Dehumanization: The Cognitive Roots of Fanaticism

American Psychologist, 2011

The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into conflict. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to better understand how sacred causes and moral imperatives diffuse through a population and motivate some (usually small) segment of it to commit violent actions. The challenge to psychology is to adopt an interdisciplinary focus drawing on a range of research methods and to become bolder in its choices of study populations if it is to be relevant to real-world problems.

The Journal of Ethics

In this article, I provide a philosophical analysis of the nature and role of perceived identity threats in the genesis and maintenance of fanaticism. First, I offer a preliminary definition of fanaticism as the social identity-defining devotion to a sacred value that demands universal recognition and is complemented by a hostile antagonism toward people who dissent from one’s group’s values. The fanatic’s hostility toward dissent thereby takes the threefold form of outgroup hostility, ingroup hostility, and self-hostility. Second, I provide a detailed analysis of the fears of fanaticism, arguing that each of the three aforementioned forms of hostile antagonism corresponds to one form of fear or anxiety: the fanatic’s fear of the outgroup, renegade members of the ingroup, and problematic aspects of themselves. In each of these three forms of fear, the fanatic experiences both their sacred values and their individual and social identity as being threatened. Finally, I turn to a fourt...

Govarî zankoî germîan, 2017

The purpose of the current study was to develop a scale to evaluate students' attitudes towards fanaticism. In order to do this, the researcher composed a questionnaire of 64 items. The format of the questionnaire corresponded to the five-point Likert Scale: 1 strongly agree; 2 agree; 3 slightly agree; 4 strongly disagree; and 5 disagree. The research sample consisted of 23 undergraduate students from the University of Leicester. The research tool was an online questionnaire distributed through the.EPR system. Participants completed the questionnaire in return for course credit. Results of statistical analysis, obtained through the use of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), were as follows. The internal reliability (Cronbach's Alpha) of the final structure of the scale, which consisted of 20 items, was calculated to be α=.834. Statistical analysis (principal components analysis, orthogonal approach, Varimax method) resulted in the following three factors: factor 1,"Fanaticism and social security" (8 items highly loaded on this factor); factor 2, "Religious fanaticism" (9 items highly loaded on this factor); factor 3, "Fanaticism and absolute views" (3 items highly loaded on this factor). These three factors explained 52.516% of the variance. Fanaticism is an internal feeling which causes an individual to believe that his/her opinions and ideas are permanently on the right side of truth. Fanatics simply do not accept the need for debate and view people with different opinions to their own as presenting a threat to their values and beliefs. Fanatical beliefs can result in discrimination and sometimes aggressive behaviour towards people who hold alternative opinions and beliefs. Fanaticism is a serious social and psychological issue which could present a significant risk to the community: "Fanatical beliefs may possibly lead to a nuclear holocaust in the nottoo-distant future" (Ellis, 1986). Investigating intolerance and fanaticism from a psychological and social standpoint using scientific research could help to identify some of the causal factors related to these phenomena. Ultimately, this research could help to achieve recognition accuracy 'More effective recognition and a clearer understanding of fanaticism, thereby making it easier to deal with and, potentially, reducing its impact on society.

2018

2011

The article presents fanaticism as a universal phenomenon that can manifest itself in almost every sphere of human activity. Although many expressions of fanaticism are negative and destructive, some can be almost neutral or even positive. The article describes the characteristics of the fanatic and explains some factors that predispose people towards fanatical behavior. It also highlights some differences between fundamentalism and fanaticism which can sometimes seem quite similar. Describing fanaticism in its multi- faceted nature, the article aims to show the reader that fanaticism is a much wider phenomenon than sometimes thought.

Olek Netzer – [email protected] ABSTRACT: MOVING FROM MULTICAUSAL TO DIRECT CAUSATION APPROACH IN WAR AND PEACE RESEARCH The scientific research of human conflict, which has been dominated by the Multicausal approach, failed to deliver meaningful remedies to war and inter-group conflict. "No straightforward and consensual psychological science has arisen to meet the needs of political scholars". Its approach, based on the idea that "political and psychological studies are inextricably intertwined" could be based on a fundamental methodological error if it fails to account for the fact that they are qualitatively different from each other. The "intertwined" causes are NOT of the same order: some are real DIRECT causes motivating people in their thinking, believing and doings, other are INDIRECT causes that might or might not affect them. In any helping profession, without regarding the physical or closest-to-physical agents, one cannot deal with critical factors in changing the condition. Changing only the indirect causes of illnesses, by changing social conditions, we practice hygiene and hopefully prevent the spread of disease. But prevention is not healing once the human organism becomes infected. We cannot become a helping profession unless we adopt the Direct-Causation approach. Research focused on direct-conscious causes of destructive political behavior leads to the human system of cognitive orientation. Then, as perpetrators of socially sanctioned evil anywhere behave as if they were under compulsion to believe they are right and their enemies are wrong, the relevant research questions need to be "How exactly do people manage to justify in their own eyes even the most inhuman atrocities and acts of self and others mass-destruction?" Following the Direct Causation approach leads to mapping of the inner social orientation space, defining the symptoms of politically motivated destructiveness and irrationality, discovering the mechanisms by which political fanatics avoid experiencing cognitive dissonances: and devising tools and procedures of helping intervention. However, the decisive step every researcher should make is to leave the multicausal approach behind and take the Direct Causation approach.

