Military Conflict and Terrorism: General Psychology Informs International Relations Lyle E. Bourne Jr., Alice F. Healy, and Francis A. Beer University of Colorado at Boulder Several experiments, focusing on decisions made by young, voting-age citizens of the United States about how to respond to incidents of international conflict, are summa- rized. Participants recommended measured reactions to an initial attack. Repeated attacks led to escalated reaction, however, eventually matching or exceeding the conflict level of the attack itself. If a peace treaty between contending nations was in place, women were more forgiving of an attack, and men were more aggressive. There was little overall difference in reactions to terrorist versus military attacks. Participants responded with a higher level of conflict to terrorist attacks on military than on cultural– educational targets. The end of the East–West cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall were triggers for major peace efforts and serious attempts to settle long- standing political disputes among nations. One of the most visible transitional events, of course, was the reunification of Germany, but there have been numerous other more recent exam- ples of progress (and sometimes regress) in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, on the Korean peninsula, in India/Pakistan, and elsewhere. These developments provided a context for re- cent trends toward peaceful international rela- tions, and there was an enormous amount of literature produced by political scientists in an effort to understand these trends (e.g., Tanter, 1999; Volkan, 1999). But progress toward peace has recently been derailed by the shock- ing events of September 11, 2001, and the United States and many of its allies are cur- rently engaged in an all-out new kind of war, a war against terrorism. Over the 15 years before September 11, while peace-oriented international developments were unfolding, we conducted a series of laboratory experiments, paralleling real international events, to examine how young citizens of the United States understand and react to episodes of international conflict and conflict resolution. The earliest of these studies explored military conflicts among nations, whereas the more re- cent studies contrasted military conflict with terrorist attacks and then focused on terrorism, fortuitously anticipating the events of Septem- ber 11. One purpose of this work has been to determine whether there are any tried and true general psychological principles that might help to understand why international events unfold as they do, why political decision makers act the way they do, and how decisions made by dip- lomats might differ from those made by the general public. But it should be noted that par- ticipants in these studies, thus far, have been limited to college students. Generalizations from these results to real or expert political decision making are unclear, and their justifica- tion remains to be determined. Priming and Personality in International Disputes In all of our experiments, we ask young adult college student participants to evaluate mostly fictitious news reports describing aggressive acts against the United States or against an ally of the United States by a nonaligned, opposi- tional country. Lyle E. Bourne Jr. and Alice F. Healy, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder; Francis A. Beer, Department of Political Science, University of Colo- rado at Boulder. This article is based on a Division 1 (Society for General Psychology) presidential address delivered by Lyle E. Bourne Jr. at the 2001 annual convention of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Lyle E. Bourne Jr., Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0345. E-mail: lbourne@psych.colorado.edu Review of General Psychology Copyright 2003 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2003, Vol. 7, No. 2, 189 –202 1089-2680/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.7.2.189 189