Cognitive components of radical attitudes and readiness to extreme

Abstract

The spread of various forms of radicalism in modern society is one of the most complex and disturbing phenomena: from the simple intransigence of opponents to religious fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism. The purpose of this study was to develop a working model of the cognitive components of radical attitudes and their verification on study of readiness for extreme behavior. We define radicalism as a personal style that manifests itself in interaction with other people in that in certain social situations only one option (actions, behaviors, events) is considered as correct and acceptable, and a person is ready to defend it at any cost, including aggressively and with the use of extreme action. Theoretical analysis suggested seven cognitive components of radical attitudes: the propensity to defend one’s opinion at any cost, black-and-white thinking, impulsive decision making, the idea of the acceptability of a public expression of aggression and interest in its public manifestations, self-confidence, the belief in easy correctability of personal mistakes. Each cognitive component of radicalistic attitudes was evaluated in 219 respondents aged from 18 to 60; then they filled the Tolerance Index, the Bass-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, Barrett Impulsivity Scale, and also evaluated their readiness to commit extreme actions for various reasons. Reliability-consistency for radical attitudes components ranged from 0.62 to 0.79. Comparison of cognitive components of radicalism with general impulsiveness, tolerance and aggression confirmed the discriminant validity of the components. Six out of seven components (except for black-and-white thinking) are related to subjective readiness for extreme actions for their beliefs and values, and four out of seven (opinion defending, acceptability of expressing aggression, self-confidence, low cost of error) remained afted statistical control for tolerance impulsiveness or aggressiveness and respondents. The obtained data confirm the validity of most of the proposed components of radical attitudes as well as their relationship to the readiness for radical (extreme) behavior.