Lankford (Reference Lankford2013c) challenges the perspective of suicide terrorists being “psychologically normal” (and not truly suicidal) by stating that they are much like other individuals committing suicide, that is, affected by mental health problems, personal crises, coercion, fear of an approaching enemy, or hidden self-destructive urges. On his view, suicide terrorists are suicidal and therefore not psychologically equivalent to those whose motivation is to sacrifice their lives for a certain cause or entity. He goes on to present interview records with suicide terrorists, including one with Mohammed Atta, the ringleader and one of the pilots of the 9/11 massacre, who (according to Lankford) struggled with severe psychological risk factors for suicide, including personal crisis. Lankford's general claim is that the primary motive for past terrorist attacks was not ideology and/or political or religious commitment, but rather, the suicidal personality that suicide terrorists share with conventional suicidal persons.

This approach to understanding the development of suicide terrorists' behavior and psychology underestimates a key phenomenon of the human mental architecture; that is, self-deception. Trivers (Reference Trivers2011) argues that self-deception is a fundamental mechanism of the human mind. It is ultimately designed for the purpose of deceiving others by obfuscating the truth, thus making detection of deception by others more difficult. While deception is cognitively demanding and can therefore be detected, it may be adaptive to suppress information from the conscious and move it into the unconscious. Such a process is typically associated with the rationalization that the lie is true, and it happens without people's conscious awareness (von Hippel & Trivers Reference von Hippel and Trivers2011). One of the consequences is the reduction of the cognitive load of the deceiver, who then expresses overconfidence in a certain belief.

Religion is especially prone to being a vehicle for self-deception, as it is one of the ways to make people believe that they are “greater” than they actually are (Triandis Reference Triandis2009). It helps people to deal with uncertainty and with things they cannot explain. It is easier to adhere to the belief that a higher power is responsible for the happenings, and justifies certain behavior, than to deal with complex facts which would render them absurd. The case of Mohammed Atta is a typical example of self-deception as a major driver of suicidal terroristic behavior. Atta was reportedly after glory, but he did not admit that to himself, so he dressed his motives in religion (Triandis Reference Triandis2009). The cognitive simplicity in rationalizing the true motive behind Atta's action is obvious, and may even have been rewarding for him. Looking back, an observer may get the impression that self-deception had led Atta into a personal disaster with similar consequences for many (uninvolved) others. So why should the mechanism of self-deception (and hence overconfidence) have caused all this if there was no benefit associated with the consequences? In Atta's case, it was certainly satisfying for him to cherish the illusion that he was doing God's work (rendering him into a martyr), and this in particular distinguishes him markedly from others who commit conventional (or unconventional) suicide without being driven by ideology and/or religion.

Considering the costs and benefits of suicidal missions, the question arises as to why (according to Lankford) suicide terrorists should be much like others who commit conventional suicide, if motives were not markedly affected by the conviction that it were for a great good. Suicide terrorism is typically characterized by violence against an out-group, that is, individuals or groups that do not share the same ideology or commitment (“the unbelievers”). Targeting suicidal terroristic acts toward an out-group, including the strategic planning of it, doesn't make sense if it were not influenced by the overconfidence that such a mission will eventually pay off, not necessarily for the individual but (at least) for the aims of the in-group (though in the case of martyrdom it is both). With reference to Osama bin Laden's post-9/11 argument that the pay-off from suicide terrorists sacrificing their lives was the promise of an indirect “benefit” for the sake of their countrymen, Lankford seems to imply that such an adjuration cannot be the sole reason for a suicidal terroristic mission. However, since Hamilton's (Reference Hamilton1964) seminal work on inclusive fitness, it is well known that organisms can raise their overall genetic success by altruistic social behavior, thus increasing their genes in the next generation. In other words, on the genetic level, there doesn't have to be an immediate reward for the individual; but the genetic benefit can also be achieved via one's in-group sharing more genes with the individual than with an out-group. Moreover, the definition of who forms the in-group versus who forms the out-group is particularly narrow in fundamentalism, and may thus explain why it is more pronounced in collectivist cultures with relatively simple and tight bounds.

Suicide terrorism is most often associated with Islam, and because of Lankford's examples of Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 attacks, we also discuss the link between self-deception and religious commitment in this context. However, it should be noted that terrorism is certainly not restricted to Islam but has occurred historically in Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism as well. Our argumentation follows that of Kruglanski and Fishman (Reference Kruglanski and Fishman2006) who view terrorism as an “effective tool” in fighting a superior “enemy,” and self-deception may be the cognitive mechanism that is used by an individual or a group to “justify” related actions. Such justification may especially affect individuals who see a large difference between themselves and the potential victims in terms of religion, social class, ethnicity, language, and ideology (Triandis Reference Triandis2009).

Suicide terrorism is characterized by cognitive simplicity and megalomaniac self-deception, both of which are intertwined and allow people to “rationalize” their actions. While this may be particularly true for people who are estranged from society, it also applies to many of those who believe that we (whoever “we” may be) must win the “war on terrorism” (Triandis Reference Triandis2009). In short, self-deception on what is “best” for the group occurs on both sides of the conflict, and it will continue until we face this fact and evaluate the complexity of terrorism in relationship to cultural diversity.