Corresponding author: Arie W. Kruglanski ( hannahk@umd.edu ) Academic editor: Tomasz Besta
© 2018 Arie W. Kruglanski.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Citation:
Kruglanski, A. W. (2018). Violent radicalism and the psychology of prepossession. Social Psychological Bulletin, 13(4), Article e27449. https://doi.org/10.32872/spb.v13i4.27449
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The phenomenon of violent radicalism/extremism is portrayed as a consequence of a mechanism that fosters extremism in general. This is the process of motivational imbalance or “prepossession”, a state wherein a given need becomes dominant to the point of inhibiting other needs. In the case of violent extremism, the dominant need is the quest for significance, the desire to matter and have self and others’ respect. Whereas the “hydraulic” domination-inhibition process that underlies extremism can be observed across levels of phylogeny, the motivational imbalance in those cases is typically brief in duration. In the case of humans, however, participation in violent extremism can be long lasting, due to its facilitation by a compelling narrative” that ties violence to the attainment of significance, and is embraced by a “network” of trusted others (individuals’ friends and relatives) who validate the narrative and bestow significance on individuals who implement its dictates.
radicalization, violent extremism
In the pages that follow, I consider the phenomenon of violent extremism and its underlying psychological mechanisms. But before doing so, it may be helpful to consider what one might even mean by calling something radical or extreme. Accordingly, I turn first to matters of terminology.
The term ‘radical’ (when applied in the social sphere) has two meanings that at first glance appear distinct from each other. One meaning pertains to the word’s usage as a noun: A radical is a nonconformist, a troublemaker, a deviationist. The second meaning pertains to the term’s use as an adjective. Here, radical means thorough, fundamental, or essential. This latter usage derives from the Latin word ‘radix’ or ‘root’ in that a root underlies the plant and is essential to its existence.
But what does this have to do with deviancy and nonconformity? On the surface of it, rather little – and the term’s use in this fashion may appear enigmatic. Yet, there could be more here than meets the eye. Indeed, looking deeper into the psychology of the radical (as a noun), we find a kind of essentialism, or purism; a single mindedness, or as
‘Radicals’ are often referred to as ‘extremists.’ But what is extremism? Again, two senses of the term are apparent. One sense is statistical and refers to ends (i.e., extremes) of the distribution. Extremists are rare, they are unusual or infrequent within an aggregate, and their activities are not what most people do. The other sense of extremism relates to intensity, or magnitude. To refer to something as ‘extreme’ is to depict it as intense, powerful, or considerable (as in extreme hunger or thirst, or extreme disappointment). As can be seen then, radicalism and extremism have important parallels that explain their interchangeable use: (1) they both denote something that is rare and infrequent, and (2) they both connote something that has special poignancy by dint of its magnitude or essentiality.
But beyond hermeneutics, the question is whether ‘extremism’ and/or ‘radicalism’ have a psychological reality, versus representing mere ways of speaking devoid of a deeper psychological basis. I believe that the former is, indeed, the case and that extremism defines an authentic psychological state. A major implication of this notion is that many different ‘extremisms’ (e.g., violent extremism, extreme diets, extreme sports or extreme addictions) share a psychological dynamic in common, and differ in the contents or dimension, namely that which the term ‘extreme’ qualifies.
The concept of extremism stands in contrast to that of moderation. Moderation, in turn, assumes a state of motivational equilibrium characterized by a balanced satisfaction of the individual’s basic biological and psychogenic needs. Extremism marks a deviation from that equilibrium, hence depicting a motivational imbalance wherein one need rises above others and prepossesses or ‘crowds out’ the remaining basic needs. Because by definition most persons desire to have all their basic needs fulfilled, and experience distress otherwise (that is what the term basically implies, after all), only a minority may endure a prolonged state of extremism. Thus, the intensity sense of extremism discussed above, shades into the statistical sense in that inveterate extremists typically constitute a small segment of the general population.
From the present perspective then, extremism lies on a continuum (of intensity) and is a matter of degree; it reflects the extent of deviation from the motivational balance in which people’s different fundamental needs are harmoniously gratified.
