We agree with Lankford (Reference Lankford2013c) that one cannot understand suicide terrorism without considering individual factors as well as contextual ones, and must distinguish perpetrator from audience effects. Nevertheless, although being willing to kill oneself is a necessary condition for executing suicide bombings, this need not imply that what really drives suicide bombers, rampage shooters, and other self-destructive killers is simply suicidality proper, conveniently disguised as political terrorism in cultural and religious contexts that ban individual suicide. Firstly, in the case studies he uses to make the latter point, Lankford not only seeks to estimate reliable predictors of suicide – such as prior suicide attempts, expressed death wishes, and debilitating depression – but also includes many “soft” risk factors such as the deaths of parents or siblings in childhood, unemployment, divorce because of infertility, and even disciplinary problems in school. Without knowing the base rates of both kinds of factors among the general population, it is impossible to evaluate the degree to which they lead people to commit suicide, let alone suicide terrorism, particularly when considered in the often war-torn, occupied settings from which Lankford draws many cases.

Just as a suicidal mental condition is insufficient to drive suicide terrorism, so it may likely be unnecessary. The case of Anders Behring Breivik – who shot 77 teenagers at a political youth camp after seeking to blow up the Norwegian governmental building – demonstrates the uncertainty of clinical judgments based on interpretations of written or limited data records. Although Lankford concludes that Breivik was clearly suicidal because his writings named the plight of conservative “brothers and sisters” being pushed toward suicide, and because he anticipated dying during his terror mission, a final forensic-psychiatric assessment (following extensive clinical interviews and 24 hour observations) not only concluded that Breivik was not psychotic, but found absolutely no evidence that he was suicidal (NTB, Norwegian News Agency 2012). Breivik expressed fear of getting killed by the police on being taken captive.

What clearly is necessary for committing any such acts of terrorism is the willingness to kill civilian others. We agree that this homicidal intent is likely fueled by rage and that cultural and ideological endorsement facilitates suicide terrorism. But both respond to the political reality in which a community finds itself. For example, Pape (Reference Pape2005) argues that suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon ebbed and flowed with the absence and presence of the Israeli occupation (whereas suicidal intent presumably remained fairly stable). Dismissing this as simply being the result of increased access to weapons and enemy targets ignores the role of the political context in fueling rage towards an enemy group: relationally motivated moral outrage (Rai & Fiske Reference Rai and Fiske2011) that they are subordinating, humiliating, discriminating against, victimizing, persecuting, and killing us, or threatening to do so, culminating in the intended killing of perceived enemy civilians.

Such political context effects may play a role even in cases of remote identification with group members suffering at times of conflict or oppression (Sheehy-Skeffington Reference Sheehy-Skeffington2009). For example, we recently found that support for a variety of terrorism-related statements among Muslim citizens living in Denmark, ranging from general understanding of terrorism to personal willingness to use violence to defend Islam, was predicted by perceptions of general Muslim suffering and was mediated by the anger this suffering evoked (Obaidi et al., in preparation). These victimization-by-proxy effects were even stronger among Danish-born than among foreign-born Muslims (Sidanius et al. Reference Sidanius, Levin, Obaidi, Pratto and Thomsen2013), and held even when controlling for the effects of personal experiences of discrimination – a structural factor indicated in radicalization among British Muslims (Travis Reference Travis2008).

In understanding how individual factors play into these processes, such that some people in a specific context endorse or commit acts of terrorism while others in the same context do not, we must go beyond the biographical and psychopathological to the relational and ideological/political. The degrees to which people like, want, and seek relationships that are communal, hierarchical, or egalitarian underpin many psychological phenomena (Thomsen Reference Thomsen2010). One particularly potent dimension of relational motives is social dominance orientation (SDO): the motivation to create and maintain between-group dominance hierarchies (Pratto et al. Reference Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth and Malle1994; Reference Pratto, Sidanius and Levin2006).

Individuals high in SDO support hierarchical intergroup structures, in which some groups dominate others, whereas individuals low in SDO favor intergroup equality. These motives, and the cultural context that embeds them, influence both the societal endorsement of suicide terrorism, and the attitudes of those willing to commit it themselves. For example, by looking at the negative relationship between SDO and support for terrorism against the West among Lebanese and Syrians, our work has demonstrated that counter-dominance is an important ideological motivation undergirding support for terrorism against dominant groups (Henry et al. Reference Henry, Sidanius, Levin and Pratto2005; Levin et al. Reference Levin, Henry, Pratto and Sidanius2003; Pratto et al. Reference Pratto, Sidanius, Bou Zeineddine, Kteily and Levin2014).

Conversely, among members of dominant majority groups in the West, the desire for group-based dominance increases support for violence, wars of conquests, and terrorist acts in retaliation against a threatening group or country (Ho et al. Reference Ho, Sidanius, Pratto, Levin, Thomsen, Kteily and Sheehy-Skeffington2012; Thomsen et al. Reference Thomsen, Green and Sidanius2008). Further supporting the crucial interaction of individual relational motives and the structural context, the effect of group identification on terror support among subordinate groups (e.g., of Arab identification among Lebanese) is particularly strong among those who are low in SDO, whereas identification with dominant groups (e.g., national identification among Americans) particularly increases support for violence among those high in SDO (Kteily et al., in preparation; Levin et al Reference Levin, Henry, Pratto and Sidanius2003; Thomsen et al., in preparation). Again, Breivik's self-described radical identification with a Christian in-group and desire to preserve its dominance would fit this picture.

In sum, we concur that it is crucial to consider both the person and the situation in understanding suicide terrorism. Research and theory in the social dominance tradition explicates how individual differences in relational motives interact dynamically with the socio-structural context in shaping people's attitudes towards actions of group-based violence. Just as social psychology involves more than the situation, and individual differences are more than the psychopathological, so the psychology of suicide terrorism is more than simply the psychology of suicide.