Attitudes towards terrorist rehabilitation programs: psychological mediating and moderating mechanisms

ABSTRACT

Rehabilitation programs for terrorists have gained notoriety. Some issues still require thorough investigation, such as the social support they receive. The present research aims to examine the attitudes towards rehabilitation programs for terrorist offenders and the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying these attitudes. To this end, two studies were conducted: the first study evaluated the mediating mechanisms (negative feelings and threats; N = 407) and the second study analyzed the moderating mechanisms (social dominance orientation, system justification, and political orientation; N = 444). In both cases, the type of offender was manipulated (criminal vs. nationalist terrorist vs. Islamist terrorist offenders) and different attitudes were assessed (general support, incapacitation, treatment effectiveness, and mandated treatment). The results showed less support for rehabilitation programs for Islamist terrorists than for other offenders. Moreover, Islamist terrorists pose a more significant terrorist threat while criminals pose a greater realistic threat, which led to less favorable attitudes towards rehabilitation programs. Finally, individuals with more conservative ideologies had stronger negative attitudes towards programs for Islamist terrorists. We discuss these findings within the framework of integrated threat and system justification theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Rehabilitation programs
• terrorism
• attitudes
• integrated threat theory
• system justification theory

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support from the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies – COES (ANID/FONDAP/15130009).

Data availability statement

All data and supplemental materials can be found at https://osf.io/tf3cu/

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Ethics statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the University of Cordoba research ethics committee (ref. CEIH-22-8). The participants provided their informed consent to participate in this study.

Notes

1 We considered a third hypothesis involving dehumanization as a mediating variable in the preregistration. Since the results were not significant and given the length of the article, the hypothesis, measure and results are presented in the Supplementary Material – SM1.

2 Given the large number of excluded participants, the analyses were repeated without excluding participants. These analyses showed similar results.

3 The MANOVA was repeated including gender as an independent variable. The results showed non-significant results for the gender variable (V = 0.01, F_(4,395) 0.90, p .461) and for the interaction between the manipulation and gender (V = 0.03, F_(8,792) 1.27, p .256).

4 Other hypotheses, including institutional trust and identity fusion as moderating variables, were considered in preregistration. Since the results were not significant, and given the length of the article, the hypotheses, measures and results are presented in the Supplementary Material – SM1.

5 The analyses were repeated with the total sample, without exclusions, which revealed similar results.

6 The MANOVA was repeated including gender as an independent variable. The results showed significant results for the gender variable (V = 0.03, F_(4,431) 2.75, p .028) but not for the interaction between the manipulation and gender (V = 0.02, F_(8,864) 1.22, p .286). Particularly, Bonferroni corrected comparisons showed that women presented more general support (M_women = 4.70, SD = 1.25; M_men = 4.33, SD = 1.49; p .007), less support for incapacitation (M_women = 2.39, SD = 1.16; M_men = 2.74, SD = 1.37; p .007), and more treatment effectiveness (M_women = 4.02, SD = 0.96; M_men = 3.69, SD = 1.09; p .001) than men.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as part of project PID2020-116646RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ and by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) through the program FONDECYT Postdoctorado 2020 (Ref. 3200031 - Mario Sainz).