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Some evolutionary theorists link suicide terrorism to low-status males, which in many societies translates into lack of employment or underemployment.
Introduction
One theory of suicide terrorism proposes that attackers will tend to be young males with poor mating prospects. Contending that the sanctioning of polygyny in Islam excludes young, low-status males in some Muslim societies from the mating market, Kanazawa (2007) concludes that suicide terrorism is a byproduct of intrasexual competition. Male reproductive success is constrained by access to mates, and males with higher social status are more likely to be polygynous and/or have greater reproductive success (Chagnon 1988; Turke and Betzig 1985). In modern industrial or postindustrial societies, a positive employment status and high income is associated with greater access to mates and higher reproductive success in males (Hopcroft 2006). Mating competition among males increases risk-taking...
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References
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Hopcroft, R. L. (2006). Sex, status, and reproductive success in the contemporary United States. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(2), 104–120.
Kanazawa, S. (2007). The evolutionary psychological imagination: Why you can’t get a date on a saturday night and why most suicide bombers are Muslim. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 1(1), 7.
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Syme, K. (2018). Unemployed. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_591-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_591-1
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