Terrorism—A (Self) Love Story Redirecting the Significance Quest Can End Violence Arie W. Kruglanski, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Michele Gelfand University of Maryland Rohan Gunaratna Nanyang Technological University Malkanthi Hettiarachchi Foundation of Goodness Fernando Reinares Universidad Rey Juan Carlos Edward Orehek University of Pittsburgh Jo Sasota Ohio State University Keren Sharvit University of Haifa Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concepts of self-love (amour pro- pre) and love of self (amour de soi même) are applied to the psychology of terrorism. Self-love is concern with one’s image in the eyes of respected others, members of one’s group. It denotes one’s feeling of personal significance, the sense that one’s life has meaning in accordance with the values of one’s society. Love of self, in contrast, is individ- ualistic concern with self-preservation, comfort, safety, and the survival of self and loved ones. We suggest that self- love defines a motivational force that when awakened arouses the goal of a significance quest. When a group perceives itself in conflict with dangerous detractors, its ideology may prescribe violence and terrorism against the enemy as a means of significance gain that gratifies self- love concerns. This may involve sacrificing one’s self- preservation goals, encapsulated in Rousseau’s concept of love of self. The foregoing notions afford the integration of diverse quantitative and qualitative findings on individu- als’ road to terrorism and back. Understanding the signif- icance quest and the conditions of its constructive fulfill- ment may be crucial to reversing the current tide of global terrorism. Keywords: terrorism, significance quest, motivation, self- love, love of self T he topic of terrorism might seem ill-suited for a collection of articles devoted to psychology’s posi- tive contributions to conflict resolution. Terrorism, everyone knows, is the incarnation of the bad, the vile and the ugly, the epitome of the evil that men do. What is this sordid topic doing in a collection of essays devoted to the enlightened, humane, and hopeful ways of dealing with human disputes? In this article, we argue that the same motivation that when properly directed may uplift humans to their most constructive conciliations may, when mis- guided, plunge people into mutual destruction, savagery, and mayhem. Consistent with the general tenor of this special issue of the American Psychologist, then, we pro- pose that understanding the motivational force potentiating terrorism may show a way for rechanneling it in a positive direction, paving the way to peaceful conflict resolution and harmony in intergroup relations (Staub, 2013, this issue). This motivational force is what we have called the quest for personal significance (Kruglanski, Chen, Dechesne, Fishman, & Orehek, 2009) and what Jean- Jacques Rousseau labeled as self-love, or amour propre in French. Rousseau’s amour propre denotes self-love that depends on the opinions of others. It is a “passionate need to ‘count,’ or to ‘be someone’” (Neuhouser, 2008, p. 31), to be recognized, to matter. Though highly consequential in human affairs, the quest for significance isn’t all there is. Rousseau insightfully juxtaposed self-love (amour propre) with love of self (amour de soi-même). Though sounding nearly identical, the two concepts profoundly differ. Self- love is about counting and mattering by standards of the normative social reality to which one subscribes, leading the “good life” in accordance with one’s group’s values. In contrast, love of self is about self-preservation, security, survival, comfort, and pleasure, in short, about “taking care of number one” and gratifying one’s individualistic needs and desires (see Table 1). At times, the quest for significance may override self-preservation motives, inspiring individuals to make personal sacrifices for collective causes. At other times, self-preservation goals may prevail, leading persons away from collective, significance-bestowing pursuits. Often, too, these two goal types may be in conflict so that an overriding commitment to one may require suppression of Arie W. Kruglanski, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Michele Gelfand, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Ter- rorism) and Department of Psychology, University of Maryland; Rohan Gunaratna, International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Malkanthi Het- tiarachchi, Foundation of Goodness, Colombo, Sri Lanka; Fernando Re- inares, Department of Political Science and Security Studies, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain; Edward Orehek, Department of Psychol- ogy, University of Pittsburgh; Jo Sasota, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University; Keren Sharvit, Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Arie W. Kruglanski, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Col- lege Park, MD 20742. E-mail: kruglanski@gmail.com This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. AQ: au AQ: 1 T1 AQ: 10 AQ: 11 tapraid4/z2n-amepsy/z2n-amepsy/z2n00413/z2n4026d13g banen S=4 4/26/13 16:09 Art: 2011-2621 APA NLM 1 Month 2013 ● American Psychologist © 2013 American Psychological Association 0003-066X/13/$12.00 Vol. 68, No. 4, 000 DOI: 10.1037/a0032615