Abstract
This study aimed to examine bright- and dark-side personality, personal beliefs (religion and politics) and self-evaluation correlates of beliefs in the Militant Extremist Mindset (MEM). In all, 506 young adults completed various self-report measures in addition to the three-dimensional MEM questionnaire. The measures included short measures of the Big Five traits, Self-Monitoring, Self-Evaluation and Personality Disorders, as well as demographic questions of how religious and politically liberal participants were. The Proviolence, Vile World, and Divine power mindsets showed varying correlates, with no consistent trend. Stepwise regressions showed that the demographic, personality and belief factors accounted for between 14% (Vile World) and 54% (Divine Power) of the variance, There were many differences between the results of three mindset factors, but personality disorder scores remained positive predictors of all three. The Vile World mindset was predicted by religiousness, liberalism, personality disorder scores and negative self-monitoring, but not personality traits. Religiousness had a contribution to all subscales and predicted the vast majority of the Divine Power mindset with smaller relationships with personality and personality disorders. Proviolence was predicted by the majority personality measures and sex.
Highlights
For over 70 years personality and social psychologists have been developing attitude tests to measure political, social and religious attitudes
This study explores concepts of a relatively new concept: The Militant Extremist Mindset (MEMS), which has characteristics similar to those referenced above There appear to be three groups of researchers currently working in the area: Saucier in America, Stankov in Australia, and Knezevic and Mededovic in Serbia
Our results show that Divine Power is the most predictable mindset, at least from our demographic and basic personality variables
Summary
For over 70 years personality and social psychologists have been developing attitude tests to measure political, social and religious attitudes. There are measures of authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, conservatism, dogmatism, ethnocentrism, fascism, Machiavellianism, paranoia, racism, social dominance etc. The interest in authoritarianism after the second war (Adorno et al, 1950), conservatism and racism in the 1960s (Wilson and Patterson, 1968; Eysenck and Wilson, 1978) and conspiracy theories today (Swami and Furnham, 2014). This study is about militant extremism which has attracted a number of recent studies (Loza, 2007; Trip et al, 2019; Gøtzsche-Astrup, 2020). An overview of two areas show to what extent they are related to the central theme of this study: Militant Extremist Mindset. The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al, 1950) focused on the individual as a cause of social evils. Authoritarians are nearly always ethnocentric in that they have a certain, simple and unshakable belief in the superiority of their
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