Researchers at Cambridge University have laid out a ‘psychological signature’ for extremist behaviour.
These extremist behaviours support violence in the name of ideology, and encompass social, political or religious attitudes. The researchers say that particular behavioural traits and unconscious cognition in the brain make certain individuals more susceptible to extremist behaviour.
These mental factors include poorer working memory and slower “perceptual strategies” (the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, eg shape and colour), and also tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.
The researchers found that social conservatism is linked to slower but more accurate unconscious decision-making, whereas liberal thinking is linked to faster but less accurate ‘perceptual strategies’.
More dogmatic people are prone to impulsivity but are slower in processing perceptual evidence.
Previous approaches to identifying radicalisation and extremism involved screening individuals by age and gender.
“I’m interested in the role that hidden cognitive functions play in sculpting ideological thinking,” said lead author Dr Leor Zmigrod, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
“Many people will know those in their communities who have become radicalised or adopted increasingly extreme political views, whether on the left or right. We want to know why particular individuals are more susceptible.”
“By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way,” Zmigrod said.
“Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer, more defined explanations of the world, making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies.”
Added Zmigrod: “There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines. Understanding this could help us to support those individuals vulnerable to extremism, and foster social understanding across ideological divides.”
This research revisited 334 participants from a previous study where participants performed 37 cognitive tasks and were assessed on 22 personality traits. They added a further 16 tests
Demographics only weakly predicted extremist behaviour. For example, dogmatism was associated with slower perceptual ‘evidence accumulation’, and lower social risk-taking and agreeableness but greater impulsivity and ethical risk-taking. Adding the psychological signatures to demographics increased the predictive power for dogmatism from 1.53% to 23.6%.
Political conservatism and nationalism was linked to ‘caution’ in unconscious decision-making, as well as when rewards are less valuable later, and slightly reduced strategic information processing. Personality traits for conservatism and nationalism included greater goal-directedness, impulsivity and reward sensitivity, and lower social risk-taking. For these ideologies, demographics only had a predictive power of less than 8%, but including the psychological signature boosted it to 32.5%.
In all of the ideologies examined, ‘extreme pro-group action’, including violence against others, had a similar psychological signature.
Source: Medical Xpress
Journal information:Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0424
