Items were generated to explore the factorial structure of a construct of fundamentalism worded appropriately for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Results suggested three underlying dimensions: (a) External versus Internal Authority, (b) Fixed versus Malleable Religion, and (c) Worldly Rejection versus Worldly Affirmation. The three dimensions indicate that religious fundamentalism is a personal orientation that asserts a supra-human locus of moral authority, context unbound truth, and the appreciation of the sacred over the worldly components of experience. The 15-item, 3-dimension solution was evaluated across Mexican (n = 455) and American (n = 449) samples. Fit indexes point out the viability of the new inventory across these two samples henceforward referred to as the Multi-Dimensional Fundamentalism Inventory (MDFI). Additional validity tests supported that the new inventory was negatively correlated with participants' integrative complexity in a religious domain-specific way.
This article reports on an intervention designed to prevent violent extremism in young UK Muslims, and provides an empirical assessment of its effectiveness. The course was designed to expose participants to the multiplicity of value priorities that influential Muslims embody, and to structure group activities that allow participants to explore all value positions on issues central to radical Islamist discourse, free from criticism or social pressure. The intervention, a 16 contact hour course using films and group activities that enables participants to problem solve according to a broad array of their own values, was pre and post tested with 81 young Muslims (mean age 19.48; SD=2.14) across seven pilot groups around the UK. As hypothesised, value spread and integrative complexity increased significantly by the end of the course in group discussions, and in written responses to moral dilemmas, conflict resolution style shifted towards collaboration and compromise.
The psychology of religion has a vital role to play in understanding religiously motivated violence, and thus contributing to its prevention. Psychological pathology alone fails to explain either terrorists’ actions or the fundamentalist religiosity that is co-opted as its legitimation. Normal social psychological processes such as uncertainty reduction, terror management, social identity, meaning making (through religion), in combination with cognitive factors such as intratextuality and low integrative complexity, provide a more adequate understanding of the radicalization of young people, some of whom go on to commit violence against hated out-groups.
Savage is a social psychologist based in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge. For the previous 15 years Sara worked as Senior Research Associate in the Psychology and Religion Research Group at Cambridge, during which she and her colleagues developed a unique intervention to address extremism. Sara continues to develop empirically based interventions to prevent extremism and inter-group violence through programmes that operationalise and measure the construct of Integrative Complexity (Suedfeld 2010), such as Being Muslim Being British, IC in Scotland (I SEE) and Conflict Transformation, published in a number of empirical articles and chapters. The IC model is now being extended to a range of countries, extremisms and inter-group conflicts, supported by continual empirical assessment and training (www.ICTcambridge.org). AbstractBeing Kenyan Being Muslim (BKBM) is an intervention that counters violent extremism and other forms of intergroup conflict through promoting value complexity. BKBM was trialled in Eastleigh, Nairobi, Kenya with a group of twenty-four participants of Kenyan and Somali ethnicities; eight participants were identified as vulnerable to extremism, six of these were former al Shabaab members. This article provides an empirical assessment of the effectiveness of the BKBM course. The new BKBM course follows the structure of the Being Muslim Being British course that exposes participants to the multiplicity of value priorities that influential Muslims embody, and structures group activities that allow participants to explore all value positions on issues central to extremist discourse and relevant to events in Kenya, free from criticism or social pressure. The intervention, a sixteen-contact-hour course using films and group activities that enable participants to problem solve on extremismrelated topics according to a broad array of their own values, was pre and post tested with twenty-four participants (twenty-two of whom completed the full assessments), (mean age 29.6, SD = 6.27). As hypothesized, Integrative Complexity (IC) increased significantly by the end of the course in written verbal data, and there was clear evidence of ability to perceive some validity in different viewpoints (achieving differentiation) in all oral participant presentations at the end of the course.
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