I will never understand why people X. Oh really? Lets turn that dial up to 11 and see what happens.
In case youre wondering why I didnt include a reference to the Netflix show Mindhunter (a fictional drama based on the origins of FBI profiling & forensic psychology of serial killers), theres a growing body of criticism regarding the methods & rigor of those techniques, & I didnt want to get bogged down hashing out details. Pretty much all of the criminal psychology used in law enforcement today assumes the central premise of this video (that even horrifyingly divergent minds can be simulated & understood to some degree), but its possible that the FBIs whole classification system is pseudoscience - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/dangerous-minds
Psychopathology of terrorists (Piccinni et al, 2017) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28931447
Patterns of Thinking in Militant Extremism (Saucier et al, 2009) - http://pages.uoregon.edu/gsaucier/Saucier_et_al_Patterns_of_Thinking.pdf
Inside the Terrorist Mind (Schaefer, 2007) - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inside-the-terrorist-mind/
Psychology of Terrorism (Borum, 2004) - http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1570&context=mhlp_facpub
Psychological Vulnerabilities and Propensities for Involvement in Violent Extremism (Borum, 2014) - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bsl.2110/full
Genesis of Suicide Terrorism (Atran, 2003) - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/299/5612/1534.full