Organizational Psychology of Homeland Threat Actors
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Project Summary
Violent actors are often sorted into two categories, formal members of an organization and isolated lone actors, but many perpetrators fall between them, shaped by ideological movements, online communities, grievance subcultures, or criminal networks without holding formal membership. This project applies organizational psychology to that middle ground, treating violent incidents as socially embedded, identity-relevant, and audience-oriented behavior rather than as isolated events.
Purpose/Objectives
This project gives DHS threat assessment and targeting analysts an empirically grounded way to read a perpetrator’s organizational ties, symbolic behavior, and intended audience as indicators of attack planning.
Method
The work proceeds in three phases using incident-level reporting and a robust coding framework. The first phase analyzes whether perpetrators with weaker or less formal group ties display more symbolic and communicative behavior, an expectation drawn from Symbolic Self-Completion Theory. The second phase compares completed mass casualty attacks with thwarted or disrupted plots to identify where plots break down, and which behavioral indicators appear before execution. The third phase examines whom violence appears intended to influence, intimidate, mobilize, or provoke.
Outputs and Impact
- Evidence on whether perpetrators with weaker or less formal organizational embeddedness display higher levels of symbolic content, use more communication channels, or are more symbolically explicit, consistent with Symbolic Self-Completion Theory.
- A comparison of completed mass casualty attacks with thwarted or disrupted plots, testing whether completed attacks are a distinct subset of the threat process or whether disrupted plots show similar organizational, symbolic, and behavioral patterns before execution.
- Identification of where plots tend to break down and which behavioral indicators are visible before execution, with direct relevance to prevention.
Research Team
Samuel Hunter, Ph.D.- University of Nebraska at Omaha
- Professor
- Department of Psychology
- Head of Strategic Operations at NCITE
- Expertise: Organizational psychology, innovation, and malevolent creativity
- University of Nebraska at Omaha
- Director of NCITE
- Professor
- Expertise: Extremist organizations and leadership