Psychological Features of Extreme Political Ideologies
By Jan‐Willem van Prooijen, A. Krouwel. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2019
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this article, we examine psychological features of extreme political ideologies. In what ways are political left- and right-wing extremists similar to one another and different from moderates? We propose and review four interrelated propositions that explain adherence to extreme political ideologies from a psychological perspective. We argue that (a) psychological distress stimulates adopting an extreme ideological outlook; (b) extreme ideologies are characterized by a relatively simplistic, black-and-white perception of the social world; (c) because of such mental simplicity, political extremists are overconfident in their judgments; and (d) political extremists are less tolerant of different groups and opinions than political moderates. In closing, we discuss how these psychological features of political extremists increase the likelihood of conflict among groups in society.
Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0abc0e55418d7df518abd27d3c2cc3aa141f732d
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Citations in the corpus
- Beyond Screen Time: Identity Development in the Digital Age (2020, background): “Over the last decade, hundreds of studies have been conducted on the impact of “screen time” providing data for a number of recently published reviews and meta-analyses (e.g. Dickson et al., 2019; Elhai, Dvorak, Levine, & Hall, 2017; Hilgard, Engelhardt, & Rouder, 2017; Marchant et al., 2017; Marino”
- The role of cognitive rigidity in political ideologies: theory, evidence, and future directions (2020, background): “Researchers have considered the role of intuitive versus analytical cognitive style [40,41], cognitive sophistication [42], cognitive simplicity and complexity [43,44,45 ,60]), cognitive ability [46,47], emotional abilities [61], logical reasoning [48], cognitive control [49–51], metacognition [52],”