“What is dear to you?” Survey of beliefs regarding protection of critical infrastructure against terrorism

Up to the present, there is only very little research on how the population perceives terrorism and its threats, even though support from the population is crucial for effective counterterrorism. By eliciting beliefs and subjecting them to content analyses, six factors were found that determine the protection worthiness of a target in the people's view: the potential damage to “people,” “symbolism,” “economy,” “politics,” “nature,” and “image/publicity.” These empirically found factors are in line with factors specified by terrorist target selection models. They differ in the strength of their cognitive representation among participants and, thus, their subjective importance to the people. The first three factors are shared among all participants, whereas the latter ones could only be found in a part of the participant sample. People's judgments of the targets' protection worthiness differ substantially from their judgments of the targets' attractiveness to terrorists, even though the same factors seem to be involved. This study offers an insight into the people's mental model about protection worthiness of targets. Together with classical risk analysis and knowledge about terrorists, these results can form a basis for setting up a holistic scheme for critical infrastructure protection.