Discordant knowing: A social cognitive structure underlying fanaticism.

Abstract

Examining the epistemic and social–cognitive structures underlying fanaticism, radicalization, and extremism should shed light on how these harmful phenomena develop and can be prevented. In nine studies (N = 3,277), we examined whether discordant knowing—felt knowledge about something that one perceives as opposed by most others—underlies fanaticism. Across multifaceted approaches, experimentally manipulating participants’ views to fall under this framework (e.g., “I am certain about X, but most other people think X is unknowable or wrong”) heightened indicators of fanaticism, including aggression, determined ignorance, and wanting to join extreme groups in the service of these views. Additional analyses found that this effect occurs via threat-based mechanisms (Studies 1–7), can be intervened on to prevent fanaticism (Study 2), is conditional on the potency of opposition (Study 3), differs from effects on extremism (Study 4), and extends to mental representations of the self (Study 5). Generalizing these findings to real-world contexts, inducing participants with discordant knowledge about the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and the morality of abortion heightened fanaticism regarding these topics (Studies 6 and 7). Additionally, antivaccine fanatics and followers of a real-world fanatical religious group exhibited greater discordant knowing than nonfanatical individuals (Studies 8 and 9). Collectively, the present studies suggest that a specific epistemic structure—discordant knowing—underlies fanaticism, and further, highlight the potential of investigating constructs like fanaticism from an epistemic social cognitive perspective.

Behavioral extremity moderates the association between certainty in attitudes about COVID and willingness to engage in mitigation‐related behaviors

“…1 Finally, we measured willingness to engage in 20 attitude–consistent behaviors (see Table 1). Some behavioral willingness measures we included are based closely on prior research on extremism (Gollwitzer et al., 2022; Swann et al., 2009) and compliance with COVID mitigation policies (Gadarian et al., 2021; Kachanoff et al., 2021). Because of their similarity to established measures, we assessed some of these in most or all samples.…”

“…Complementing these findings from the attitudes literature, research on self‐threat similarly shows that perceiving personally important beliefs as vulnerable or insecure often creates defensiveness (Kernis et al., 2008; McGregor et al., 2013). For example, having an important position challenged can produce a sense that one's views are under attack, causing people to become dogmatic and lash out at disagreeing others (Gollwitzer et al., 2022). We theorized that even in the absence of an overt challenge, it would be disconcerting simply to lack certainty when one wants to or thinks one should be certain (DeMarree et al., 2014), such as when facing a potentially threatening topic where protective actions might be necessary (Haas & Cunningham, 2014; Neta et al., 2017).…”

NLP as a Lens for Causal Analysis and Perception Mining to Infer Mental Health on Social Media

“…in order to correlate stances in social media posts with both online and offline phenomena that include protest dynamics and social distancing. Furthermore, perception mining supports extensive studies over discordant knowing [49] and exploring social perceptions of health and diseases using social media data [50].…”

Attitude Strength: What’s New?

“…Relatively recent work on understanding fanatical behavior (e.g., engaging in aggression for one’s cause) has produced conceptually similar results. In particular, Gollwitzer and colleagues (2022) examined what they called discordant knowing , a situation in which people feel certain of something but then learn that their position is opposed by other people. Learning that others disagree with you, especially liked or important others, can presumably shake one’s confidence and produce feelings of conflict regarding the attitude (i.e., subjective ambivalence, Priester & Petty, 2001).…”

“…In sum, the accumulated evidence appears to suggest that when people’s attitudes on a variety of important issues become problematic (uncomfortable) in some way (e.g., because their high certainty is challenged, Gollwitzer et al, 2022, or they are uncertain of their views in a threatening domain, Siev et al, 2022, 2023), they can react by becoming more willing to engage in extreme and even violent behaviors in an attempt to compensate for that weakness by demonstrating strength.…”