How Social Science Can Reduce Terrorism

By SCOTT L. PLOUS and PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO

In a press conference several months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people ... would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

President Bush expressed similar surprise when he told the press corps on April 13, 2004: "Had I had any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved