Speaking of Psychology - What drives people to extremism? With Arie Kruglanski, PhD, and Sophia Moskalenko, PhD

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

The word “extremist” might call up images of violence or terrorism. But extreme behaviors are all around us and can be a force for good as well as destruction. Arie Kruglanski, PhD, and Sophia Moskalenko, PhD, talk about what drives people to extreme behaviors, whether there’s an “extremist personality,” how social media drives extremism and whether the world is becoming more extreme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. What does it mean to be an extremist? The word might call up images of political violence or terrorism, but extreme behaviors are all around us and can be a force for good as well as destruction. Extreme single-mindedness and focus can spur scientists to make new discoveries and artists to create great art. Today we're going to talk to two psychologists about the psychology of the extreme.

What drives people to extreme behaviors, both constructive and and destructive? Is there an extremist personality? And if so, is it something you're born with? Is there a connection between extremism and mental illness? How does social media drive extremism? Is the world becoming more extreme? And can psychological research on extremism suggest ways to reach people at risk of turning violent or harming others? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

I have two guests today. First is Dr. Ari Kruglanski, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and a founding co-director and co-principal investigator of NC Start, the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism. His research interests include violent extremism, political activism, the quest for significance and closed-mindedness. Dr. Kuglansky is the author of more than 400 academic articles, chapters, and books.

He has won many awards for his work, including APA's 2025 Award, for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. Next is Dr. Sophia Moskalenko, a research fellow at Georgia State University and a program management specialist at the UN Office of Counterterrorism Behavioral Insights Hub. She's a social and clinical psychologist who studies extremism, terrorism, and radicalization, and was previously a researcher at NC Start. Dr. Moskalenko and Dr. Kuglansky are co-authors of a new book called The Psychology of the Extreme, which was published in February.

Thank you both for joining me. Pleased to be here. Thank you for having us. For both of you, much of your work has focused on political extremism and violence, but in your new book, you talk about extremism, more broadly. So let me ask you, how do you define extremism? Extremism is a psychological state of motivational imbalance. That happens when one of our basic needs is so dominant that it crowds out the others. And when that happens, the constraints that those

other needs normally impose on behavior are relaxed, if not completely removed. And when that happens, anything that serves the dominant need is legitimized, is permitted, including things that would otherwise be constrained by alternative considerations. So take, for example, hunger. When we are moderately hungry, our eating behavior is constrained by considerations of health, of taste, of social norms, of what people in our society consider as legitimate for consumption. But when the hunger becomes extreme, all those constraints fade away and anything is legitimized for consumption, including bark of the trees, your pets, even bodies of other human beings, as was demonstrated in this unfortunate, tragic,

event in the Andes when the plane crashed and the survivors were forced to eat their fallen comrades' flesh. So this paradigm of removal of constraints is something that applies to extremism across the board. So for example, when the need for significance and metering is the predominant need, considerations of life, family, career, social norms fade away, and you would do anything. You would kill and die in order to satisfy that need. And that's, you know, the paradigmatic instance of extremism, this motivational imbalance, this one-track mind that legitimize anything that serves that dominant need.

So that sounds like we all have the potential. for extremism, but there must be some factors that are happening psychologically that prevent us from doing this all the time. Is that correct? So as Ari already indicated in his response, we believe that extremism is a biologically built-in mechanism that humans evolve to have in order to overcome situations of crises, situations where it's life or death and you're in the desert and you need water or you're being chased by a predator or or or enemies and in those situations you can't be distracted by other things you have to mobilize the entire repertoire of your resources and abilities to deal with the crisis and so when we think about extremism

outside of our primordial environments all it takes sometimes is to get a person into the mindset that this is life or death, that this is their existential need, you know. And it's, it's not so hard to do. We're pretty good at creating narratives that are convincing of that. And possibly in today's world, there are people who are especially adept at doing that. You know, we know about the evening news. They want to keep you on, but because they show you these shocking and horrible things. But also everyday exposure to news online is prioritizing things that are shocking, that are disturbing because it multiplies user engagement, which is what a lot of social media are after. So this mindset of survival and crisis that breeds extremism is not only limited to what

extremism was originally designed for. It's been co-opted and is very widely used today to harvest people's attention and to get them into this extremist mindset, whether it's buying things online or, you know, getting into some extremist communities online that have to do with eating in a particular way or like starving themselves or bodybuilding or indeed getting engaged with radical political ideas and actions. In the beginning of the book, you give examples of two people we might not think of together, but who both typify extremism in different ways. And I'm thinking of Gandhi and bin Laden. Can you tell us about that? What traits do these vastly dissimilar people share? I'm going to just briefly talk about it because Sophia is an expert on both.

But I think that what is common to them is this single-mindedness. and their readiness to sacrifice anything that falls outside the domain of that particular need. So in both cases, the underlying need was the quest for significance, for their nation, for their religion, and that justified a variety of practices that one would call extreme, rejection of all Western modes of doing things for Gandhi, the mobilization of people, believers, to fight the West, to fight and kill non-believers by Al-Qaeda. That single-mindedness, that one-track mind,

readiness to sacrifice all on altar of that need was what common to both. But Sophia can add to that because she studied Gandhi and Osama extensively. So they also share some biographical information that is maybe strange to those of us who we know them as these giants in the political and historical landscape. So they both grew up in quite prominent and well-to-do families. They both were very shy when they were young, not known as leaders among their peers at all, kind of staying outside of the struggle for significance, at least in that moment. However, at a certain point in their late teens,

they both became increasingly interested in what was essentially from both of them an anti-colonial struggle because they both grew up in countries that were dominated by a colonial power and felt that that was unjust and it needs to be addressed. And so both of them started first changing their diet, which is something we find across a lot of cases of extremism. That may be, you know, the first thing you notice about somebody is they change. he each other eat. For Osama bin Laden, that was that he'd begun fasting two days a week like the prophet, which for a teenage boy is a huge commitment. Fasting is like not eating at all,

right, for two days a week. And he started doing it himself. And then he started pushing his family, his mother and his stepfather and his step-siblings to follow him on this path. For Gandhi, it was his vow to remain vegetarian, even though he was studying in lunch. He was, And in London, at that time, it was very difficult to be vegetarian and still eat in a way that he enjoyed. So really serious self-sacrifices in order to maintain and cultivate what they felt was important to them politically and as far as their identity was concerned. And then these sacrifices only grew greater. They started giving up the way they looked to others and as a result, they stood out with their dress. Gandhi gave up on the Western clothes.

Osama bin Laden started to wear traditional Muslim clothes and kind of felt the people who didn't do it were not right. Friends that were dressing in shorts, for example, to play soccer, were violating a moral boundary. And Osama bin Laden expressed it to his friends. So this dynamic process of, on the one hand, breaking social norms in order to cultivate a particular blueprint. belief. And on the other hand, with that breaking or straining social relationships, because that's what happens. When an extremist begins that extremist journey, other people feel the changes in them, and sometimes the extremist will express to them the desire that they follow them or change their own behaviors. That strains social relationships. So what happened in both Osama bin Laden's

and Gandhi's trajectory to becoming who they became as we knew them is some serious isolation. And for Gandhi, that was pivotal. So he was in South Africa about to travel on a train. He was already feeling as a discriminated minority being an Indian South Africa. And he had a first class ticket, but he was rejected from first class because he was an Indian. So given a choice of going to the second class or disembarking the train, he chose the latter. and he ended up spending a night on the platform all alone following this grave injustice. And that's when he came up with the idea of Satya Graha, which is the idea of peaceful, non-violent resistance that then became the signature

of his life and the movement that followed him. For Osama bin Laden, the isolation was the result of his increased radicalization and his growing conflict with governments, including his own government, the Saudi government, and him becoming a persona non grata and somebody who was hunted internationally. And the isolation and secrecy that that kind of life entailed also brought him into seclusion.

