Extremism and political violence: the mediated effect of epistemic and significance motivations.

This study analyzes the motivational processes underlying political group extremism, namely a willful collective behavior that violates the norms of expected conduct in a given context (Levine & Kruglanski, 2022; Kruglanski et al., 2017). Extremist conducts are produced by a motivational imbalance (Kruglanski et al., 2022), where one dominant need—the quest for personal significance (QFS)—overrides all the others. Following Levine and Kruglanski (2022) and Hogg (2021), another antecedent hypothesized for group extremism is the individuals’ desire for certain, clear-cut and ambiguity-free knowledge (need for cognitive closure, NFC, Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), since the absence of such knowledge poses a major threat to people’s self- esteem as valuable and competent social actors. Both needs have been associated with extreme political worldviews (Jasko, et al., 2020, Webber et al., 2018). In this vein, we argue that such existential (QFS) and epistemic (NFC) needs are associated to non-normative political engagement (Moskalenko & McCauley, 2009) through the mediation effect of motivational extremism (ME). In two correlational samples (n 1 = 567, n 2 = 764), we observed how ME was associated to the QFS and the NFC. In turn, such needs exerted an indirect effect on non- normative engagement, partially (QFS) or totally (NFC) mediated by ME. According to this argument, the results showed that the relation between epistemic / significance-affirming motivations and non-normative political engagement was mediated by extremism conceived as motivational imbalance. Specifically, while the QFS showed both direct and indirect effects on engagement, NFC showed indirect effect only.