tradeoff dropped only 6 percent in the eight months after the attacks and held just above the pre-9/11 level, fluctuating between 61 and 64 percent, until May 2006 (Best et al., 2006).

12 For FBI hate crime statistics, see the online source: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm%23hate; for a study of hate crime in the wake of 9/11, see Byers and Jones (2007).

13 Gallup Organization, Gallup's Pulse of Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007 at http://www.galluppoll.com/.

14 The indicator dropped six points between February 1999 and September 2000, rose five points in March 2001 and dropped again by only two points in June 2001 (Gallup Organization, Gallup's Pulse of Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007 at http://www.galluppoll.com/).

15 Gallup Organization, Gallup's Pulse of Democracy: Immigration, accessed online on October 5, 2007 at http://www.galluppoll.com/.

16 The most publicized attempts during this period were the Christmas Day bomber who tried to take down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 with explosives, and the failed car bombing in Times Square in 2010.