And that's another hallmark of an extremist's journey that at some point they end up quite isolated. And the only people who can stand their... their demands on their extremism, are other extremists. And that very often, like it was for Gandhi, is the kind of moment that pushes them ultimate lifestyle and choice that defines their extremist and themselves. I wanted to add something to that,

and that is that there is many more followers and imitators of Osama bin Laden than there are of Gandhi, and there is a good reason for it. in the sense that the violent way of attaining significance through aggression, through dominance, through the glory of the militancy, is a very primordial way of attaining significance, whereas the more passive resistance that Gandhi advocated is much less direct assertion of your power,

of your dominance, of your metering. So I think that's one difference between these two, who share many commonalities. And one commonality that Sophia didn't mention is that both of them were assassinated for their ideology. You describe personality traits that sound very much like fixations of the type that you might see in somebody who has maybe autism spectrum disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder. And I'm just wondering whether extremism is related to these kinds of mental health disorders. So I don't know that I would put it that way, that, you know, most people who are exhibiting extremist tendencies are not diagnosable as having any kind of mental health issues. And in fact,

as we started saying, extremism is in everybody's repertoire and under the right conditions, everybody will probably act in an extreme way. So in that sense, it's a normative possibility to be extreme. However, mental illness often looks very much like extremism in the singular obsession with something. So for anorexics, it's the obsession with losing weight and restraining their calorie intake. For people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, it's whatever the fear is, maybe it's the fear of germs or fear of being trampled that becomes the singular obsession that ends up defining much of their day-to-day lives and their behaviors. Some forms of depression, they have this feature of rumination

where a person spends much of their time just thinking back about all the failures that they've experienced and all the things that they think are wrong with them and rejections and so on. And this circular, endless loop of negative thought ends up consuming them to the degree that it becomes a mental health issue. So mental disorders are disordered ways of thinking, of feeling, of behaving that can look very much like extremism, which at some points can be very normative. So, yeah, again, you know, the manifestation has this common element of fixating on one thing

to the exclusion of other things. The etiology could be different. For example, in the case of autism, it's unclear that what is happening is suppression of other things or simply those other things not being particularly well developed like social sensitivity and social awareness.

So it may look similarly on the surface and yet have different underlying etiology. It's a fascinating possibility to look at the commonalities and how far, how deeply they go into the psychological process. And that's something that future generations of researchers hopefully will pursue. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news?

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You know, the clamor, the competition for attention, the competition for being popular and acceptable drives this idea of standing out, mattering, being somebody to huge extremes. I just read a story yesterday in Washington Post about a ski jumper who jumped to his death in order to attain the glory of doing something that would make his video viral. And so that kind of competition for attention that is propagated by the social media is instilling proclivity to go to the extremes in order to stand out, in order to matter, in order to have significance, we have the attention of other people. Sophia, you want to add to that?

Yeah, it's my impression, too, that the world is becoming more extreme. I think that the social media are a huge problem in that sense. As Ari said, because one of the mechanisms to cultivate extremism, as we described in the book, is what in psychology is known as mere exposure. So this is a very well-known psychological phenomenon that a person who goes on his morning run, if that person sees an observer casually looking over, they will run faster. So they will expand more energy. They will become a little more extreme in whatever it is that they're doing.

So this idea that you're being judged by others is a natural ingredient that helps extremism thrive. And if before we were judged by our friends and neighbors, now it seems like the whole world is looking when we're posting or comments. commenting or liking. So we're on the stage and not in a good way, you know, and that makes extremism grow. But also another thing that is relevant here is COVID, which was an existential crisis, especially in the beginning when we didn't know much about the virus. It looked horrible. And as I already said, crisis is one thing for which extremism is built. And so around the world, we saw huge political changes take place after COVID, including protests.

We had Black Lives Matter protests here, and then we had the January 6th protests, and we had populist movements come into power in a lot of countries. We've all become a little more extreme, and I think we're still going through it from where I'm sitting. Do political extremists tend to fall on one side of, the spectrum or the other, or are they evenly distributed? I would say that they can be evenly distributed. We have had waves of left-wing extremism culminating in communism that took over large portions of the world, and of course had fascism and Nazism that also threatened the security and stability

of the planet. Now we have right-wing, rising, nationalism, rising, religious extremism. So the ideologies, the narratives that can serve extremism can vary in content. The important thing is that they are presented as something that serves this all-important need to matter, to be significant. Who creates these narratives? Does the leading extremist sort of start the ball rolling? And it sounds like there is a level of contagion, social contagion going on here. Am I getting that right?