To consider how this may happen, consider the analogy of the concept of health, which denotes the optimal physiological functioning of an organism. Normally, most people are (more or less) healthy and their bodily systems function as intended. Occasionally, however, entire populations might fall sick, owing to a plague, mass starvation, or poisoning. Similarly, whereas societies are relatively peaceful and non-violent much of the time (
Psychological theorists (e.g.,
Other basic needs are psychogenic in nature: these are the need for safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (identified by
Humans are assumed to strive for fulfillment of their basic psychogenic needs, much as they do with respect to physiological needs. Furthermore, people’s specific goals are assumed to be traceable, ultimately, to their basic needs. The goal of cooking may hark back to the need for nutrition, rebellion against oppression—to the need for autonomy, competition—to the need for competence, formation of intimate ties—to the need for relatedness, and so on (
I define motivational balance as a state in which all the basic needs constitute active concerns whose fulfillment drives individuals’ behavior. These needs constrain one another such that behavior that gratifies only some needs while undermining others tends to be avoided. For instance, one’s hunger may co-exist with concerns about health, and taste; as a consequence, foods that are unhealthy or foul-tasting would be avoided. One’s need for intimacy and relatedness may temper one’s need for achievement, thus promoting a work-family balance, etc.
At times, however, a motivational imbalance may occur wherein a given need receives disproportionate emphasis, overriding the others. This state may be described as one of prepossession, in which one’s mind is predominantly absorbed with a given motivational concern, and is oblivious to all else (
The constraints on behavior imposed in a motivationally balanced state, and their disinhibition under motivational imbalance, were investigated by
As already noted, motivational imbalance may underlie all kinds of extremism regardless of their specific nature (e.g., extreme eating habits, extreme sports, addictions of various sorts, “fatal attractions”, etc.). I now consider how this process plays out in the case of violent extremism. Our work on this topic (
The human quest for personal significance represents a basic need whose fulfillment is essential to individuals’ sense of well-being. It is implicit in such motivational notions as the need for competence (
The quest for personal significance subsumes a variety of subordinate goals identified in the social science literature on terrorism and violent extremism (e.g.,
Devotion to the leader implies carrying out activities that the leader approves of and for which she/he rewards individuals by bestowing significance upon them. Financial rewards, or the perks of paradise are awarded in recognition of one’s worth; they reflect one’s valuable contributions to the protection of one’s faith. Even salaries dispensed to fighters of terrorist organizations or payments to families of killed ‘martyrs’ are significance bestowing: They enable individuals to care for their families, thus gaining their gratitude and admiration, as well as living up to their obligations as providers.
Arousal of one’s need for significance (e.g., through a significance loss, and/or the opportunity for a significance gain) does not prejudge how significance is attained and it does not necessarily imply a resort to violence. After all, personal significance defines a universal human need, which most people fulfill in peaceful ways. Where severe intergroup conflict is in place, however, unleashing violence against the adversary is often hailed as a particularly effective route to significance, meriting the group’s recognition of the individual as a hero or a martyr. Typically, societies pay homage to, and glorify those who are ready to make sacrifices on their behalf. For instance, military service that reflects soldiers’ readiness to risk life and limb for “king and country” has been universally regarded as a most honorable pursuit (
An extensive body of recent research supports the intimate relation between the quest for significance and the support of violence on behalf of some sanctioned cause. For instance, open source materials about successful suicide bombers (i.e., individuals who volunteered to die while carrying out their mission) suggest that those animated by a loss of significance and/or evincing a particularly strong appetite for significance gain perpetrated more severe casualties (in terms of the numbers of people killed and/or wounded in the attacks) than individuals with a less intense quest for significance (
The motivational imbalance at the root of extremism is enabled by basic mechanisms describable on the biological/neuronal (molecular) as well as psychological (molar) levels of analysis. The former have been investigated with animal models at different phylogenetic levels, such as mice, flies or crayfish among others. For instance, flies will tolerate a higher concentration of bitter (and potentially toxic) contaminants in food as they get hungrier. In other words, their ‘concern’ for taste seems to decline the greater their concern for nutrition becomes. Research on the brain mechanisms involved in this phenomenon reveals that taste neurons become more sensitive to sweet-tasting substances and less sensitive to bitter tastants (
Activation of neurons that typically elicit aggressive behavior in the mouse affected it to a much reduced extent when the male was engaged in copulation, and it required a considerably more intense level of stimulation under these conditions to elicit attacks. This inhibition was removed following ejaculation. As
Animals’ preference for a balanced ‘moderation’ is illustrated by a study in which an animal who is both thirsty and hungry is afforded access to two bottles of water, one of which contains a tasteless but caloric compound, and the other containing water without the nutritious compound (
In summary, animal research carried out by behavioral biologists attests both to animals’ preference for balanced states (in which their various motives, e.g., hunger and thirst, are all satisfied) and to neural mechanisms that enable the emergence of a motivational imbalance in which a given motive subjected to a particularly intense stimulation emerges as dominant alongside a parallel decline in the strength of other motives and the concomitant weakening of behavioral patterns that typically subserve them.
