The sociocognitive processes of ideological obsession: review and policy implications

Significance Quest: A Meta-Analysis on the Association Between the Variables of the 3N Model and Violent Extremism

Given the pervasiveness of violent extremism all over the globe, understanding its psychological underpinnings is key in the fight against it. According to the Significance Quest Theory and its 3N model, violent extremism (i.e., violent and deviant behavior) is a function of three elements: need, narrative, and network. In the present meta-analysis, to put into test the theory and its model, we aimed to establish the strength of the association between these three elements, as well as the quest for significance itself, and violent extremism; and investigate if these associations are influenced by methodological decisions (i.e., sampling and measurements/manipulations). A literature search was performed through electronic platforms, a call for unpublished or in-press data, and backward snowballing. Seventeen reports, comprising 42 studies, met full inclusion criteria: quantitative studies based on primary data assessing for the association of at least one of the 3Ns, or quest for significance, and violent extremism, and providing sufficient data for effect size extraction. Findings are reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses(PRISMA) guidelines. Random-effect meta-analyses rendered statistically significant pooled effect sizes in all the investigated associations. The association is strong for quest for significance, moderate for narrative and network, and low for need for significance. Subgroup analyses demonstrate that the detection of these associations is influenced by methodological decisions concerning the measurements and manipulations, but not by those concerning the sampling. We discuss these findings and suggest future research directions aiming to improve the predictive power of the theory and its model.

"Consumed by creed": Obsessive-compulsive symptoms underpin ideological obsession and support for political violence

Radicalization is a process by which individuals are introduced to an ideological belief system that encourages political, religious, or social change through the use of violence. Here we formulate an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) model of radicalization that links obsessive passion (OP; one of the best predictors of radical intentions) to a larger body of clinical research. The model's central tenet is that individual differences in OCD symptom severity could shape radical intentions via their influence on OP. Across four ideological samples in the United States (Environmental activists, Republicans, Democrats, and Muslims, Ntotal  = 1114), we found direct effects between OCD symptom severity and radical intentions, as well as indirect effects of OCD on radical intentions via OP. Even after controlling for potential individual difference and clinical confounds (e.g., adverse childhood experiences, loss of significance, and substance abuse), these relationships remained robust, implying that OCD plays a significant role in the formation of violent ideological intentions and opening new avenues for the treatment and prevention of violent extremism. We discuss the implications of conceptualizing radicalization as an OCD-like disorder with compulsive violent tendencies and ideology-related concerns.

Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness

Despite recent advances, the origin and utility of consciousness remains under debate. Using an evolutionary perspective on the origin of consciousness, this review elaborates on the promising theoretical background suggested in the temporospatial theory of consciousness, which outlines world-brain alignment as a critical predisposition for controlling behavior and adaptation. Such a system can be evolutionarily effective only if it can provide instant cohesion between the subsystems, which is possible only if it performs an intrinsic activity modified in light of the incoming stimulation. One can assume that the world-brain interaction results in a particular interference pattern predetermined by connectome complexity. This is what organisms experience as their exclusive subjective state, allowing the anticipation of regularities in the environment. Thus, an anticipative system can emerge only in a regular environment, which guides natural selection by reinforcing corresponding reactions and decreasing the system entropy. Subsequent evolution requires complicated, layered structures and can be traced from simple organisms to human consciousness and society. This allows us to consider the mode of entropy as a subject of natural evolution rather than an individual entity.

Disconnected Out of Passion: Relationship Between Social Alienation and Obsessive Passion

Violent radicalization continues to be a global problem. One of the main proposals for understanding radicalization and support for political violence is based on social alienation as a trigger. That is, individuals who feel alienated from society try to get out of this situation by using violence, if necessary. However, social alienation alone is not enough to explain radicalization. Therefore, we propose that social alienation interacts with other factors to foster radicalization. Particularly, we propose that obsessive passion, an internal compulsion that leads a person to engage in an activity even when they should not, is one of the interacting factors. Following previous literature, we hypothesized that higher social alienation predicts support for political violence to a greater extent the higher the obsessive passion. To test this hypothesis, we performed two studies in which the cause of passion varied (religion: N = 652 and family: N = 873). Both studies assessed social alienation, harmonious and obsessive passion, and support for political violence. The results showed a significant increase in the effect of social alienation on support for political violence when obsessive passion was higher, even controlling by harmonious passion. These results highlight the importance of considering other variables related to social alienation that could facilitate radicalization processes, particularly maintaining an obsessive passion for a cause when one feels a social disconnection. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed given their contributions to prevention based on work on feelings of social disconnection and harmonization of causes.

What Prevention and Treatment of Substance Dependence Can Tell Us About Addressing Violent Extremism

In this article, the authors examine similarities between violent extremism and substance dependence. They review evidence from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and public health that suggests that there are similarities in violent extremism and substance dependence in terms of the underlying neural pathways, social and psychological causes, behavioral patterns, and opportunities for prevention and intervention.

