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Behavioral extremism takes different forms and shapes, including violent extremism, extreme dieting, extreme passion, and extreme infatuations. The authors look at these various behaviors through the lens of the goal systems theory and argue that all cases of extremism stem from motivational imbalance whereby a given need (or a goal serving this need) gains dominance and overrides other basic concerns. The result is an expansion of behavioral options for addressing the prioritized need and engagement in extreme behaviors forbidden under the state of balance. Further, the authors discuss the antecedents of motivational imbalance with a particular focus on individual differences. They argue that some people personify the dynamics of extremism more than others and propose a construct of “extreme personality” to reflect between-person variation in proneness to motivational imbalance. They cite evidence showing that extreme personality predicts manifestations of extremism at different levels: motivational, cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social. They conclude by discussing future research directions.

This chapter reviews several developments in goal systems theory (GST) that have taken place since its “debut” in 2002. These include empirical work on the configurational constructs of equifinality and multifinality as well as on the new concept of counterfinality. The discussion also addresses the means–ends fusion model of intrinsic motivation based on the structural properties of GST and a model of extremism that draws on both the structural and allocational properties of GST and identifies a common psychological dynamic in widely different “extremisms” including terrorism, extreme sports, extreme diets, extreme love, and exceptional humanism. Lastly, the concept of goal systems is tied to that of basic human needs. Whereas the basic needs form part of a largely invariable human nature, goal systems designed to serve those needs are socially constructed and, hence, vary in accordance with context and culture. Understanding this conjunction provides new insights into a wide range of behaviors, including the aggressive response to frustration and romantic love.

Several existing explanations of the factors that lead some to support or participate in violent extremism provide parts of a useful framework yet do not sufficiently integrate the major causal variables into a truly workable theory of what drives certain individuals toward the violent extremist cause. The 3 Ns theory used here argues that individuals will support or participate in violent extremist groups if the organizations’ goals and activities are expected to help meet personal needs. Individuals are most likely to become ideologically committed to the extremist cause because of its promise to meet their psychological need for significance. But in contexts of armed conflict, extremist groups may be sympathized with or attract active support because they are also the best option for meeting security and sustenance needs. But only meeting physical needs does not draw the same ideological commitment that meeting the need for significance does.

ISIS in Iraq is not riding on the back of a wave of Sunni resentment as it did in 2014. Far from it, Sunni Arab Iraqis are now the most content of the major Iraqi communities. While Iraq faces multiple significant challenges, from very serious economic problems and poverty to the Covid-19 pandemic to the Iraqi state being directly challenged by Iran-aligned militias, it is Iraq’s Sunni Arabs who maintain greater confidence than Shia Arabs and Kurds in the Iraqi state and its policies. While ISIS in Iraq continues to survive, it is not thriving, and its immediate future does not foretell a comeback if there is not a major change in how Sunni Arabs view how they are treated by the Iraqi state. Most importantly, Sunni Arabs believe that the Iraqi state cares about them and their needs more now since any time since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book. It also lays out some main implications from this study. One of the most important takeaways from the study is that ISIS in Iraq is down but not out. While ISIS is not a potent military force in Iraq now, if Iraq’s Sunnis are made to feel marginalized and threatened again, it could breathe new life into the group. Iraq’s largely dysfunctional and underperforming central government does not have the luxury of taking Sunni Iraqi support for granted in the long run. Generational change in Iraq could be an important source of new support for ISIS in the country’s Sunni population, as younger Sunnis who did not experience the degradation and pain of ISIS occupation may come to believe ISIS represents an alternative to poor governance by the central government.

This chapter explores the political and social developments in Iraq from the U.S. invasion in 2003 to the pivotal year of 2011, when U.S. forces withdrew from the country. It was in this time span that the social and political foundations for the rise of ISIS were established. While the rise of ISIS was not inevitable by 2012, the events of that year greatly contributed to the chances of a major Sunni insurgency in Iraq breaking out. Most importantly, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, many Sunni Arabs perceived their exclusion from political and societal power in Iraq and a growing dominance of sectarian Shia political forces. This sense of marginalization and victimization among Sunnis became acute following Prime Minister’s Nouri al Maliki’s efforts to further marginalize Sunnis after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. It was this sense of Sunni grievance that offered the Sunni insurgency the social support it needed to gain traction.