Katsafanas (ed) The Philosophy and History of Fanaticism, 2023

Fanatics are often viciously closed-minded. As Paul Katsafanas and Quassim Cassam have argued, fanatical members of ISIS, the Taliban, the KKK, and the Nazi party are paradigms of vicious closed-mindedness. But, must fanatics be closed-minded, as Katsafanas and Cassam suggest, or could they be open-minded? And, even if fanaticism entails closed-mindedness, must the fanatic's closed-mindedness be epistemically vicious, or could it be epistemically virtuous? This chapter argues that fanatics needn't be closed-minded, and may even be open-minded. In so doing, it proposes an alternative analysis of fanaticism that is broader in scope than those of Katsafanas and Cassam. It also contends that even if fanaticism does entail closed-mindedness, the closed-mindedness it entails needn't be epistemically vicious. Case in point: insofar as the Garrisonian Abolitionists were closed-minded fanatics, their closed-mindedness was epistemically virtuous, not vicious.

The Philosophy of Fanaticism, 2022

European Psychologist, 2021

Following the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States, policy approaches to extremism have mainly focused on understanding the dynamics of religious-based extremism, such as Al-Qaeda and other violent Jihadist/ Islamist groups. Predominantly, the emphasis has been on mapping individual pathways into these particular forms of extreme mobilization. Attacks in Paris, Brussels, and Manchester, as well as in North Africa, Somalia, and Yemen confirm the value of this work in light of the continuing dominance of the security challenges posed by radical Islam, not least in relation to the rise of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. The large number of incidents in Europe and elsewhere have resulted in calls for counter-strategies to be modified or expanded, but also for greater resources to be devoted to understanding other forms of extremism, particularly those associated with extreme far right responses or ethnic nationalist ideologies. The economic crisis and its policy responses, along with migration, integration and asylum policies, have affected the relationship between populism and extremism in a fundamental and encompassing manner. The electoral successes of populist, Eurosceptic, and far right parties confirm such tendencies, showing the capacity of extremist discourses to mobilize constituencies against vulnerable groups (e.g., ethnic minorities and immigrants), other countries, and international institutions. Various versions of cultural nationalism have underpinned such mobilization, marked among other things by xenophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny and Islamophobia, in turn fueling violence. The January 6, 2021 attack at the United States Capitol adds to this picture and lays bare a number of issues related to disinformation, polarization, and the challenge to democratic institutions. This special issue aims to widen the analysis of extremism to account for the unresolved puzzles that continue to plague practitioners, policy makers, and academics alike:

Education is one of the most important social institutions in each society, which promotes and enables the transmission of knowledge and skills across generations. Education is a very complex institution because it contains different issues such as political, economic, social and cultural. Durkheim argued that education plays an important role in the socialization of children because children gain an understanding of the common values in society, uniting a multitude of separate individuals. Schooling enables children to internalize the social rules that contribute to the functioning of society. So, as institution education plays many roles such as transmit of values of a society or transformation of values of a society from one generation to the other. During education process (formal and non-formal education) individuals learn what is ‘to be judge’ and what is ‘to be accepted’, what is ‘to be love’ and ‘to be hate’, that it converted into the primary agency to promote the social solidarity or conflict, violence and extremism. This article will focus on the descriptive analyze the causes of ‘Hate speech’, social conflicts, violent extremism in society and how to combat through education process by forming counter and alternative narratives.

Extremism can be characterized by extreme attitudes and extreme actions. However, in order to understand extremism one first has to develop a sense of normality and normativity. Social Psychology might contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of why and how people evaluate a person or a certain behavior as either normal or as extreme. According to the ingroup projection model,1 groups provide a frame of reference for the included individuals and subgroups. The ingroup prototype defines what is perceived as normal and what is deviant and extreme within this group. Individuals or groups that are not perceived as fitting the prototypical characteristics will be devalued or even excluded. This process of normative differentiation may be particularly problematic between groups that share a common superordinate group, in which each subgroup tends to generalize and project its attributes onto frames of reference for the common superordinate group. In this way, normative differentia...

2019

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021

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 ...

Aggressive Behavior, 2022

This study aimed to examine the role of socio‐political attitudes and motivational tendencies supposed to mark closed‐mindedness, as well as other relevant variables of individual differences (Disintegration, i.e., proneness to psychotic‐like experiences/behaviors and Death Anxiety), in the Militant Extremist Mindset (MEM). A community sample of 600 young respondents (Serbs, Bosniaks, and Albanians, aged 18–30) was recruited within a multiethnic region of Serbia that experienced armed conflict during the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia. The best‐fitted SEM model, incorporating measurement and structural relationships between the variables, showed that the latent factor of Closed‐mindedness predicted all three aspects of MEM as well as Neighborhood Grudge, that is, resentment toward neighboring ethnicities. The effects of Disintegration and Death Anxiety on MEM were entirely mediated by Closed‐mindedness. Compared to previous findings, Closed‐mindedness appears to represent the most important set of cognitive and motivational tendencies that channel protracted intergroup tensions into militant extremism.

FLEKS - Scandinavian Journal of Intercultural Theory and Practice, 2019

In the analyses of extremism, the focus has mostly been on ideology and sociological – or so-called vulnerability –factors. While these factors are important the relevance and weight of emotionsin the extremisation processes have not received the attention, they deserve. This article is an attempted to filling this gap. The paper explores the importance of emotions, especially strong emotions like hate and ‘ressentiment’, in establishing and reproducing the extremist identity. Methodologically this contribution emphasises a hermeneutic approach and draws on the philosophy of emotions, especially the approach of Robert C. Solomon. Empirically the article draws upon established international research and the author’s research on Islamist extremism in Norway.