I've always been interested in learning what motivates people to do things that would be considered extreme to the general population of that culture. Why do people kill other people? There are many different motivating factors that could answer that question. But what kind of motivators are present for someone to kill another person they don't know and have no personal problem with?
I read an interesting article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100310/ts_csm/286499 about a US-born woman that is described as having become gradually radicalized by Islamic contacts through the internet. She is a middle-aged American woman that had contact with Muslim extremists and was given an order to kill a man in Sweden. She was preparing to do so when police got wind of the conspiracy and arrested her. She agreed to marry a co-conspirator so he could travel more easily and have better access to travel in Europe, which is also an example of extreme behavior that doesn't have a blatant motivator.
All of her actions seem without obvious motivation. Religion doesn't seem to be the strongest motivator in this case because none of her comments mention God, converting to Islam, or anything that could be tied with extreme religious belifs. The little I know about the incident from the article seems to me that she could possibly be motivated by a need for affiliation. What I infer from the article is that she is a single, middle-aged woman with plenty of time on her hands to spend perusing the internet making contacts with Islamic extremists. She might feel interpersonal rejection from her peers in her own culture, which is a typical fear of people with high needs for affiliation, and because she was unable to gain approval with people in her culture, sought approval elsewhere and via the internet.
This woman also seems to display long-term goal setting behaviors. All of this communication with extremists, planning, and marrying a co-conspirator was done over a period of time in order to achieve the goal of killing the man in Sweden. These behaviors done before the long-term goal was reached were mini, short-term goals that would have provided enough reinforcement to keep her going with the end result, long-term goal in mind. Constant communication and smaller steps to take before her desired result provided motivation to continue toward the goal. It also helped internalize her goal to become more intrinsically motivated. The article said: "In June, 2008, LaRose posted a comment on YouTube under the moniker "JihadJane" saying that she was "desperate to do something somehow to help" suffering Muslims, according to the indictment." which indicates that she was somehow intrinsically motivated toward extremist thinking to the point of plotting and intending to murder someone.
All of this seems to make sense with what we've been learning in class, but I'm still left wondering how all of these motivators and reinforcers could be enough to make someone intend to murder another person and having adopted these extremist views at a later age in life. I would be able to understand it more from a motivational standpoint if she had been immersed in this culture and extreme thinking her whole life, but she was born in the US and adopted these views from internet communications. It doesn't seem like enough motivation to commit murder. But, perhaps this disturbing phenomenon is why the beginning of the article says how even experts are baffled by this sort of extreme behavior.
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