Recent research examines how dark personality traits and moral judgments combine to shape the mindset of militant extremists. This research shows that people who advocate ideological violence often exhibit sadistic tendencies and prioritize group loyalty over personal fairness. These findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Psychologists typically define extremist thinking as a particular pattern of beliefs and motivations. Rather than viewing extremists simply as deviant personalities separated from normal society, researchers treat this idea as a combination of attitudes that can be activated under the right environmental conditions. This cognitive pattern contains three main elements, which can be thought of as the psychological fuel for radicalization.
The first factor is willingness to support ideological violence, which serves as a measure of underlying hostility and disgust. The second element is the belief that the world is a fundamentally mean place. This pervasive pessimism leads to persistent resentment toward foreign enemies, human nature, or modern society itself. The third element involves an appeal to a higher or divine power. This belief provides a convenient excuse for violence, allowing individuals to justify extreme and harmful measures by claiming they serve a larger religious or utopian purpose.
Marija V. Coric, a researcher at the Institute of Criminal Sociology in Belgrade, Serbia, led the investigation with colleague Janko Medjedović. They wanted to understand how people who are not currently members of extremist groups continue to carry elements of these extreme views in their daily lives. They specifically considered how these views relate to intuitive moral judgment and the darker side of human personality traits.
To investigate this psychological situation, the research team focused on two well-known theoretical frameworks. The first framework considers moral foundations and divides human morality into two broad categories based on evolutionary psychology. One category focuses on protecting individual rights in favor of universal ideals of care and fairness. This individualized morality is centrally focused on preventing harm to humans and ensuring mutual justice.
The second moral category focuses on uniting social groups against outsiders. This framework emphasizes unwavering loyalty to the group, respect for traditional authority, and protection of spiritual or physical purity. These characteristics have historically dominated social order within cohesive communities, but they can also shift moral focus. This shift often shifts the focus away from protecting individual human lives and toward actively protecting abstract collective identities.
The second psychological framework includes four dark personality traits, often grouped by researchers as the dark four. These temperaments include psychopathy, with emotional shallowness, lack of empathy, and highly impulsive behavior. Narcissism is defined by grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, and a constant desire for social admiration.
The last two dark properties deal with manipulation and brutality. Machiavellianism centers around a cynical manipulative nature and a strategic attitude that the ends justify the means. Finally, sadism characterizes a tendency to enjoy observing others and directly inflicting pain on them. In a typical environment, this can translate into everyday sadism, manifesting itself in the form of enjoying violent sports, trolling the internet, or finding entertainment in the misfortunes of one’s peers.
Researchers suspected that these dark personality traits might provide a fundamental personal tendency toward interpersonal harm. This aggressive underlying tendency can be intellectually justified or amplified by a particular moral system. Individuals may have a natural inclination toward cruelty, but they can secure a framework of group loyalty and sacred purpose to excuse that cruelty as a noble moral obligation.
To test these associations, the research team conducted two separate surveys in the general population. In the first part of the project, 399 adults completed a questionnaire assessing their intuitive moral foundations and support for militant extremist ideas. Survey participants rated how strongly they agreed with statements that defended extreme violence, expressed a pessimistic worldview about modern institutions, and advocated divine justification for extreme measures.
During this initial research phase, Coric and Medjedovic observed a clear relationship between moral values and extreme ideological beliefs. People who placed lower personal value on personal fairness and consideration for others were more likely to support violence and rely on divine justification. The apparent lack of empathy for individual suffering goes hand in hand with the acceptance of brutal ideological tactics.
At the same time, researchers found a strong association with group-focused morality. Participants who valued group cohesion, absolute authority, and purity were more likely to condone violence for higher spiritual reasons. These same people likely viewed the world as a vile place, suggesting that their strong group loyalties were accompanied by a deep suspicion of the outside world.
Based on these initial psychological observations, the researchers conducted a second comprehensive study of 540 adult volunteers. This phase included the same questionnaires as the first phase, but added validated tests to measure four dark personality traits. This addition allowed the research team to directly observe how deep-seated malevolent personality traits interact with moral intuitions to shape extremist attitudes.
Results from the second study revealed that dark personality traits reliably predicted core elements of extremist thinking. Sadism emerged as the strongest personality predictor for those directly advocating ideological violence. People who score high on sadism frequently cite powers greater than God to excuse violent acts. This suggests that the basic feeling of psychological enjoyment of the suffering of others plays an important underlying role in supporting extreme ideologies.
This public approval of violence was closely linked to the participants’ particular moral profile. Individuals prone to sadism and endorsing violence on a daily basis consistently rejected moral beliefs focused on protection of the individual. The researchers noted that these dark personality traits are associated with a complete rejection of universal care, which partially explains why these individuals actively support violent political extremists.
A completely different pattern emerged regarding the worldview that society is a vile and corrupt place. This highly pessimistic intellectual worldview was closely associated with Machiavellianism, rather than sadism or psychopathy. People who are highly manipulative, strategic, and highly cynical in their daily social interactions were much more likely to view the modern world as a hostile environment.
Researchers have observed that manipulative individuals with a cynical worldview readily endorse a morality that emphasizes in-group loyalty. The study authors suggest that people who lean toward Machiavellianism may employ group-binding morality as a highly useful tool for socially exploiting others. Seeing the entire world as inherently vile can simply serve as a practical narrative excuse for their own manipulative and selfish behavior.
While this study provides a detailed psychological look at the structure of extreme beliefs, the authors caution about some limitations. Participants in the study were drawn entirely from the general population, not extremists or incarcerated people. The analytic sample also included a disproportionate number of young, highly educated, and female participants. This demographic bias limits the extent to which the final conclusions can be applied to the broader public.
The research team also noticed some theoretical inconsistencies in how militant extremist attitudes are currently measured. The mindset component focused on a pessimistic worldview behaved very differently from the core component focused on physical violence and divine justification. This statistical split suggests that perceiving the world around you as vile may capture another mental mechanism entirely, rather than simply harboring social resentment and motivating targeted violence.
Future academic research will need to investigate these psychological contradictions in more detail. The study authors recommend using longitudinal tracking techniques to follow the same people over several consecutive years. This particular approach can help behavioral scientists determine whether dark personality traits and group-based morality are actually responsible for developing extremist views over time, or whether they simply happen to exist alongside them. Including individuals currently active in extremist political organizations would also help verify whether these psychological patterns investigated hold consistently in real-world conflicts.
The study, “Moral Foundations of Extremist Thought Patterns: Moral Foundations and the Role of the Dark Tetrad,” was authored by Marija V. Coric and Janko Medjedovic.
