Do Dark Personality, Uncertainty and Group Relative Deprivation Predict the Same Kind of Political Violence?
By Tomislav Pavlović
Multiple groups of individuals are often present in photos of violent protests. For instance, some individuals may become violent and attack their political enemies or police during a protest, others may be reluctant to attack people, but have nothing against destroying the public or enemy properties. At the same time, some may yell threats, but would never cause any harm. However, all these individuals would be labelled as participants of a violent protest. Therefore, in order to precisely predict who would be willing to conduct what kind of violent actions, it may be relevant to differentiate between the types of political violence — instead of measuring it globally. This is relevant because including non-violent individuals into deradicalization programs can backfire, just as not including violent ones. To check for similarities and differences between supporters of specific types of political violence, we studied the roles of three popular determinants of extremism and radicalization: group-based relative deprivation, the (in)stability of life’s meaning and the Dark Triad).
The perception of group-based relative deprivation, or belief that one’s group is in an unfavourable position compared to other groups within a society was recognized as the first step towards radicalization in multiple models (e.g., Borum, 2003; Moghaddam, 2005) with a clear idea: those who feel that the system is unjust towards them become prone to using violence in the attempt to establish a just society. However, the recent review (Franc and Pavlovic, 2018) and secondary data analyses (Storm, Pavlovic and Franc, 2020) failed to provide strong arguments in favour of the relationship. Generally, only a minor portion of those discriminated against becomes violent, implying that group-based deprivation is insufficient to explain support for political violence per se.
Hogg and Adelman (2013), on the other hand, explain that uncertainty in one’s own identity may motivate individuals to join strictly structured, clearly focused and highly cohesive organizations — like the extremist ones. Similarly, Kruglanski et al. (2014) explain that lack or loss of life’s meaning may motivate individuals to find new meaning — if nowhere else, in “martyrdom” or self-sacrifice for group goals. Therefore, having an unstable perception of where one’s life is going can lead to joining groups that provide or restore meaning by offering some clear-cut solutions and values that stabilize one’s worldview. Perceived threats to such groups, or existential systems they promote, may lead to violence.
According to personality psychologists, individuals can have relatively stable characteristics that may serve as vulnerabilities in the context of radicalization. The Dark Triad of personality may represent a group of three such features, considered to be the core of malevolent behaviours (Paulhus and Williams, 2002). Machiavellianism represents tendencies towards interpersonal manipulation and deceit; narcissism can be described as grandiose self-concept, self-centeredness and tendencies towards dominance, while psychopathy is reflected in impulsiveness and thrill-seeking accompanied with low empathy and anxiety (Paulhus and Williams, 2002). This approach suggests that individuals with more malicious personality traits may be more likely to employ violence against their political enemies.
Although all these hypotheses may seem plausible, the combined effects of relative deprivation, uncertainty and the Dark Triad on support for different types of political violence were not tested in earlier studies. However, theorists were hypothesizing about them (e.g., Borum, 2014). Therefore, this study represents a unique contribution to the ongoing issue of predicting political violence and its subtypes.
We conducted the study online by sharing the invitation via social media sites and mailing lists. A total of 299 participants-volunteers (104 men) filled the questionnaire. On average, our participants — students of Croatian faculties — were 22.75 years old.
We designed the study in a way that points out the differences between unfair politicians and the rest of society. After solving the personality questionnaire and reading a brief introduction to group-based relative deprivation that was supposed to focus them on the differences between politicians and the rest of the population, we measured how deprived our participants felt compared to politicians. Finally, after a brief reminder (without mentioning any names) on the political affairs that occurred in Croatia during the last few years, participants expressed their agreement or disagreement with several statements describing different types of violence against “bad politicians”. At the end of the survey, we explained that violent political actions are not acceptable and offered several moderate options for political engagement. Institutional Ethics committee approved the study.
In brief, the correlations table (Table 1) presents four relevant findings. Firstly, individuals who felt higher group-based relative deprivation were also more prone to support threats and vandalism than physical force and assassination. Contrary, individuals with more pronounced dark personality were more inclined to support physical force and assassination than threats and vandalism against politicians. Thirdly, the relationship between the stability of life’s meaning and support for different forms of political violence is much weaker. Interestingly, neither of investigated feeling or characteristics is related to disapproving violence in solving political issues.
Further analyses confirmed these findings: dark personality and feeling of group-based relative deprivation contribute to explaining support for all four types of political violence. However, the dark personality contributed more to the explanation of support for the use of physical force and assassinations. In contrast, the group-based relative deprivation contributed more to the explanation of support for threats and vandalism. Moreover, the combination of dark personality and feelings of group-based relative deprivation have an additional contribution to the explanation of support for the use of physical force and assassinations — among individuals with darker personality traits the more deprived ones supported extreme methods of dealing with unjust politicians (Figure 1).
These results indicate that feeling of deprivation could motivate support for using threats and destroying property; however, support for more extreme methods of protest is more likely when deprivation is accompanied by dark personality traits. Thus, it seems (although no causal inferences could be made due to the nature of research design), that one’s personality may play a role in determining what the protest would look like and how many (if any) people would get hurt. This confirms the potential importance of personality as a factor in extremism (McGregor, Hayes and Prentice, 2015), as well as the combination of specific personality and specific contexts. On a more general level, this study indicates that a combination of interpersonal, intrapersonal and intergroup factors should be considered when explaining political violence. Secondly, not all violence is the same — different types of violence have different determinants. Both of these could lead to the development of more precise radicalization models, which in turn can lead to the development of more efficient prevention and interventions programs targeting the individuals that are at highest risk of becoming radicalized.
About the Author
Tomislav Pavlović is a department member at the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar. His work on DARE (EU Horizon 2020, 725349) has been supported by a Croatian Science Foundation within Young Researchers’ Career Development Project — Training of Doctoral Students (DOK-01–2018) financed by the European Union from the European Social Fund (ESF).
About the ISPP & its Blog
The International Society of Political Psychology is an interdisciplinary organization representing all fields of inquiry concerned with exploring the relationships between political and psychological processes. If you are interested in contributing an article or have any questions about the blog, please email them or visit the ISPP Blog’s webpage.
References
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