This chapter seeks to understand why ISIS lost the hearts and minds of most of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs between 2014 and 2017. As data collected in several waves of surveys in Iraq show, by the end of 2017, the vast majority of Iraqi Sunni Arabs were desperate to see the end of ISIS. ISIS lost the willingness of the population to cooperate and aid it in its fight against the Iraqi state and its allies. In fact, some brave Sunni Arabs actively worked to undermine ISIS from within its area of occupation. More Iraqi Sunnis tried to avoid ISIS’s ire and welcomed the arrival of the Iraqi Army and its allies as they retook territory from the extremist group.

One of the most asked questions about ISIS during its occupation of large swathes Iraq is this: What was it like to live under the governance of the group? Using data collected from ordinary Iraqis, the chapter attempts to give a picture of everyday life in ISIS-occupied Iraq. Most Sunni Iraqis who experienced the arrival of ISIS, particularly in Mosul, say the group was largely accepted at first, as an alternative to what was viewed as a corrupt, abusive, and sectarian Iraqi state. In retrospect, however, many of the people interviewed about ISIS’s governance thought that although ISIS was superior in some aspects of governance to the Iraqi state, the group largely wore out its welcome through its brutal imposition of an interpretation of sharia that was far more extreme than even relatively conservative Sunni Iraqis were willing to accept.

Nouri al Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister in 2012, was the single most important factor in driving the rise of ISIS in that year. Deeply sectarian, the Shia prime minister turned to marginalizing and intimidating the Sunni Iraqi population with the goal of ensuring the political dominance of Iraq’s Shia majority. The result of Maliki’s efforts was an Iraqi Sunni population that viewed itself as physically threatened and deeply disrespected. ISIS was able to use this Sunni disaffection with the Iraqi state to build a social base of support for a renewed insurgency and conquer significant swathes of territory in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq.

The introduction sets up the research questions that the book explores: What factors conditioned public support and opposition toward ISIS in Iraq? Why did some Iraqi move from passive support for the group and actively participate in the group’s activities, including fighting? The chapter also introduces the argument of the book, namely that ISIS’s rise and fall in Iraq were largely due to the group’s impact on the human needs of Iraqis in the areas where it operated. The group was successful when it was viewed as meeting security, sustenance, and significance needs. It declined when it could no longer provide for those needs.

By leveraging data collected in the years between 2012 and 2018, this chapter seeks to explain why Iraqis came to join and otherwise participate in ISIS. The data used in this chapter come from interviews with captured ISIS foot soldiers and leaders, as well as dozens of focus group interviews with Iraqis who lived in ISIS-occupied areas of Iraq and witnessed firsthand how Iraqis they knew, some from their own families, were drawn into ISIS. The data will show that there was no single path into ISIS for the Iraqis who participated in the organization. The data show that ISIS was a means for Iraqis who joined it to meet needs they faced at the time, be it for security, sustenance, or significance. What is clear is that most Iraqis did not join ISIS out of religious zealotry.

Even though the motivation to feel worthy, to be respected, and to matter to others has been identified for centuries by scholars, the antecedents, consequences, and conditions of its activation have not been systematically analyzed or integrated. The purpose of this article is to offer such an integration. We feature a motivational construct, the quest for significance, defined as the need to have social worth. This need is typically fulfilled by a sense of measuring up to the values one shares with significant others. Our significance-quest theory (SQT) assumes that the need for significance is universal, whereas the means of satisfying it depend on the sociocultural context in which one’s values are embedded. Those means are identified in a narrative supported and validated by one’s network, or reference group. The quest for significance is activated by significance loss and/or the opportunity for significance gain. It motivates behavior that aims to affirm, realize, and/or show commitment to an important value. The SQT is consistent with large bodies of prior research and supported by novel studies in multiple laboratory and field settings. It transcends prior understandings and offers guidance for further study of this essential human motivation.

With the constantly increasing popularity of human multitasking, it is crucial to know why people engage in simultaneous task performance or switch between unfinished tasks. In the present article, we propose that multitasking behavior occurs when people have multiple active goals; the greater their number, the greater the degree of multitasking. The number of currently considered goals is reduced where one goal's significance overrides the others, reducing the degree of multitasking. We tested these hypotheses in a series of six studies in which we manipulated either goal activation or goal importance and investigated how this affected the degree of multitasking. The results showed that the more active goals participants actively entertained, the more likely they were to plan to engage in multitasking (Studies 1 and 5), and the more often they switched between tasks (Study 2). They also multitasked more under high interruption condition assumed to activate more goals than low interruption condition (Study 3). Further, we demonstrated that the degree of multitasking was significantly decreased by reducing the number of simultaneously considered goals, either via increasing the relative importance of one of the goals (Study 4) or via inducing greater commitment to one of the goals through a mental contrasting procedure (Study 5). Study 6, carried out in an academic context, additionally showed that the importance of a class-related goal negatively predicted media multitasking in class. The results thus show that goal activation is the underlying mechanism that explains why people multitask. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Behavioral extremism (e.g., violent extremism, extreme humanism, or extreme athleticism) elicits fear, revulsion, pity, or admiration depending on the context. Its common image as exotic and esoteric makes extremism fascinating to audiences worldwide. The negative, antisocial and positive, prosocial cases of extremism are generally regarded as poles apart and as based on qualitatively different psychologies. By contrast, we propose that all cases of extremism, across different manifestations and levels of phylogeny, involve the same psychological mechanism. This mechanism consists of a motivational imbalance wherein a given need becomes dominant to the extent of overriding other basic concerns and liberates behaviors that the latter formerly constrained. We discuss the antecedents and consequences of such imbalance and provide empirical evidence to support our claim.

