“Consumed by creed”: Obsessive‐compulsive symptoms underpin ideological obsession and support for political violence

Abstract

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.

Commentary on “Consumed by Creed”

“…This is particularly important if we take into account that previous questions were directly related to Islamic rituals. Adam-Troian and Bélanger (2023) should have taken into account the possibility of such misunderstanding, but as far as we have understood their survey, this was not the case.…”

“…Thus, the use of the Y-BOCS in Adam-Troian and Bélanger's (2023) study cannot lead to the conclusion reported in the full title of their article ("Obsessive-compulsive symptoms underpin ideological obsession and support for political violence"), as it was not meant to measure OCD symptoms in the general population. However, if we assume for the sake of further discussion that the use of the Y-BOCS is, in fact, valid, we can visualize the main result by plotting the reported severity of OCD symptoms against the measure of radicalization to look at the potential relationship.…”

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Consumed by Creed" (Adam-Troian & Bélanger, 2023) is a research article that suggests a link between Obsessive-Compulsive symptoms and support for political violence. Analysing the article and the dataset provided by the authors, we found errors in their methodology and procedures, accompanied by a high number of researcher degrees of freedom that could have led to the finding of false-positive results.

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“…Understanding how radicalization is created, and how targeted psychological interventions might help to reduce it, is an important, active field of research. In their article, "Consumed by Creed," Adam-Troian and Bélanger (2023) found a link between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and radicalization, suggesting the possibility of preventing radicalization by treating OCDs.…”

“…Taken together, these results indicated that the data could not be used to support the claim in the title of the article. We further looked at the raw data and found that various questionnaires used by Adam-Troian and Bélanger (2023) in their survey were not reported in the study, while others contained some adjustments to the questions compared to the original version that they cited; additionally, cleaning of the raw data revealed that the exclusion criteria explained in the article were either not used, or were used differently, between the samples. This high number of "researcher degrees of freedom" in the data collection and analysis process may have led to statistically significant effects that nevertheless are in fact false positives.…”