Researchers have made and tested a new tool called the Extremist Archetypes Scale to help tell the difference between the different psychological traits that violent extremists have.
The work, led by Milan Obaidi and Sara Skaar from the University of Oslo in Norway, along with other researchers, describing the tool and validation results was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Members of violent extremist groups might have a wide range of motivations, backgrounds, personalities, and other characteristics.
But research on violent extremism has often ignored this difference, which limits its scope and usefulness.
Obaidi and colleagues relied on past research to create a new scale that captures variation among radicals in order to assist address this problem.
The “adventurer,” “fellow traveler,” “leader,” “drifter,” and “misfit” extremist archetypes are among the five dimensions that make up their new extremist archetypes scale.
An “adventurer,” for example, can be motivated by thrill and the chance to become a hero, whereas a “drifter” would be looking for a sense of belonging.
The researchers chose to approach archetypes as dimensions in order to account for cases in which an extremist does not precisely fit into a single archetype and to record an individual’s progression into an extreme archetype.
The researchers then carried out a number of investigations to support the Extremist Archetypes Scale’s validity.
They looked at correlations between respondents’ scores on the scale and scores on a number of widely used questionnaires that assess personality traits, sociopolitical attitudes, ideologies, prejudice, and ethnic identity.
They also confirmed the scale’s usefulness in a variety of situations involving gender, political orientation, age, and ethnicity.
The validation investigations backed up both the notion that the archetypes consistently reflect various personality and behavioral profiles as well as the scale’s predictive validity—across political orientation and ethnicity.
As an illustration, the “adventurer” archetype was linked to extraversion and aggressive behavioral intents, while the “misfit” archetype was linked to narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
According to the researchers, using their scale in future studies could benefit counter-extremism initiatives.
They also point out that although their study concentrated on extremism in groups, future research may look at stereotypes of extremists who act alone.
“The current research developed the Extremist Archetypes Scale,” the authors write, “which measures different archetype dimensions that reflect different motivations for joining extremist groups and obtaining different roles within them.”
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