The psychology of religion has a vital role to play in understanding religiously motivated violence, and thus contributing to its prevention. Psychological pathology alone fails to explain either terrorists’ actions or the fundamentalist religiosity that is co-opted as its legitimation. Normal social psychological processes such as uncertainty reduction, terror management, social identity, meaning making (through religion), in combination with cognitive factors such as intratextuality and low integrative complexity, provide a more adequate understanding of the radicalization of young people, some of whom go on to commit violence against hated out-groups.
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