Psychology of Transnational Terrorism and Extreme Political Conflict

Psychological responses to political hostility: a study on aggression, bullying, and well-being in Qatar

In 2017, the Gulf crisis led to a blockade that severely restricted Qatar's air, land, and sea access. This political crisis had far-reaching consequences, particularly affecting cross-national families and children. This qualitative analysis explores the effects of the blockade's political instability on individuals and families, specifically for Qatari citizens married to non-Qatari spouses and their cross-national children. Applying the General Aggression Model and Social Learning Theory, we interviewed 24 individuals residing in Qatar from nations directly affected by the crisis (Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). Two main themes emerged: first, the characteristics of aggressive and bullying behaviour, and second, the impacts on the well-being of cross-national families. The results showed that Qatari women and their children suffered disproportionately due to gender-based citizenship rights issues. The impacts on their well-being included heightened anxiety, depression, feelings of danger, uncertainty, and division within individuals, families, and communities. Recommendations include increasing collaborative efforts between governments, educational institutions, and community-based organizations, which are crucial to addressing aggressive and bullying behaviour across all age groups fostering a more harmonious and resilient society.

Transcultural pathways to the will to fight

In 2022, the "Will to Fight Act" was referred to the US Congress urging attention to measuring and assessing will to fight. That Bill was not enacted, and evaluation efforts within the political and military establishment remain contentious, fragmented, and meager. This likely will persist, along with attendant policy failures and grievous costs, without awareness of research that the social and psychological sciences reveal on the will to fight [S. Atran, Science 373, 1063 (2021)]. We illustrate such research using converging data from a multimethod and multicultural approach, including field and online studies from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. These studies reveal specific psychosocial pathways, within a general causal framework, that predict willingness to make costly sacrifices, including to cooperate, fight, and die in war and sustained conflict. From the continuing strife in Iraq to embattled Ukraine, 31 studies were conducted in 9 countries with nearly 12,000 participants. These include people in longstanding conflicts, refugees, imprisoned jihadists and gangs, US military, studies in Ukraine before and during the current war, and rolling studies with a European ally of Ukraine. Results provide evidence for a mediation model of transcultural pathways to the will to fight. Building on our previous behavioral and brain research, on the battlefield in Iraq, with violent extremists, and with US military, the linear mediation yielding the will to fight involves identity fusion, perceived spiritual formidability, and trust. The model, a variation on "The Devoted Actor Framework," applies to primary reference groups, core cultural values, and leaders.

Coordination in interpersonal systems

Coordinated group behaviour can result in conflict or social cohesion. Thus having a better understanding of coordination in social groups could help us tackle some of our most challenging social problems. Historically, the most common way to study group behaviour is to break it down into sub-processes, such as cognition and emotion, then ideally manipulate them in a social context in order to predict some behaviour such as liking versus distrusting a target person. This approach has gotten us partway to understanding many important collective behaviours, but I argue that making major changes in the world will require a more integrated approach. In this review, I introduce dynamic systems theory, with a focus on interpersonal systems, where all the processes we typically study in individuals, such as cognition and emotion, become intertwined between social partners over time. I focus on the concept of coordination, defined as a temporal correlation between interacting components of a system (or systems) arising due to coupling between them. Finally, I show how this perspective could be used to guide investigations of social problems such as polarisation.

Implicit intertemporal trajectories in cognitive representations of the self and nation

Individual selves and the collectives to which people belong can be mentally represented as following intertemporal trajectories-progress, decline, or stasis. These studies examined the relation between intertemporal trajectories for the self and nation in American and British samples collected at the beginning and end of major COVID-19 restrictions. Implicit temporal trajectories can be inferred from asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events across different mentally represented temporal periods (e.g., memory for the past and the imagined future). At the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions, both personal and collective temporal thought demonstrated implicit temporal trajectories of decline, in which future thought was less positive than memory. The usually reliable positivity biases in personal temporal thought may be reversable by major public events. This implicit trajectory of decline attenuated in personal temporal thought after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. However, collective temporal thought demonstrated a pervasive negativity bias across temporal domains at both data collection points, with the collective future more strongly negative than collective memory. Explicit beliefs concerning collective progress, decline, and hope for the national future corresponded to asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events within collective temporal thought.

