Co-authored with Dr. Daniel Snook, violent extremism researcher at Florida Gulf Coast University and lead author on the breakthrough study.

When I (Dr. Snook) learned about primal world beliefs (or primals, for short)—people’s basic assumptions about the nature of reality—I immediately began to wonder which might be related to violent extremism, or violence for a religious, political, or social cause.

There are 26 primal world beliefs, such as the belief that the world is safe versus dangerous, interesting versus dull, and beautiful versus ugly (Clifton et al., 2019; Clifton & Yaden, 2021). They have been theorized as lenses through which humans interpret daily life with a potentially massive influence on many of the most-studied outcomes in psychology, such as well-being, depression, and many personality traits. But researchers have not been sure of their role yet.

To really find that out, the field would need a reliable way of changing these beliefs, to determine their effects. Yet no one had studied primals and violent extremism before, so our team was excited to take a first look.

Primals are not specific ideological beliefs such as the White supremacist belief that “White people are the superior race,” but views that people have about what is true of the world generally. This makes primals useful for exploring how radicalization occurs in lots of different religious and political ideological contexts.

Our first step was coming up with some hypotheses. If you asked violent extremism researchers like me what primal would likely predict violent extremism, many would probably say the belief that the world is dangerous. Dangerous world belief has a natural link to intergroup aggression (Duckitt et al., 2002). This might go along the lines of, “You threaten or attack us, we threaten or attack back.” So, a person who sees the world as full of threat and danger should be more prone to support intergroup aggression, right?

But what we found instead wasn’t anything we expected.

Lower Meaningful World Belief was related to higher violent extremism.

Meaningful world belief is not the belief that your life has meaning, nor the belief the world has some underlying grand meaning or purpose. It simply concerns how plentiful value or meaning is in the world. Does a typical person, place, thing, or experience we encounter matter or have meaning? Or is that rare, and so things usually don’t matter? If you think most things tend to matter, you’ll have a higher Meaningful score; if you think few things matter, you’ll have a lower score.

In five studies of very different ideological groups—committed Democrats, Republicans, Environmentalists, Black Lives Matter activists, and violent Kazakstani prisoners (a total of 1,518 participants)—we found that, out of all 26 primals, low Meaningful world belief was the top predictor of violent extremism intentions, every time.

The sample of violent Kazakstani prisoners was especially interesting. We compared men imprisoned in Kazakhstan for jihadist terrorism offenses (i.e., terrorists) versus plain old violent offenses (e.g., armed robbery, murder). The terrorists had much lower Meaningful World Belief scores. This means lower Meaningful World Belief predicted something very specific: pre-meditated violence in pursuit of an ideological cause and not just violence in general.

Why did Meaningful World Belief predict violent extremism?

Our interpretation of these results was that maybe if someone believes most things (including people) aren’t likely to matter much, then they may feel it’s justifiable to destroy them to advance one of the few things they believe truly matters: their ideological cause.

To put it differently, it’s probably fine to set off unlabeled fireworks in, say, a desert, be cause there’s very likely little of value out there to be destroyed; just sand. But blowing anything up in, say, an art museum or elementary school? No way: There’s lots of priceless stuff there.

How could this finding help in the real world?

Building on this worldview discovery, we designed an intervention to increase Meaningful World Belief, which we hoped would decrease violent extremism intentions. Based on existing well-being practices (e.g., gratitude, mindfulness, and prayer), we wanted to create a way to increase people’s awareness and experience of everyday sources of meaning that they weren’t noticing, and then use that to help re-frame their world.

For the intervention, we asked participants to take three photos on their cellphone of things they thought were meaningful (that had value or mattered) throughout the day, for 9 days in a row. The goal was to keep them looking for meaning all day. At the end of the day, they selected the photo they thought held the most meaning and then wrote a short journal entry on why that photo held meaning.

Each day prompts changed. One day they were asked to look for meaning in their home or neighborhood. Another day they were asked to look for meaning in the natural world (e.g., plants, a sunset, etc.), and so on. The idea was to help people identify often-overlooked meaning in different areas of their lives and thereby help them see meaning more often and in more surprising places.

On day 10, we finally asked them to reflect on what sort of world this is, given so many meaningful things, and invited them to see the world differently.

We then tested this intervention in 430 US Republicans who endorsed the January 6, 2021 capitol insurrection (Study 6).

We found that those who received the intervention had higher levels of Meaningful World Belief and lower levels of violent extremism intentions compared to a control group. Excited, we tested this intervention again among 297 US Democrats and Republicans (Study 7) and found that the intervention again reduced violent extremism intentions compared to an active control group, but this time without changing Meaningful World Belief (an important qualification).

Takeaways

This research is exciting due to three breakthroughs:

The evidence from all seven studies suggests an important discovery for violent extremism research: Low Meaningful World Belief is the primal world belief that best predicts violence for a cause, seemingly whatever that cause may be.
We’ve created a new way of reducing violent extremism that aligns with major motivational theories explaining radicalization (such as 3N Theory; Kruglanski et al., 2019, and Ideological Obsession Theory, Bélanger, 2021).
Finally, this is a major breakthrough for primal world belief research.

While primals have been theorized to influence dozens of major life outcomes, a widespread assumption has been that primals can’t be changed (Clifton & Crum, 2025; Clifton & Meindl, 2022). This intervention tentatively challenges that assumption. Teams around the world are already working on adapting this intervention to change other primal world beliefs to see their impact on different outcomes.

To see the full results of this new research, please see the underlying peer-reviewed study published in Psychology of Violence (Snook et al., 2026).