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Martyrdom is defined as the psychological readiness to suffer and sacrifice one's life for a cause. An integrative set of 8 studies investigated the concept of martyrdom by creating a new tool to quantitatively assess individuals' propensity toward self-sacrifice. Studies 1A-1C consisted of psychometric work attesting to the scale's unidimensionality, internal consistency, and temporal stability while examining its nomological network. Studies 2A-2B focused on the scale's predictive validity, especially as it relates to extreme behaviors and suicidal terrorism. Studies 3-5 focused on the influence of self-sacrifice on automatic decision making, costly and altruistic behaviors, and morality judgments. Results involving more than 2,900 participants from different populations, including a terrorist sample, supported the proposed conceptualization of martyrdom and demonstrated its importance for a vast repertoire of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena. Implications and future directions for the psychology of terrorism are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors describe procedures used in the development of a new scale of militant extremist mindset. A 2-step approach consisted of (a) linguistic analysis of the texts produced by known terrorist organizations and selection of statements from these texts that reflect the mindset of those belonging to these organizations and (b) analyses of the structural properties of the scales based on 132 selected statements. Factor analysis of militant extremist statements with participants (N = 452) from Australia, Serbia, and the United States produced 3 dimensions: (a) justification and advocacy of violence (War factor), (b) violence in the name of God (God factor), and (c) blaming Western nations for the problems in the world today (West factor). We also report the distributions of scores for the 3 subscales, mean differences among the 3 national samples, and correlations with a measure of dogmatism (M. Rokeach, 1956). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]