It's an interesting question that I've been asked a lot with respect to Q&O in particular, which was on the front pages of newspapers in this country for a few years, and I've studied it some. And a lot of people were interested in who's behind it. And in fact, there were a couple of documentaries that were done by HBO and some other authoritative resources. but I think it's less interesting who creates it. And one reason is that none of these narratives are new. So with respect to QAnon, every single conspiracy theory that is embraced by Q&N

has been around for decades, if not sometimes, sensualies or millennia, whether it's blood libel, people drinking blood of children, or it's flat earth, or it's, you know, human lizard hybrids who were going to take over the world. All of those we've known, they've been around. It's like viruses are in the air all the time.

And it's only when the immune system is weakened or compromised that would become susceptible to these viral stories and allow them to colonize and threaten our society. And in fact, if you look through the history at the time when these... conspiratorial narratives became dangerous and deadly and resulted in a huge number of deaths, like, for example, the witch hunts did, or like, for example, the protocols of the elders of Zion did. Each of those resulted in thousands, if not tens of thousands of people being killed or

tortured or otherwise really, you know, treated horribly for no good reason at all. In both of those cases, the narratives have long predated their rise to the surface as this major phenomenon. And in both of those cases, they were very quickly discovered to be a fraud. It was known at the time of which Hunts, that the book was a fraud. It was known at the time of Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the book was a fraud. It was known at the time of Hew andon that it was a completely debunked, conspiracy theory. And then doesn't stop it from spreading and it doesn't stop it from affecting people and it doesn't stop them from engaging in extreme behaviors like spending days and nights

online in these rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and neglecting their own families and in fact breaking up relationships with their siblings, with their spouses, their children over these beliefs. And in some really extreme cases, people will kill their children. We've had these incidents happen where they believe that the children are human lizard hybrids, or they believe that the children are destined for the cabal, and so it's better that they be murdered at the hand of their mother. Right. So the ideology itself is just kind of a veneer on the real problem,

which is that people feel that they're living in a time of crisis, and that their existence is threatened. And unless they do something extreme, all will be lost, which is what is a common thread among all of these different historical cases. So, you know, they say that the professional psychology is desperately trying to catch with common sense. And, you know, there is a sense in which people know psychology. They know the vulnerabilities. They know the threats.

They know how to push people's buttons and what kind of story to tell them to mobilize them to extreme actions. Stories about, you know, children being killed, women being raped, things that threaten you masculinity and mobilize you to action. These things are known. We know it from our own psychology,

from the psychology of our children, our friends, and, you know, people who want to write to power or want to exert influence, are using it in creative ways, capitalizing on stories and themes that existed for centuries in order to capture the moment, the point of vulnerability, and the MS power, MS influence, and most votes ascend to political stations and so forth. for our listeners who might be concerned that either they themselves or someone they know is tending toward extremism, first of all, how do you know that you're reaching a danger point and what can you do to pull yourself away? One red flag that is actually often described as such by people in the prevention of violent crime community

is when the person starts pulling away from their social circles, when they all of a sudden stop going to meetings with people that they used to regularly see, when they end up spending more and more time alone, or completely changed their social circle. So this social disconnect, as we've discussed before, is often a whole mark of increasing extremism because the person has already done,

or said something that alerted people in their circle that caused them to talk to the person or expressed their disagreement with the extremist position, causing a rift or a strain on their relationship. So when this isolation or a change of social milieu is in place, this is a hallmark of abutting extremism. So if your loved one is exhibiting something like that, then the best thing to do is, is to try to stay around. Instead of arguing with them,

which is the natural thing to do, instead of trying to disabuse them of what you think are their mistaken motions, try to be there for them on just a human level, not on the level of discussing politics or whatever extremism the person is leaning into, but trying to understand their feelings. What is it that makes them feel

that they're living in a crisis? What is it that makes them be willing to break social connections, be willing to sacrifice things, and support them in a way that is genuine and kind and constant, which from research we know is the best bet to get a person out of extremist situations at a moment when they're ready to do so. I wanted to add a couple of comments. First of all, we must remember that extreme is not necessarily a negative thing. Some of the greatest contributions to science, to art,

to political philosophy, to world peace, were contributed by people who are extremists. Martin Luther King used to refer to himself as a radical. So, you know, this focused commitment to a cause can be in a service of good things, of pro-social things, things that construct rather than distract, However, we also know that extremists takes a toll on the extremists. We recently carried out, our team carried out research on 70 nations, and the one robust

finding is that extremism is negatively related to well-being. It takes a price. The fact that you suppress your needs, suppress your social needs, suppress your family connections, suppress your relatedness. takes its stall. And at the end of the day, the extremists are not happy campers. They suffer a lot. So that has to be taken into consideration.

