The more time that passes since Sept. 11, the less likely the public will be supportive of military actions like an attack on Iraq, according to University of Colorado at Boulder researchers.
CU-Boulder researchers from the psychology and political science departments conducted three separate experiments exploring individuals' responses to reported terrorist attacks against the United States.
In each experiment they found people responded with an increasing level of conflict to terrorist acts when they were repeated -- rather than just a single act.
People viewed an initial terrorist attack as an isolated event not worthy of strong retaliation, but with repeated attacks this view changed and the level of retaliation escalated, according to psychology Professor Alice Healy, the lead author of the study.
"What this says is that people's responses to these types of things are not static, but rather dynamic," Healy said. "Anybody polling the public, especially after an event like a terrorist attack, shouldn't just do it following the event, because the responses will most certainly change."
The researchers' findings appear in the paper "Terrorists and Democrats: Individual Reactions to International Attacks," in the September 2002 issue of the journal Political Psychology. CU-Boulder researchers Joshua Hoffman and Lyle Bourne of the psychology department and Frank Beer of political science also were authors on the paper.
While participants increased their level of retaliation with repeated terrorist attacks, they were less inclined to respond with hostility at first. With the war against terrorism ongoing and the possibility of a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, people may fall back into the pattern of supporting less conflict, according to Beer.
"If there are no more terrorist attacks, people are not necessarily going to escalate their response," Beer said. In other words, the further removed people are from Sept. 11, the less likely they are to support combative responses to Iraq.
"This is why President Bush is having trouble getting people to respond to Iraq," Beer said.
The experiments examined the differences in individuals' responses to attacks depending on whether the attackers were terrorists or military, were from a democratic or nondemocratic regime, occurred here or abroad, and whether the attack was on a military or cultural target.
While the studies were conducted before Sept. 11, 2001, the researchers believe their findings will help determine the factors that guide public reactions to terrorist attacks. The studies focused on how U.S. college students understood and reacted to episodes of international conflict. Participants were asked to read and respond to simulated media reports of acts of terrorism against the United States.
In all the experiments, the initial reactions of participants to attacks were less combative than the attacks themselves, but escalated over successive rounds. Participants appeared to forgive an initial attack but became less tolerant as attacks persisted, according to Healy.
The researchers found that men responded with more conflict to an attack by a democratic adversary than a nondemocratic adversary, whereas women responded with more conflict to an attack by a nondemocratic adversary than a democratic adversary, especially after the initial rounds of attack.
They also found that people reacted with the same rate of escalated conflict to attacks on foreign soil as attacks on domestic soil.
"This was a psychology-based experiment looking to find answers to political questions," Healy said.