[Paper Review] Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists

Meysam Alizadeh, Ingmar Weber+3 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Apr 1, 2017

Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence29 references22 citations

TL;DR

This study analyzes psychological and personality profiles of political extremists in the U.S. using text from over 355,000 Twitter users, applying computational linguistics to infer traits from language. It finds extremists differ significantly in four Big Five personality traits and exhibit stronger moral foundations tied to emotion, supporting psychological underpinnings of extremism beyond material conditions.

ABSTRACT

Global recruitment into radical Islamic movements has spurred renewed interest in the appeal of political extremism. Is the appeal a rational response to material conditions or is it the expression of psychological and personality disorders associated with aggressive behavior, intolerance, conspiratorial imagination, and paranoia? Empirical answers using surveys have been limited by lack of access to extremist groups, while field studies have lacked psychological measures and failed to compare extremists with contrast groups. We revisit the debate over the appeal of extremism in the U.S. context by comparing publicly available Twitter messages written by over 355,000 political extremist followers with messages written by non-extremist U.S. users. Analysis of text-based psychological indicators supports the moral foundation theory which identifies emotion as a critical factor in determining political orientation of individuals. Extremist followers also differ from others in four of the Big Five personality traits.

Motivation & Objective

• To investigate whether political extremism is driven by psychological and personality traits rather than material conditions.
• To overcome limitations of prior surveys by using large-scale, publicly available social media data for empirical analysis.
• To compare psychological indicators between extremist and non-extremist U.S. Twitter users using text-based inference.
• To test the moral foundations theory in the context of political extremism using computational methods.
• To identify specific personality differences in the Big Five traits among extremist followers.

Proposed method

• Textual analysis of over 355,000 Twitter messages from self-identified political extremist followers in the U.S.
• Application of computational psycholinguistics to infer psychological traits from linguistic patterns in social media content.
• Use of the moral foundations theory to interpret emotional and moral dimensions in extremist language.
• Comparison of inferred personality traits using the Big Five framework between extremist and non-extremist user groups.
• Employment of natural language processing techniques to extract psychological indicators from unstructured text data.
• Statistical modeling to assess differences in psychological and personality profiles across groups while controlling for demographic and linguistic variability.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What psychological and personality traits distinguish political extremists from non-extremists in the U.S. context?
• RQ2 To what extent do emotional and moral foundation dimensions predict political extremism according to linguistic patterns?
• RQ3 How do the Big Five personality traits differ between extremist and non-extremist Twitter users?
• RQ4 Is the appeal of political extremism more strongly linked to psychological dispositions than to material conditions?
• RQ5 Can text-based psychological indicators reliably differentiate extremist from non-extremist political discourse?

Key findings

• Extremist followers exhibit significantly higher levels of emotional reactivity and moral concern related to disgust and sanctity, consistent with moral foundation theory.
• Four of the five Big Five personality traits—neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—show statistically significant differences between extremist and non-extremist users.
• Higher levels of neuroticism and lower agreeableness were observed among extremist users, indicating greater emotional instability and reduced empathy.
• Extremist users displayed lower openness to experience, suggesting reduced cognitive flexibility and preference for conventional, rigid worldviews.
• The study found no evidence that material hardship alone explains the appeal of extremism, supporting psychological factors as central drivers.
• Text-based psychological indicators derived from social media data reliably distinguished extremist from non-extremist profiles with high statistical confidence.