Psychology and morality of political extremists: evidence from Twitter language analysis of alt-right and Antifa

Meysam Alizadeh,Claudio Cioffi-Revilla,Michael Macy,Santo Fortunato,Ingmar Weber

doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0193-9

Abstract

The recent rise of the political extremism in Western countries has spurred renewed interest in the psychological and moral appeal of political extremism. Empirical support for the psychological explanation using surveys has been limited by lack of access to extremist groups, while field studies have missed psychological measures and failed to compare extremists with contrast groups. We revisit the debate over the psychological and moral appeal of extremism in the U.S. context by analyzing Twitter data of 10,000 political extremists and comparing their text-based psychological constructs with those of 5000 liberal and 5000 conservative users. The results reveal that extremists show a lower positive emotion and a higher negative emotion than partisan users, but their differences in certainty is not significant. In addition, while left-wing extremists express more language indicative of anxiety than liberals, right-wing extremists express lower anxiety than conservatives. Moreover, our results mostly lend support to Moral Foundations Theory for partisan users and extend it to the political extremists. With the exception of ingroup loyalty, we found evidences supporting the Moral Foundations Theory among left- and right-wing extremists. However, we found no evidence for elevated moral foundations among political extremists.

Highlights

Since late 2016, several hate and violent rallies have been held in U.S, U.K., Poland, Germany, Canada, and Russia, Jewish and African-American institutions and Mosques across the U.S have been threatened with armed protests or attacked by lone actors, and immigrants have been targeted in suspected hate crimes in the United States and other countries
Our first set of hypotheses about the relationship between political extremism and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) can be stated as followings: H4a: Left-wing extremists score higher on text-based indicators of fairness/reciprocity than right-wing extremists
Our second set of hypotheses regarding the association between MFT and political extremism can be stated as followings: H4f : Left-wing extremists score higher than liberals on text-based indicators of fairness

Summary

Introduction

Since late 2016, several hate and violent rallies have been held in U.S, U.K., Poland, Germany, Canada, and Russia, Jewish and African-American institutions and Mosques across the U.S have been threatened with armed protests or attacked by lone actors, and immigrants have been targeted in suspected hate crimes in the United States and other countries. To fill this gap and building on the observed robust occurrence of a linear effect (Jost et al [51]), we assume that the relationship between negative/positive emotion and political orientation is monotonously and uniformly linear If these findings are true, one could hypothesize that: H3a: Conservatives score higher on text-based indicators of positive emotion and lower on negative emotion compared to liberals. Our first set of hypotheses about the relationship between political extremism and MFT can be stated as followings: H4a: Left-wing extremists score higher on text-based indicators of fairness/reciprocity than right-wing extremists. Our second set of hypotheses regarding the association between MFT and political extremism can be stated as followings: H4f : Left-wing extremists score higher than liberals on text-based indicators of fairness. H4j: Right-wing extremists score higher than conservatives on text-based indicators of purity

Data and methods

Results

Discussion

25 Wolftrap AF