Whereas the COVID-19 pandemic induces in people both uncertainty and angst, the latter may not be a direct consequence of uncertainty as such, but rather of the possible negative outcomes whose subjective certainty increased under the pandemic. From this perspective, we discuss the psychological determinants of people’s reactions to the pandemic and their modes of self-affirmation in response to pandemic-implied threats. Those reactions are guided by value-oriented narratives that may variously drive people’s pro- and anti-social behaviors during the pandemic.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis. Consequently, many countries have adopted restrictive measures that caused a substantial change in society. Within this framework, it is reasonable to suppose that a sentiment of societal discontent, defined as generalized concern about the precarious state of society, has arisen. Literature shows that collectively experienced situations can motivate people to help each other. Since societal discontent is conceptualized as a collective phenomenon, we argue that it could influence intention to help others, particularly those who suffer from coronavirus. Thus, in the present study, we aimed (a) to explore the relationship between societal discontent and intention to help at the individual level and (b) to investigate a possible moderating effect of societal discontent at the country level on this relationship. To fulfil our purposes, we used data collected in 42 countries (N = 61,734) from the PsyCorona Survey, a cross-national longitudinal study. Results of multilevel analysis showed that, when societal discontent is experienced by the entire community, individuals dissatisfied with society are more prone to help others. Testing the model with longitudinal data (N = 3,817) confirmed our results. Implications for those findings are discussed in relation to crisis management. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement. New York University Abu Dhabi

In the current review, we propose to look at curiosity from the goal systemic perspective and differentiate between curiosity as a motive/goal, which engenders various activities (means) aimed at satisfying it, and information-seeking behaviors which can, but do not have to be, driven by the curiosity motivation as such. We thus assume that people can adopt various behaviors in order to satisfy their curiosity. On the other hand, they can behave in a curious and inquisitive manner in order to satisfy ‘incurious’ motives (e.g. to obtain a reward or attain cognitive closure). We also analyze a special case in which the mere activity of information gathering and exploration becomes the goal in itself. Then, mere performance of this activity can be rewarding.

One might assume that the desire to help (here described as Want) is the essential driver of helping declarations and/or behaviors. However, even if desire to help (Want) is low, intention to help may still occur if the expectancy regarding the perceived effectiveness of helping is high. We tested these predictions in a set of three experimental studies. In all three, we measured the desire to help (Want) and the Expectancy that the aid would be impactful for the victim; in addition, we manipulated Expectancy in Study 3. In Studies 1 and 3, we measured the participants’ declaration to help while in Study 2, their helping behavior was examined. In all three studies, we used variations of the same story about a victim. The results supported our hypothesis. Thus, the studies help to tease apart the determinants of helping under conditions of lowered desire to do so, an issue of great importance in public policymaking.

When thwarted goals increase endorsement of violence, it may not always reflect antisocial tendencies or some breakdown of self-regulation per se; such responses can also reflect an active process of self-regulation, whose purpose is to comply with the norms of one's social environment. In the present experiments (total N = 2,145), the causal link between thwarted goals and endorsement of violent means (guns and war) was found to be contingent on perceptions that violence is normatively valued. Experiments 1-3 establish that thwarted goals increase endorsement of violence primarily among U.S. adults of a lower educational background and/or men who endorse a masculine honor culture. Experiment 4 manipulates the perceived normative consensus of college educated Americans, and demonstrates that thwarted goals increase college educated Americans' endorsement of whatever norm is salient: prowar or antiwar. Generalizing the model beyond violent means, Experiment 5 demonstrates that goal-thwarted Europeans report increased willingness to volunteer for refugee support activities if they perceive strong social norms to volunteer. Altogether, these findings support a frustration-affirmation model rather than frustration-aggression, whereby thwarted goals increase compliance with perceived norms for behavior, which can increase endorsement of violent means such as guns and war, but also nonviolent charitable actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The present review identifies a variety of tactics that are often employed by ideologies to promote and/or justify political violence. The review builds on a social psychological framework that identifies important existential and epistemic needs that motivate individuals to become ideological extremists and discusses the mechanisms through which ideological narratives that promote political violence can serve these needs. We end the review by discussing two broad variants of ideology (religious and conservative) that should be particularly apt at implementing these tactics.

