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Group extremism, defined as collective behavior that substantially violates situational norms of conduct, is currently receiving a great deal of attention from social scientists, military and law enforcement personnel, and the public at large. This attention is motivated by concern about extreme groups that advocate and practice violence to achieve their goals. However, a wide range of nonviolent groups (e.g., religious cults, single-issue political groups) also exhibit extremism. Because of its size and diversity, the literature on extreme groups suffers from a lack of theoretical integration. In particular, little effort has been made to identify common group processes underlying various forms of extremism. In addressing this omission, this chapter builds on Significant Quest Theory by highlighting the role that networks play in group extremism.

Nationalist and populist movements are on the rise across the globe. Analyses of populism have been traditionally carried out within the realms of sociology and political science. Yet, as a form of social behavior, populism has a strong psychological underpinning. Scholars have provided different explanations to populism, identifying economic difficulties, political resentment, ethnic rivalries, the refugee crisis, and geopolitical tensions as recent drivers of this phenomenon. In this chapter, we build on these findings by identifying common psychological mechanisms that underlie these seemingly disparate conditions, and offer a psychological lens to explain how they make populism appealing. Specifically, we argue that two main motivational forces lend attractiveness to the populist narrative: the need for significance and mattering and the need for cognitive closure. We provide empirical support to our argument by briefly reporting the results of two studies of populism in the U.S. and Italy.

Individuals who have a strong locomotion orientation tend to be future-oriented and motivated to move from the present state toward a future state, making swift and steady progress toward their goals. The current study has assessed the conceptual possibility that such motivation leads locomotors to experience greater hopeful thinking, an active cognitive process that consists in planning the future and implementing these plans. The results of Study 1 lend preliminary support to this possibility. The practical implication was linked to the importance of hope in the subjective well-being experienced in everyday life. For this reason, Study 2 tested a model in which hopeful thinking mediated the subjective well-being experienced by locomotors. The results supported the hypothesis: locomotion orientation was associated with enhanced hope capabilities that, in turn, were associated with higher subjective well-being, with significant positive implications for individuals.

This research used open source information to investigate the motivational backgrounds of 219 suicide attackers from various regions of the world. We inquired as to whether the attackers exhibited evidence for significance quest as a motive for their actions, and whether the eradication of significance loss and/or the aspiration for significance gain systematically differed according to attackers’ demographics. It was found that the specific nature of the significance quest motive varied in accordance with attackers’ gender, age, and education. Whereas Arab-Palestinians, males, younger attackers, and more educated attackers seem to have been motivated primarily by the possibility of significance gain, women, older attackers, those with little education, and those hailing from other regions seem to have been motivated primarily by the eradication of significance loss. Analyses also suggested that the stronger an attacker’s significance quest motive, the greater the effectiveness of their attack, as...

The coordinated attacks attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS; also called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL) across Paris that left 130 civilians dead, the massacre of 2,000 in Baga, Nigeria, by the Boko Haram, or the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that killed 3 and injured 264 are but a few examples of the terrorist attacks that, in recent years, have become commonplace across the world. Such occurrences, unfortunately, show no signs of relenting, and they present a particularly vexing challenge to global security (Zarif, 2015). The effort toward combating terrorists and terrorist organizations requires clear military and policing involvement, aimed at protecting innocent civilians and defeating the extremists on the ground. Equally clear is the fact that psychologists also have a seat at this table. Insights gleaned from current empirical studies focused on terrorism, as well as decades of research into psychological processes underlying terrorist activity, are important weapons in the fight against violent extremism.