In the Opponent’s Shoes: Increasing the Behavioral Validity of Attackers’ Judgments in Counterterrorism Models

The new study by researchers Sumitra Sri Bhashyam, a research associate at consulting firm Evidera, and Gilberto Montibeller, a professor of management science at Loughborough University — "In the Opponent’s Shoes: Increasing the Behavioral Validity of Attackers’ Judgments in Counter-Terrorism Models" — thoroughly explores the current trend in modeling terrorists’ judgments. That trend assumes people who commit such acts are “fully rational” in striving to achieve goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. The study, which recently appeared in the online version of Risk Analysis, a publication of the Society for Risk Analysis, urges counter-terrorism modelers to consider how terrorists’ preferences are affected by “emotions and visceral factors” that influence their decisions about short- and long-term goals.

The study is an outcome of Sri Bhashyam’s Ph.D. research, supervised by Prof. Montibeller, who is an expert on the prioritization of emerging threats, and conducted when both were affiliated with the Decision Sciences Team at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Drawing widely from such fields as behavioral decision research, politics, philosophy of choice and conflict management in terrorism, Sri Bhashyam and Montibeller propose modifications in the assumptions used by counter-terrorism risk analysts to make models conform more closely to what actually is known about terrorists’ motivations and judgments. Current models are incomplete in their key assumptions that terrorists only seek to maximize economic or damaging impacts, that they have well-established and stable preferences, and that they view the probabilities of achieving success of their actions objectively.