The Moderating Effects of “Dark” Personality Traits and Message Vividness on the Persuasiveness of Terrorist Narrative Propaganda

Terrorism researchers have long discussed the role of psychology in the radicalization process. This work has included research on the respective roles of individual psychological traits and responses to terrorist propaganda. Unfortunately, much of this work has looked at psychological traits and responses to propaganda individually and has not considered how these factors may interact. This study redresses this gap in the literature. In this experiment (N = 268), participants were measured in terms of their narcissism, Machiavellianism, subclinical psychopathy, and everyday sadism—collectively called the Dark Tetrad. Participants were then exposed to a vivid or nonvivid terrorist narrative (or a control message). Results indicate that Machiavellianism interacts with both narrative exposure and narrative vividness to amplify the persuasive effect of terrorist narratives. Neither narcissism, subclinical psychopathy, nor everyday sadism had such an effect. These results highlight the importance of considering the psychological traits of audiences when evaluating proclivity for radicalization via persuasion by terrorist narratives.

Willingness to sacrifice among convicted Islamist terrorists versus violent gang members and other criminals

Is terrorism just another form of criminal activity, as many nations' justice systems assume? We offer an initial answer using face-to-face interviews and structured surveys in thirty-five Spanish prisons. Recent theories of extreme sacrifice inform this direct observational and comparative study. Islamist terrorists display levels of self-sacrifice for their primary reference group similar to that of Latino gangs, but greater willingness to sacrifice for primary values than other inmates (non-radical Muslims, Latino gangs, and delinquent bands). This disposition is motivated by stronger perceived injustice, discrimination, and a visceral commitment to such values (risk/radicalization factors). Nevertheless, state authorities, prison staff, and families are (protective/de-radicalization) factors apt to reduce willingness to sacrifice and keep foreign fighters, now being released in large numbers, from returning to terrorism.

Significance-Quest Theory

Even though the motivation to feel worthy, to be respected, and to matter to others has been identified for centuries by scholars, the antecedents, consequences, and conditions of its activation have not been systematically analyzed or integrated. The purpose of this article is to offer such an integration. We feature a motivational construct, the quest for significance, defined as the need to have social worth. This need is typically fulfilled by a sense of measuring up to the values one shares with significant others. Our significance-quest theory (SQT) assumes that the need for significance is universal, whereas the means of satisfying it depend on the sociocultural context in which one's values are embedded. Those means are identified in a narrative supported and validated by one's network, or reference group. The quest for significance is activated by significance loss and/or the opportunity for significance gain. It motivates behavior that aims to affirm, realize, and/or show commitment to an important value. The SQT is consistent with large bodies of prior research and supported by novel studies in multiple laboratory and field settings. It transcends prior understandings and offers guidance for further study of this essential human motivation.

Spiritual over physical formidability determines willingness to fight and sacrifice through loyalty in cross-cultural populations

Across 11 studies involving six countries from four continents (n = 3,285), we extend insights from field investigations in conflict zones to offline and online surveys to show that personal spiritual formidability—the conviction and immaterial resources (values, strengths of beliefs, character) of a person to fight—is positively associated with the will to fight and sacrifice for others. The physical formidability of groups in conflict has long been promoted as the primary factor in human decisions to fight or flee in times of conflict. Here, studies in Spain, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Morocco reveal that personal spiritual formidability, a construct distinct from religiosity, is more strongly associated with the willingness to fight and make costly self-sacrifices for the group than physical formidability. A follow-on study among cadets of the US Air Force Academy further indicates that this effect is mediated by a stronger loyalty to the group, a finding replicated in a separate study with a European sample. The results demonstrate that personal spiritual formidability is a primary determinant of the will to fight across cultures, and this individual-level factor, propelled by loyal bonds made with others, disposes citizens and combatants to fight at great personal risk.

