Abstract
Understanding what motivates people to join violent ideological groups and engage in acts of cruelty against others is of great social and societal importance. In this paper, I posit that one necessary element is ‘ideological obsession’—an ideological commitment fuelled by unmet psychological needs and regulated by inhibitory and ego-defensive mechanisms. Drawing from evidence collected across cultures and ideologies, I describe four processes through which ideological obsession puts individuals on a path towards violence. First, ideological obsession deactivates moral self-regulatory processes, allowing unethical behaviours to be carried out without self-recrimination. Second, ideologically obsessed individuals are easily threatened by information that criticises their ideology, which in turn leads to hatred and violent retaliation. Third, ideological obsession changes people's social interactions by making them gravitate towards like-minded individuals who support ideological violence. As these social networks become more interconnected, they amplify one's adherence to violent extremism. Finally, ideologically obsessed individuals are prone to psychological reactance, making them immune to communication strategies intended to dissuade them from using violence. In fact, messages espousing non-violence can have the opposite effect by reinforcing their violence-supporting ideology. I conclude by presenting evidence-based strategies to prevent radicalisation leading to violence for individuals in pre-criminal spaces.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.
Highlights
Common definitions of addiction extend to obsessive eating (650 million people are overweight), Internet pornography (13% of Internet traffic), gambling and oniomania [2,3,4,5]. There is another set of destructive behaviours that are rarely subsumed under the umbrella of addictions: the phenomenon of ideological obsession, known as obsessive ideological passion, which has been defined as the overwhelming engagement in a political or religious ideology [6,7,8]
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate this concept of addiction and review studies that have been undertaken to comprehend the sociocognitive mechanisms that connect ideological obsession to violent extremism
We found that study participants positively evaluated the social media profiles of strangers devoted to a similar ideology, but only when those profiles were supportive of radical activities and less when they were in favour of peaceful activism
Summary
Understanding what motivates people to join violent ideological groups and engage in acts of cruelty against others is of great social and societal importance. Ideological obsession changes people’s social interactions by making them gravitate towards like-minded individuals who support ideological violence. Ideologically obsessed individuals are prone to psychological reactance, making them immune to communication strategies intended to dissuade them from using violence.
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