What Would Arnold Do Now? Masculine and Feminine Men and Women React to Experimental Terrorist Attacks.

The paper reports the results of experimental research on gender differences in individual reactions to simulated terrorist attacks. Subjects were University of Colorado undergraduates who were given priming vignettes about terrorist situations, followed by reports of terrorist attacks. They were then given questionnaires probing multiple different personality dimensions. Unsurprisingly, men scored higher on masculinity measures. They also tended to be more angry, dominant, experimenting, vengeful, disagreeable, and malevolent. Men reacted more conflictually when responding to terrorist attacks. Counter-intuitively, men were also more forgiving. Women, on the other hand, were generally more feminine, fearful, submissive, conservative, agreeable, and benevolent. They generally reacted less conflictually when responding to terrorist attacks, but they also tended to be less forgiving than men. There were also some interesting gender-related interactions. One of our experiments involved prior priming for forgiveness and retaliation. Women primed for forgiveness, but being less forgiving, responded more conflictually to terrorist attacks on cultural/educational targets than men in either priming condition responded to attacks on such targets. Conversely, women primed for forgiveness also responded less conflictually to terrorist attacks on military targets than men in either priming condition responded to attacks on such targets. The observed gender difference profiles mostly fit in with cultural stereotypes, but they are complex and controversial; they need much further investigation. While there appear to be general tendencies, our findings suggest that public responses to terrorist attacks vary. The purpose of terrorism may be terror, but responses need not be uniform or stereotypical. Terrorist acts unfold as a discontinuous series of events that are reported by news media in real time. As this process occurs, it differentially stimulates predispositions of individuals who feel that they are being attacked. Terrorist attacks and media reports, in turn, have complex direct and indirect effects on a heterogeneous network linking individual political leaders and citizens. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]