And I think that the third thing is that psychological literacy, understanding yourself, understanding, reading our book, if I may suggest that, Sophia is supporting me in that recommendation. Yes. Understanding your own psyche, understanding when too much is too much and what you are actually

doing in excluding everything else for this one crazy commitment, that can give you pause and allow you to navigate to regulate your life in a more judicious, thoughtful way. So how

did you each get interested in studying this syndrome, this situation? We both come from the study of terror And for me, the bulb was the time where the term terrorism was replaced by the term violent extremism. And Sophia knows the background to that change. I thought it's political correctness, but it's more than that.

And when I pondered the term violent extremism, I realized that maybe there are other extremism that are not violent. diet, extreme sports, extreme love crashes, all kinds of behavioral and substance addictions. These are all forms of extremism. And I pondered whether there could be a common psychological core to those various extremism. And that's when we started talking about the possibility of this motivational imbalance when one need overrides everything else. Yes. So we both study terrorism, but I had, although I didn't yet think of it in terms of extremism, it was very clear to me that some of the greatest visionaries that our civilization is built around, including Jesus, right? They are extremists in fundamental ways, even if they reject violence and lie terrorists. Understanding the complete commitment that terrorists have helped me to understand self-sacrifice of,

of people who have done fantastic things that were all grateful for. I mean, we enjoy, you know, rights and freedoms and technology and advances in medicine that were carried out by people who gave their all. People tested vaccines on themselves in the olden days, you know, and a lot of doctors died as a result or suffered horrible consequences by doing this extreme self-sacrifice in the name of medicine. or Maria Kiri's extreme self-sacrifice in the name of her science. I just want to be clear of something that we clarify in the book,

but for the listeners too, that we don't believe, and we have examples in the book to support this, that it takes extremism to achieve great things. We don't believe that you must lay your life on the altar of science to advance it, or that nothing worth doing was ever done without huge personal sacrifice. There are plenty of examples, including Einstein and others who lead, you know, Picasso, quite balanced lives, combining their deep, profound passion for either art or technology or science, whatever, with other interests, be playing the violin or traveling the world or

engaging with colleagues and friends and women. So it's not that extremism is a necessary component for our world to thrive, for our science to advance, for the human rights to flourish. It does sometimes help, but more often than not, it hurts, and it particularly hurts the people who engage in it. So last question, I'd like to ask this one of most of the people I talk to. What are you working on now? What's next, either in this area or other areas where you are conducting research?

We have a contract for a new book, and that book is going to be titled, To Matter to Marvel. And this attempts to juxtapose this human quest for significance and metering with the opposite psychology of admiring. of belittling oneself in vis-à-vis nature, vis-a-vis greater forces, vis-à-vis God, vis-a-vis some great heroes. And the balance between these two that, again, to us, represents the most healthy way of leading one's life, not being committed to greatness, to an excessive attempt,

and not belittling oneself to the point of losing agency, losing a sense of self, but being able to be small and be big, to be and not to be, so to speak. So moving from extremism to moderation, is that what you're saying? To some extent, yes. Would you like to add, Sophia?

I think we have the need, maybe not an extreme need, but we all have a need to have something greater than ourselves that we can bow to in our daily lives. It can be science for scientists or it can be God for people of religion or it can be nature. And we also have the need to matter and to be significant. And when there is this deep imbalance is when we get extremism.

And finding threading the needle, finding that equanimity, satisfying both needs for being big and being small, is what we think is a good life. Well, I want to thank you both for joining me. This has been a very fascinating conversation. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. It was delightful.

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association.

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