Why do some people help others in need, and some do not? One potential answer is sympathy, which reflects an other-focused desire to help others in need. Consequentially, we posit that sympathy tow...

We present an experiment showing that need for closure (NFC)-defined as the epistemic desire for certainty-can moderate individuals' affective reactions to cognitive inconsistency. Informed by Kruglanski and colleagues' new theory, that cognitive inconsistency elicits negative affect particularly under certain circumstances, we find that NFC (i.e. the desire for certain, stable and unambiguous knowledge) influences the strength of consistency effects and resulting negative affect. More specifically, we find that individuals who are high on NFC experience more negative affect upon encountering an inconsistent (vs. consistent) cognition. However, when individuals are low on NFC, inconsistency is irrelevant, and their affect depends on whether the ultimate outcome of the cognition is positive or negative. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research.

New members are important sources of innovative perspectives in groups. However, it can be very difficult for newcomers’ ideas to be heard. It is likely that group members with high (vs. low) levels of need for closure (NFC) are more resistant to newcomers’ innovative ideas. Moreover, when group epistemic authority (EA) is high, members should “freeze” on the group’s ideas, regardless of the newcomer’s EA. In contrast, when group EA is low, members would be expected to “seize” the ideas proposed by newcomers with high EA. Study 1 confirmed that high (vs. low) NFC group members are more resistant to newcomers’ innovative ideas. In Study 2, in high NFC groups, evidence was obtained for seizing but not freezing. In Study 3, for group members with heightened NFC, both freezing and seizing results were obtained. Findings suggest that both NFC and EA play important roles in receptivity to newcomers’ ideas.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. Understanding the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine uptake is important to inform policy decisions and plan vaccination campaigns. The aims of this research were to: (1) explore the individual- and country-level determinants of intentions to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and (2) examine worldwide variation in vaccination intentions. This cross-sectional online survey was conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, involving 6697 respondents across 20 countries. Results showed that 72.9% of participants reported positive intentions to be vaccinated against COVID-19, whereas 16.8% were undecided, and 10.3% reported they would not be vaccinated. At the individual level, prosociality was a significant positive predictor of vaccination intentions, whereas generic beliefs in conspiracy theories and religiosity were negative predictors. Country-level determinants, including cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and power distance, were not significant predictors of vaccination intentions. Altogether, this study identifies individual-level predictors that are common across multiple countries, provides further evidence on the importance of combating conspiracy theories, involving religious institutions in vaccination campaigns, and stimulating prosocial motives to encourage vaccine uptake.

Extremism occurs when a certain need, for instance, significance quest, overrides other human motivations. Based on the Significance Quest Theory, we argue that ambition—a specific aspect of significance quest—can lead to extremism, particularly through obsessive passion. In an Italian sample (Study 1, N = 249) we predicted and found that ambition was positively related to both obsessive and harmonious passion; however, only obsessive passion positively predicted extremism. To bolster and generalize our findings we conducted a second study involving American participants (Study 2, N = 300). We confirmed the mediating role of obsessive passion in the relationship between ambition and extremism, while we did not find the mediating role of harmonious passion. The present research has theoretical implications in that it constitutes the first evidence that ambition might share some aspects with significance quest and sheds new light on ambition field. Moreover, our findings provide practical ways to prevent extremism.

Previous research on the need for cognitive closure (NFC), or the desire for epistemic certainty, has consistently found that it is associated with negative attitudes toward immigrants, among other outgroups, potentially because they represent agents of change and/or due to a general preference for perceived stability and certainty associated with right-wing politics. However, as individuals with this need theoretically prefer stable and certain knowledge, independent of the specific content, it is also possible that these individuals could have positive attitudes toward immigrants when they are provided with a positive source of information to which they can metaphorically "close" upon. In two studies (n = 397), controlling for participants' political orientation, we found that individuals with an NFC were more likely to accept immigrants when their positive effect was endorsed by an epistemic authority (Study 1), but only when they trusted this source (Study 2).