In lower species, the state of prepossession in which a given motive dominates others is typically of brief duration. The motivational “storm” subsides once the momentarily dominant need is taken care of and the animal is then free to turn its attention to its alternative concerns. In humans, however, the operation of cognitive and social mechanisms enables long haul persistence of prepossessive states, including an enduring engagement in violent extremism. These mechanisms are considered in what follows.
Below, I briefly describe three cognitive mechanisms that play a central role in the radicalization process. These are the processes of knowledge activation, knowledge inhibition, and construal or inference.
The phenomenon of knowledge activation is ubiquitous throughout the radicalization process. It plays a key role in evocation of one’s significance motive and bringing to mind possible ways of satisfying it. The process of knowledge activation assumes that a given knowledge construct is available in the individual’s memory from which it is triggered, and hence made accessible by various primes in the individual’s environment. The ease with which an available construct is activated by a cue or prime defines its degree of accessibility, or activation potential (
As noted earlier, attainment of personal ‘significance’ is highly motivating for most people, stemming as it does from such basic needs as those of competence (
Typically, exhortations by militant propagandists activate one’s goal of collective significance related to the humiliation of a group (e.g., Muslims, Palestinians, Americans) suffered in the hands of an adversary and hence communicating a loss of significance on part of the group’s members. In those instances, the significance loss is bound to the individuals’ social identity (i.e., their wounded pride as Muslims, Palestinians, or Americans).
Alternatively, the quest for significance restoration may be linked to one’s individual-identity and be activated by memories of one’s personal failures, debacles, and humiliations essentially unrelated to collective causes. Finally, the quest for significance may be evoked by opportunities for significance gain, that is, by heightened expectancies of significance attainment. As we discussed in detail elsewhere (
Activating a cognitive construct impacts subsequent thoughts, feelings, and actions. For instance, it can affect the categorization of ambiguous stimuli that share features with that construct (
Activation of a given construct results in the spreading of activation to other nodes in the construct’s associative network, that is, to other semantically related constructs. For instance, the construct of personal significance could activate ways and means associated in the person’s mind with the attainment of significance, as well as priming the emotion constructs associated with attainment or failure to attend significance (e.g., shame, dejection).
Cognitive scientists agree that attention is selective (e.g., see
Typically, cognitive experiments study selective attention to externally presented stimuli, e.g., text presented in a dichotic listening task, letters presented in the flanker task (
These attentional mechanisms likely play an important role in radicalization into violent extremism as well. For instance, focusing one’s attention on the goal of personal significance (e.g., occasioned by instances of humiliation and significance loss) may divert it from issues of comfort and safety and enable individuals to enact risky behaviors at odds with those concerns (e.g., to volunteer for suicidal attacks). Similarly, focusing attention on issues of security and safety (as likely did much of the U.S. population in the aftermath of the 9/11 assault) may divert individuals’ attention from issues of human rights, allowing torture to be practiced (e.g., in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and a variety of ‘black sites’ where enhanced interrogation techniques might be practiced) and disregarding concerns with humanity, compassion, or empathy.
As already noted, selective attention refers to focusing attention on some (internal or external) stimuli and the consequent withdrawal of attention from other stimuli. This process consists of two opponent factors pulling in divergent directions: One source of pull or attraction emanates from the focal stimulus to which attention is deliberately directed and the opposing pull comes from the stimulus from which attention is withdrawn. The stronger the pull of the latter, the greater the effort needed in order to direct one’s attention at the focal target by inhibiting the distracting stimulus.
Consider the Eriksen flanker task mentioned earlier (
Similarly, in the well-known Stroop test (
What role do these attentional processes play in radicalization and extremism? To reiterate, when one of the individual’s needs becomes dominant, it draws attention away from other concerns. However, where the latter represent basic needs whose fulfillment is essential to individuals’ well-being, they may well “vie” for attention as well. Accordingly, the focusing of attention on the dominant, extremism-promoting need may require considerable effort directed at inhibiting those competing concerns. In other words, mere diversion of attention may be insufficient where the alternative concerns emanate from individuals’ basic needs. Precisely because such alternative concerns are basic, they are likely to assert themselves sooner or later, and grab the individual’s attention. Staying focused on the dominant need may then require active inhibition.