Ideological passion and violent activism: The moderating role of the significance quest

This research examines how the relationship between passion for an ideology and violent activism is magnified by the personal (vs. collective) loss of significance. In Study 1 (N = 238), the relationship between obsessive (but not harmonious) passion for the Republican Party and violent activism was moderated by personal (but not collective) loss of significance. Study 2 (N = 612) replicated these findings with an experimental manipulation of personal and collective loss of significance in a sample of Black Lives Matter supporters. In Study 3 (N = 416), we set out to attenuate the obsessive passion-violent activism relationship by experimentally manipulating personal and collective significance gain. Echoing the results of Studies 1 and 2, the manipulation of personal (but not collective) significance gain reduced the relationship between obsessive passion for the environmental cause and violent activism. Furthermore, Study 3 examined the psychological mechanism at play by incorporating a measure of goal-shielding - a factor of theoretical relevance to explain extreme behaviour. Personal significance gain reduced individuals' proclivity to inhibit goals unrelated to their ideological pursuit, which in turn reduced their support for violent activism. These findings reveal psychological factors relevant to detecting at-risk individuals and implementing cost-effective prevention programmes against ideological violence.

Evolutionary origin and the development of consciousness

This review seeks to combine advances in anthropology and neuroscience to investigate the adaptive value of human consciousness. It uses an interdisciplinary perspective on the origin of consciousness to refute the most common fallacies in considering consciousness, particularly, disregarding the evolutionary origin of the subjective reality in looking for the neural correlates of consciousness and divorcing studies in neuroscience and behavioural sciences. Various explanations linked to consciousness in the field of neuroscience, supplemented with the theoretical explanation of an experience as an ongoing process of overlap between intrinsic neural dynamics and stimulation can be summarised as the stochastic dynamics of one's control system experienced by the individual in the form of subjective reality. This framework elaborates on the world-brain research program and lays foundation for the quantitative description of one's qualitative feelings and naturalistic science of consciousness. Furthermore, this study highlights the philosophical perspective of the inseparability between the physical correlates and the subjective reality contributing to the realistic ontology of conscious processes.

The Motivational Underpinnings of Intentions to Use Doping in Sport: A Sample of Young Non-Professional Athletes

Doping use is considered as a deviant behavior in sport contexts, and it is necessary to recognize preventive factors to shut down the negative consequences. We proposed that athletes experiencing loss of personal significance would be more prone to doping use intentions. This pathway should occur through the effect of the enhanced predominance of obsessive (vs. harmonious) passion that such athletes experience concerning their sport activity, which, in turn, facilitates the adoption of moral disengagement strategies to find justifications for it, when they perceive that significant others approve their intention. The study relied on a cross-over design, with a convenience sample of 437 athletes recruited at four sports sciences Universities evenly distributed in Italy. Questionnaires administered contained a validated tool based on Kruglanski’s theorizing on radical and deviant behavior (e.g., Loss of Significance, Obsessive, and Harmonious passion) and deriving from social cognitive theory (e.g., Moral disengagement). Results of the study tested a serial mediation moderated model, which links the different variables to explain the influence they have on the intentions to use doping. Overall, this research suggests a motivational dynamic that may be at the heart of illicit behaviors in sport, such as using drugs-enhancing performance potentially among athletes of all kinds.

Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience

Although the study of political behaviour has been traditionally restricted to the social sciences, new advances in political neuroscience and computational cognitive science highlight that the biological sciences can offer crucial insights into the roots of ideological thought and action. Echoing the dazzling diversity of human ideologies, this theme issue seeks to reflect the multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the nature of the political brain. Cutting-edge research along three thematic strands is presented, including (i) computational approaches that zoom in on fine-grained mechanisms underlying political behaviour, (ii) neurocognitive perspectives that harness neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques to study ideological processes, and (iii) behavioural studies and policy-minded analyses of such understandings across cultures and across ideological domains. Synthesizing these findings together, the issue elucidates core questions regarding the nature of uncertainty in political cognition, the mechanisms of social influence and the cognitive structure of ideological beliefs. This offers key directions for future biologically grounded research as well as a guiding map for citizens, psychologists and policymakers traversing the uneven landscape of modern polarization, misinformation, intolerance and dogmatism.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Ideology, communication and polarization

Ideologically committed minds form the basis of political polarization, but ideologically guided communication can further entrench and exacerbate polarization depending on the structures of ideologies and social network dynamics on which cognition and communication operate. Combining a well-established connectionist model of cognition and a well-validated computational model of social influence dynamics on social networks, we develop a new model of ideological cognition and communication on dynamic social networks and explore its implications for ideological political discourse. In particular, we explicitly model ideologically filtered interpretation of social information, ideological commitment to initial opinion, and communication on dynamically evolving social networks, and examine how these factors combine to generate ideologically divergent and polarized political discourse. The results show that ideological interpretation and commitment tend towards polarized discourse. Nonetheless, communication and social network dynamics accelerate and amplify polarization. Furthermore, when agents sever social ties with those that disagree with them (i.e. structure their social networks by homophily), even non-ideological agents may form an echo chamber and form a cluster of opinions that resemble an ideological group. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.