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Terrorism incites fear designed to coerce governments to act, according to definitions of “terrorism” in U.S. law, in U.N. resolutions and elsewhere. But terrorism often prompts as much anger and retaliation as fear and intimidation.

That’s one conclusion of two decades of research by a team of professors at the University of Colorado.

The researchers have also found that simulated news reports of attacks on military sites evoked a stronger desire for retaliation than did attacks on cultural or educational sites, even after Sept. 11, 2001. They found that anger in response to a terrorist attack was more likely among masculine people and less likely among feminine people, irrespective of gender.

And while women tended to be more fearful and men angrier in response to simulated terrorist attacks, there was one notable exception: When attacks were reported to have come from enemy nations, women reacted more harshly than did men. But when attacks came from countries that were U.S. allies, men reacted more punitively and women more leniently.

In short, the response to terrorist attacks appears differential among genders and personality types. It also appears dynamic, becoming harsher after repeated attacks and decaying over time without reinforcement from subsequent attacks.

Alice Healy, a CU college professor of distinction in psychology, has helped lead this team of researchers since the 1980s. It was then that Francis A. Beer, now a professor emeritus of political science, told Healy about a theory: that the way people respond to current events could be primed by images of history.

That view contradicted the theory that people and nations make mostly rational decisions about waging war.

“I said, ‘We could do an experiment on that,’” Healy recalls. She recruited Lyle E. Bourne Jr., now a professor emeritus of psychology, to join the team.

The idea was to gain a better grasp of how citizens—and countries—make decisions about whether to go to war or maintain peace. In a 1987 paper published in the American Political Science Review, Beer, Healy, Bourne and Grant Sinclair outlined an experiment on 60 psychology students asked to make decisions on peace and war.

The team found that historical images played a significant role in students’ decisions on whether to wage war or keep peace. “A popular aphorism holds that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it,” the authors wrote. “Our perspective suggests that those who do remember history apply it selectively.”

Later, Healy’s team turned its attention to terrorism. In 1997 and ’98, it conducted experiments to gauge how students responded to simulated reports of terrorism. The students’ reactions were recorded after each of five simulated reports of terrorist attacks.

They found that students’ reaction to simulated terrorist attacks did not elicit fear across the board, that responses varied. “You don’t have very many people melting down in a puddle,” Beer said recently.

The researchers tested the reaction of subjects to terrorist attacks vs. military attacks on America, tested gender differences in response to terrorist attacks emanating from friendly vs. unfriendly nations, and tested the different reactions to attacks on military vs. cultural or educational targets.

“We had anticipated 9-11, essentially,” Healy said recently. The results from these experiments were published in a 2002 edition of Political Psychology that was devoted to research on terrorism.

What they had not yet done, though, was to test the effect of 9-11 on post-terrorism decision-making. Healy, Beer, Bourne and former psychology student Alison Aylward conducted simulated-terrorism experiments one and three years after the actual attacks. Those results were reported in the summer 2009 edition of the American Journal of Psychology.

Not surprisingly, students responded with a greater inclination to retaliate to terrorist attacks one year after 9-11. But three years after the attacks, students responding to simulated terrorist attacks showed less desire to retaliate.

“9-11 has changed our lives, but we’re kind of forgetting about it,” Healy observed recently. Three years after the attacks, students’ “conflictual” responses to reports of terrorism had declined nearly to pre-9-11 levels.

As before, however, the research subjects responded to each subsequent simulated attack with a greater inclination to retaliate. Also as before, subjects responded more harshly to attacks on military sites than on cultural or educational sites. That result might be surprising, given that the World Trade Center, where most of the 9-11 victims died and which became a focal point of national outrage, was not a military site.

Healy, Beer and Bourne suggest that historical images such as the attack on Pearl Harbor may help explain this result. Attacks on military sites, they say, may be seen as more of an act of war—something that partly disables our national defenses and leaves us more vulnerable to further attack.

The team’s work did uncover a significant gender difference. In a 1995 journal article and in the 2002 article, the team noted that men responded more harshly than women to attacks by nations with which the United States had a peace treaty. Especially after repeated attacks, women responded more harshly than men to attacks by nations with which the United States had no treaty.

The difference, Healy’s team postulated, reflected women’s tendency to be more forgiving within established political (and romantic) relationships, whereas men tend to view transgressions in such relationships as more unforgivable.

Terrorist attacks do much more than cause fear, Beer noted. “The complex effects of terrorist attacks are a major finding of our research.”

But Beer also underscored a limitation of the team’s research: Experiments are conducted on students in a classroom setting, not on the general population or on decision-makers.

In a journal article that is still in press in Clio’s Psyche, Beer, Healy and Bourne offer an overview of this work. They write: “Terrorism, by definition, is designed to produce terror, but it does not actually do so all the time, in all circumstances, for all individuals.”

“Psychological experiments and real-world experiences inform each other and broaden our knowledge about the effects of terrorist attacks,” they write. “In a different world, this is not knowledge that we should wish to have. In our times, however, it can be useful.”

One use, they suggest, is that such knowledge increases political leaders’ ability to cope with the “very complex web of terrorist effects on their populations and to connect with various types of citizens whom terrorism may affect very differently.”

“Even more importantly, we are better able to shape long-term strategies for democratic responses to terrorism in the emerging, dangerous environment of the 21st century.”