The Role of Basic Psychological Needs in Right-Wing Extremism Risk Among American Conservatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern psychological theories of violent extremism stress the roles of social connections and personal meaning as motivators for individuals to participate in extremist groups. Personal meaning and social connections are both important aspects of Basic Psychological Needs Theory, a motivation framework commonly used in workplace and educational psychology. This study sought to assess the relationship between Basic Psychological Needs and extremism among (N = 361) self-identified American conservatives. Psychological Need fulfilment was strongly negatively associated with endorsement of extremism (range of rs = −.43 to −.68). In addition, Psychological Need fulfilment explained incremental variance in extremism scores after accounting for other psychological characteristics, including aggression, psychopathy, empathy, and Five-Factor Model personality traits. These findings suggest that Basic Psychological Needs may be a useful framework to expand our understanding of the etiology of extremism, and that prosocial alternatives for meeting these needs may reduce the risk of engaging in extremist behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".