By analogy, consider a basic need for nutrition evoking the experience of hunger. Though preoccupation with other concerns, such as an engrossing intellectual activity, may take one’s mind off hunger for a while, the ‘oblivion’ is unlikely to be long lasting. Sooner or later, hunger will let itself be known through increasingly severe pangs, and come to penetrate the individual’s awareness. Thus, to maintain attentional focus on a given concern, mechanisms of selective attention may need to be augmented by those of active inhibition: an effortful process of banning unwanted thoughts from one’s mind (
Extremism (of whatever kind) is thus stressful and hard to accomplish: it requires the investment of inhibitory energy to suppress basic human needs that vie for attention. The more extreme the behavior (i.e., the greater the upset of the motivational balance), the fewer the persons (namely those with extraordinary self-regulatory capacity) who are able to keep it up, especially for a long duration. For instance, the average length of time that individuals spend as members of violent far right organizations in Europe (e.g., of the neo-Nazi variety) is about ten years (
In summary, processes of knowledge activation, selective attention, and inhibition play an important role in all kinds of extremism, including violent extremism. Activation of a dominant need, and the focusing of attention on it, comes at the expense of alternative concerns that also demand attention. Maintenance of extreme behavior may require continued investment of efforts and energies in inhibitory processes that deny attention to those concerns. This stresses the motivational system as a consequence of which extremism tends to be time-bound, and to be exhibited by small segments of most populations.
Though activation of motivational constructs (goals and means) is necessary, it is insufficient for their actual implementation in behavior. Additionally, a construal process must take place in which the behavior comes to be understood as an effective means to a current goal. This function is carried out via an inferential process in which judgments are formed on the basis of relevant evidence. Recently, we (
In summary, the activation of constructs and their consequent representation in awareness, though necessary, is insufficient for making behavioral choices and embarking on a concrete course of action. The latter presuppose the formation of a cognitive means-ends schema that tie a given (e.g., extreme) activity-construct to an individual’s goal in the situation (e.g., attainment of personal significance) and its validation via the appropriate evidence.
The goal of any behavior ultimately derives from one of the individuals’ basic needs. The means to the goal are determined by the specific context. Consider the (basic) need for nutrition experienced as hunger. The means to satisfying it would be completely determined by situational availability. In some circumstances, booking a table at a restaurant might constitute an available means, whereas in other conditions the available means might be cooking a meal in one’s kitchen, plucking a coconut from a tree, etc.
Similarly, the goal of personal significance could be served by a variety of means, including such valued behaviors as fighting for a socially cherished cause. Individuals might thus ascribe their behavior to an ideological cause without explicitly realizing that serving it is but a means to their fundamental quest for significance, which is the motivation ultimately responsible for their behavior. Illustrating this point, German neo-Nazis whom we have recently interviewed (
Complex behaviors exemplified by actions of violent extremists are enabled by fundamental psychological and biological mechanisms, some of which humans share with organisms at lower rungs of the phylogenetic ladder. In this paper, I propose that extremism arises in a situation in which a given basic need dominates others. This state of prepossession removes the constraints that the latter needs impose on behavior, and hence license activities detrimental to those concerns.
The foregoing analysis is thought to apply to all kinds of extremisms including, though not limited to, violent extremism. It also captures the twofold meaning of extremism as a term used in popular language, namely in its denotation of a (1) high magnitude or intensity ascribed to a phenomenon or a process, and (2) its infrequency of occurrence: because the imbalanced dominance of a given need inhibits other basic concerns, it should foster distress and dissatisfaction that most people would tend to avoid. Thus, states of prepossession in which extremely intense needs obviate others are ultimately unsatisfactory and hence short-lived and/or infrequent.
In our prior work (e.g.,
The presently described state of prepossession is made possible by the operation of basic mechanisms observable at the neural and cognitive levels, including in particular the twin processes of activation and inhibition in which the stimulation of biological and cognitive processes serving a given organismic function coincides with the suppression of processes serving alternative functions. Whereas these basic mechanisms operate across levels of phylogeny—extensive endurance of the state of prepossession in humans may be enabled by cognitive construal of belief systems and group dynamics that turn those belief systems into a shared reality.
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