The Personality of Extremists: Examining Violent and Non-Violent Defense of Muslims

Abstract

Many early explanations for violent extremism focused on clinical dispositions, withpoor empirical support. In the current work, we argued that violent extremists might be “normal” in a clinical sense while nonetheless bearing certain personality signatures. Results from five studies among four general population of Muslims and a sample of former Mujahideen suggest that both violent and non-violent behavioral intentions among European Muslims and Muslims in the Middle East are predicted by basic personality traits. Results from individual studies and a meta-analysis showed that more violent intentions were related to lower altruism, lower openness to experience, and lower emotionality, whereas more non-violent intentions were primarily related to higher altruism. When substituting non-violent intentions with actual behaviors the results were similar, suggesting that the findings are not merely self-report artefacts. Finally, the violent intention effects were consistent across the three European countries (e.g., Belgium, Denmark and Sweden) that provided the most foreign fighters to Islamic State per capita. Overall, the personality model explained 11% of the individual differences in non-violent and 27% of the violent intentions.

Group-Based Relative Deprivation Explains Endorsement of Extremism Among Western-Born Muslims

“…The surveys for Studies 1 to 6 included measures of group-based relative deprivation (e.g., "Muslims will always be at the bottom and non-Muslim Westerners at the top of the social ladder"; αs = .79-.92; Smith et al, 2012), Muslim identification (e.g., "I strongly identify with other Muslims"; αs = .72-.94; adapted from Doosje, Ellemers, & Spears, 1995), perceived injustice (e.g., "Muslims in Muslim countries suffer because of the foreign policy of Western countries"; αs = .60-.89; Obaidi, Bergh, et al, 2018;Tausch et al, 2011), groupbased anger (e.g., "I feel angry when I think of Western countries' foreign policies towards Muslim countries"; αs = .59-.94; adapted from Tausch et al, 2011), 1 violent behavioral intentions ("I am ready to do everything in my power to change Western countries' foreign policy towards Muslim countries" and "I am ready to use violence against other people in order to achieve something I consider very important"; αs = .61-.89) to defend or support Muslims or Islam (Doosje et al, 2013), and finally, place of birth (for detailed information about item content, see Table S4 in the Supplemental Material). All of the examined variables in this research also differentiated former jihadists from the general population in Afghanistan ( Jihadists scoring higher), attesting to their validity (Obaidi, Bergh, Akrami, & Dovidio, 2019). Except for place of birth, all items were scored on 7-point Likert-type scales ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).…”

Measuring extremist archetypes: Scale development and validation

“…As stated earlier, the above descriptions tap into both the social roles and psychological profiles of different extremist archetypes. Researchers argue that individual psychological factors such as nonclinical personality traits can be useful in advancing our understanding of violent extremism [ 10 – 12 ]. For instance, recent research has established an association between basic personality characteristics and more extreme ideological standpoints [ 12 ].…”

“…Researchers argue that individual psychological factors such as nonclinical personality traits can be useful in advancing our understanding of violent extremism [ 10 – 12 ]. For instance, recent research has established an association between basic personality characteristics and more extreme ideological standpoints [ 12 ]. Others have found a pattern of personality traits expressed through low intellect/imagination, low extraversion, and high agreeableness that seem to make people vulnerable to extremist ideology.…”

Psychobiology of Extremist Violence: The Comeback of Individuality

“…Searches directed to identify what kinds of personality traits, if any, predispose people to endorse extremist violence are rather scarce. The links unveiled by Obaidi et al (2021) between normative personality and support for extremist violence might have parallels on studies about the psychological features which characterize political extremism in democracies (Jost, 2017;Federico, 2021;Federico and Golec de Zavala, 2021). However, only intellectual simplicity ("low openess") cohered with traits describing political extremism on ordinary populations (van Prooijen and Kreuwel, 2019).…”

“…This path deserves to be explored in depth, despite the hurried dismissal of a plausible role for psychopathic tendencies by Obaidi et al (2021). The antisocial cluster was the better predictor to gang's embededness in UK prisoners (Egan and Beadman, 2001), and the data gathered using measures of Appetitive Aggression in several samples of young African excombatants could be particularly informative on this regard (Elbert et al, 2018;.…”