Modeling affective and cognitive responses to soft-target terrorism over time
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Modeling affective and cognitive responses to soft‑target terrorism over time Matt Baucum1 · Richard S. John1 · William Burns2 · Kent E. Portney3 · Jeryl L. Mumpower3 Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract There is great value in understanding the public’s reactions to terror attacks, though such reactions pose stark challenges for sound psychological investigation. Reactions to terrorism (as with any other threat) involve emotional and cognitive components, and the degree to which they reciprocally interact is not well understood. Furthermore, much of the literature on the public response to terrorism is based on the construct of “risk perception,” whose precise definition and correlates are still ambiguous. This study aimed to more clearly disentangle the various emotional and cognitive facets that predict individuals’ response to the terrorism threat in the United States. We employed a longitudinal survey from a representative U.S. sample (n = 1057) and measured attitudinal and cognitive reactions to the threat of terrorism at both time points. An autoregressive latent variable model was used to assess the stability of such variables over time, as well as their reciprocal effects on one another. Participants’ emotional and cognitive reactions to the threat of terrorism evolved independently over time, contrary to the predictions of some prior risk perception literature. Furthermore, measurements of risk perception depended mostly on prior estimates of attack likelihood, emphasizing the importance of individuals’ assessments of hazard probability in the risk judgment process. Keywords Risk perception · Terrorism · Risk · Threat
1 Introduction Terrorism is a highly salient threat that can induce strong cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions. Fully capturing the extent of its impact on the public poses a stark challenge. An individual’s reaction to a terror attack might contain both attitudinal and affective components, and might be rooted in both the present consequences and the future risk of a similar attack. How one reacts to a terror attack can shape certain avoidance behaviors (note the well-cited finding that air travel aversion likely contributed to increased traffic deaths following 9/11; Gigerenzer 2006) and may inform public policy (Friedman 2011; Ivanov et al. 2016; Rose et al. 2017; Rubin 2011).
* Matt Baucum [email protected] 1
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2
Decision Research, Eugene, OR, USA
3
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
This study seeks to add clarity to the complex patterns of public reactions to terrorism by investigating how emotional and attitudinal responses to terrorism (1) evolve over time and (2) reciprocally influence each other. Investigation of the public response to terrorism involves many cognitive and emotional variables such as fear, perceptions of an attack’s severity, and assessments of the risk posed by the terrorism threat. Yet many studies foc
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