Morally Homogeneous Networks and Radicalism

Online radicalization is among the most vexing challenges the world faces today. Here, we demonstrate that homogeneity in moral concerns results in increased levels of radical intentions. In Study 1, we find that in Gab—a right-wing extremist network—the degree of moral convergence within a cluster predicts the number of hate-speech messages members post. In Study 2, we replicate this observation in another extremist network, Incels. In Studies 3 to 5 ( N = 1,431), we demonstrate that experimentally leading people to believe that others in their hypothetical or real group share their moral views increases their radical intentions as well as willingness to fight and die for the group. Our findings highlight the role of moral convergence in radicalization, emphasizing the need for diversity of moral worldviews within social networks.

Radicalization to Violence: A View from Cultural Psychiatry

This article introduces a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry with selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry on "Pluralism and Polarization: Cultural Contexts and Dynamics of Radicalization," which took place June 20-22, 2017. The ASI brought together an interdisciplinary group scholars to consider the role of social dynamics, cultural contexts and psychopathology in radicalization to violent extremism. Papers addressed four broad topics: (1) current meanings and uses of the term radicalization; (2) personal and social determinants of violent radicalization, including individual psychology, interpersonal dynamics, and wider social-historical, community and network processes; (3) social and cultural contexts and trajectories of radicalization including the impact of structural and historical forces associated with colonization and globalization as well as contemporary political, economic and security issues faced by youth and disaffected groups; and (4) approaches to community prevention and clinical intervention to reduce the risk of violent radicalization. In this introductory essay, we revisit these themes, define key terms, and outline some of the theoretical and empirical insights in the contributions to this issue. Efforts to prevent violent radicalization face challenges because social media and the Internet allow the rapid spread of polarizing images and ideas. The escalation of security measures and policies also serves to confirm the worldview of conspiracy theory adherents. In addition to addressing the structural inequities that fuel feelings of anger and resentment, we need to promote solidarity among diverse communities by building a pluralistic civil society that offers a meaningful alternative to the violent rhetorics of us and them.

Identity fusion predicts violent pro-group behavior when it is morally justifiable

Identity fusion is a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts extreme pro-group behaviors. However, the effects of fusion depending on the nature of such behaviors -violent versus nonviolent- and the factors that may incline strongly fused individuals to display them still remain unexplored. To fill this gap, we performed two correlational studies in which we examined whether moral beliefs regarding the justifiability of violence moderate the relationship between fusion with the family (Study 1), or with the country (Study 2), and willingness to engage in violent and nonviolent pro-group acts. Results showed that strongly fused participants were more willing to act violently than weakly fused participants, but only when their beliefs in the moral justifiability of violence were high. In contrast, their willingness to engage in nonviolent acts was not influenced by moral beliefs.

Why People Enter and Embrace Violent Groups

We distinguish two pathways people may follow when they join violent groups: compliance and internalization. Compliance occurs when individuals are coerced to join by powerful influence agents. Internalization occurs when individuals join due to a perceived convergence between the self and the group. We searched for evidence of each of these pathways in field investigations of former members of two renowned terrorist organizations: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (Study 1) and Islamist radical groups (Study 2). Results indicated that ex-fighters joined LTTE for reasons associated with both compliance and internalization but that ex-fighters joined Islamist radical groups primarily for reasons associated with internalization. When compliance occurred, it often took the form of coercion within LTTE but involved charismatic persuasion agents within Islamist groups. This evidence of systematic differences in the reasons why fighters enter violent groups suggests that strategies for preventing radicalization and fostering de-radicalization should be tailored to particular groups.