Suicide bombing as motivated cognition

According to University of Toronto sociology professor Robert Brym, revenge motivates suicide bombers.

Contrary to what most academic research has shown, says Brym, "revenge and retaliation seem to be the principal animus driving this suicide bombing campaign. We see this when we examine when attacks occur, what people say about why they're taking place and when we look at the actual costs and benefits gained."
Brym and his research team created a database of collective violence events that occurred during the second intifada, the term generally used to describe the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in the fall of 2000. The team collected data on 138 attacks from existing databases, Hebrew and Arabic newspapers and the New York Times. They then mined the database for 128 variables, examining individual motives, organizational rationales and events that led up to each attack...
By examining statements made by bombers, their families or representatives from organizations they claimed to be working for, the authors found that attacks were not generally governed by a strategic logic, as is often believed to be the case, but were motivated by a desire for revenge. By examining events that preceded each specific attack, they found that particular Israeli actions such as killings prompted most attacks. "For the most part," they write, bombers "gave up their lives to avenge the killing of a close relative, as retribution for specific attacks against the Palestinian people or as payback for perceived attacks against Islam."
Even at the organizational level -- when attacks were organized by groups like Hamas -- where strategic concerns might be assumed to be more common, six out of ten rationales focused on avenging specific Israeli actions...
This suicide bombing campaign simply isn't working in the sense that the Palestinians are not realizing any strategic gains as a result, says Brym. On the other side of the conflict, he says, "Israeli acts of oppression are also counter-productive...
"From a utilitarian point of view, the conflict is irrational. It doesn't bring about intended results for either side. The idea of laying blame on one side or the other doesn't get us very far, analytically speaking. Unless it's understood as an interaction, it can't be understood fully -- or resolved."

I blogged in 2004 on research indicating that suicide bombers are not insane, but motivated by revenge. Given that humans appear to have a neurological mechanism that rewards a desire for revenge, the next operational question I'd like answered is what specifically triggers revenge. What cultures and contexts promote the expression of revenge?

Jessica Stern makes an interesting comment with regard to anger and humiliation:

One way to summarize the distinction that helps us understand Al Qaeda is to say that bin Laden's objectives are really expressive, not instrumental. Those groups that have set instrumental objectives are not going to carry out catastrophic attacks, because such attacks will never achieve those objectives, whereas groups that are expressing anger can continuously change their mission statement. If you have a broad one, based on rage, one day you can say that it's to force U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia. The next it can be about Iraqi children. The third day it can be about the Palestinians. That's a way to appeal to a much wider public.
Another thing about expressive terrorism is that it enables cynical leaders to attract youth who feel humiliated, culturally or personally.

Further research into terrorism and motivated cognition would appear to be a promising avenue. On a side note, consider how motivated reasoning may apply to the rationalization of terrorist acts. In other paradigms, religious correctness may be another validity metric used in evaluating what acts are permissible and what are not.

In an influential review, Ziva Kunda (1990) summarized several decades of research supporting the role of motivation in cognitive processes such as decision-making and attitude change. She claimed that motivation has been shown to affect reasoning in a number of paradigms, including cognitive dissonance reduction, beliefs about others on whom one's own outcomes depend, and evaluation of scientific evidence related to one's own outcomes. Her analysis of this research led further to the conclusion that motivated reasoning is only possible when the individual is able to generate apparently reasonable justifications for the motivated belief; this happens, however, outside of the person's conscious awareness. This is achieved via bias in accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs.