Terrorist attacks sharpen the binary perception of "Us" vs. "Them".

Terrorist attacks not only harm citizens but also shift their attention, which has long-lasting impacts on public opinion and government policies. Yet measuring the changes in public attention beyond media coverage has been methodologically challenging. Here we approach this problem by starting from Wikipedia's répertoire of 5.8 million articles and a sample of 15 recent terrorist attacks. We deploy a complex exclusion procedure to identify topics and themes that consistently received a significant increase in attention due to these incidents. Examining their contents reveals a clear picture: terrorist attacks foster establishing a sharp boundary between "Us" (the target society) and "Them" (the terrorist as the enemy). In the midst of this, one seeks to construct identities of both sides. This triggers curiosity to learn more about "Them" and soul-search for a clearer understanding of "Us". This systematic analysis of public reactions to disruptive events could help mitigate their societal consequences.

National Development Generates National Identities.

The purpose of the article is to test the relationship between national identities and modernisation. We test the hypotheses that not all forms of identity are equally compatible with modernisation as measured by Human Development Index. The less developed societies are characterised by strong ascribed national identities based on birth, territory and religion, but also by strong voluntarist identities based on civic features selected and/or achieved by an individual. While the former decreases with further modernisation, the latter may either decrease or remain at high levels and coexist with instrumental supranational identifications, typical for the most developed countries. The results, which are also confirmed by multilevel regression models, thus demonstrate that increasing modernisation in terms of development contributes to the shifts from classical, especially ascribed, identities towards instrumental identifications. These findings are particularly relevant in the turbulent times increasingly dominated by the hardly predictable effects of the recent mass migrations.