Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions

Abstract

Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? Although traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This article synthesizes cutting-edge evidence demonstrating that individuals’ cognitive and affective architecture shapes their willingness to support ideological violence. In the cognitive domain, traits such as cognitive rigidity, slow perceptual strategies, and poor executive functions are linked to heightened endorsement for ideological violence. In the emotion domain, characteristics associated with emotional reactivity and impaired emotional regulation, such as sensation seeking and impulsivity, can facilitate readiness for extreme political action. The review homes in on the roles of cognitive rigidity and sensation seeking as traits heightening proclivities for extreme pro-group behavior and recommends that future research should assess cognition-emotion interactions to reveal different subprofiles of political actors. A theoretical framework focused on cognitive and affective information-processing traits—and their interactions—opens up tractable empirical questions and a future research agenda. Identifying subsets of ideologues is an endeavor with potential to inform the design of evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing ideological extremism and fostering social understanding.

The psychological and socio-political consequences of infectious diseases: Authoritarianism, governance, and nonzoonotic (human-to-human) infection transmission

“…A recent investigation demonstrates that personality traits interact with the social context to shape citizens' social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ludeke, Vitriol, Larsen, & Gensowski, 2021), illustrating that context, geography, and personality dispositions can have joint and amplifying effects on each other. Acknowledging these (potentially non-linear) interactions is particularly important when we con sider real-life ideologically-motivated behavior such as extreme political action and violence (Zmigrod & Goldenberg, 2021).…”

Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity

“…One limitation of this work is that the effects of coherence and certainty cannot be disentangled from the one given by participants’ political extremity ( 11 , 17 , 19 ). This is because our measurement instruments do not allow us to define two similar levels of coherence or certainty with different extremity, or vice versa.…”

“…While interaction rules based on individuals rewarding similarity have been attributed as the main causes of the existence of echo chambers in social media ( 9 , 69 ) and the political segregation of societies ( 7 ), this work suggests that such an assumption may oversimplify the complexity of political interactions. Future research should examine whether and how the asymmetric effects reported in this work relate to emergent phenomena such as the extremification of political opinions ( 17 ), the polarization of beliefs ( 70 ), and the disappearance of moderate views ( 15 ).…”

“…While coherence and certainty are both related to the notion of political extremity, they are conceptually different variables (17)(18)(19). Extreme individuals tend to have ideologically consistent opinions (high coherence) and are confident about their views (high certainty).…”

A neurocognitive model of ideological thinking

“…It will be essential for a mature neurocognitive model of ideological behavior to address the neurocognitive impacts of both holding certain ideological beliefs (Connors & Halligan, 2015) and holding any belief to an extreme degree (Rollwage et al, 2019;Zmigrod, 2020b;Zmigrod & Goldenberg, 2021). Furthermore, as outlined in Figure 2C, the neurocognitive model explicitly postulates that there are bidirectional links between ideologies and neurocognitive processes, and so future research will need to untangle the causal arrows and cyclical effects between ideological and cognitive A neurocognitive model of ideological thinking POLITICS AND THE LIFE SCIENCES • FALL 2021 • VOL.…”