The number 18 is surely extreme. \u2013 Hoca Camide, trying to make an incontestable point. <\/p>\n
Adeo causa non deest [There\u2019s no shortage of causes] \u2013 Pliny the Elder<\/p>\n
Visegr\u00e1d is a village near the knee of the Danube. Rising in the west, the great river flows past Vienna to become Hungary\u2019s border with Slovakia. Rolling past Visegr\u00e1d and the hilltop Plintenburg, the river then makes a 90-degree turn to head South toward Budapest. In the Slavonic language, \u201cVisegr\u00e1d\u201d means High (Vise) Castle (Gr\u00e1d). It is a beautiful, if Kafkaesque, setting. Down by the river, we find a swanky wellness hotel with baths, a bar, and conference rooms. It was here that we, a small group of psychologists and other social scientists, shared our thoughts on the psychology of extremism, a topic for our time. It was then and there that I realized that my views on the matter were rather moderate. <\/p>\n
The group shared a broad consensus that extremism, and political extremism in particular, is a social phenomenon with potentially corrosive consequences. This is not an extreme attitude to have. Worries about political extremism are de rigueur and received as socially responsible (Freilich et al., 2024). Political extremism is a contributing factor to intolerance, aggression<\/a>, and even violence. There is a good deal of empirical evidence for the link between extremism and aggression, but it is also clear that extreme political attitudes do not necessarily produce violence. It is perfectly possible to entertain extreme viewpoints without engaging in destructive behavior. <\/p>\n The scientist\u2019s job is to detect, to explain, and (perhaps) to advise on a phenomenon of interest. So, we asked how we know whether a position is extreme, whether we can account for its origins, and what might be done to mitigate the detrimental consequences that might ensue. As to detection, a perception of extremity requires a distribution of data, that is, referents for comparison (extremus = the outermost). The extremity of the number 18 is indeterminate. If it is the number of years lived at the time of death, 18 is extremely small; if it is the number of children begotten by a loving couple, it is extremely large. Psychologically speaking, judgments of extremity either require extensional (i.e., distributional) knowledge (i.e., experience) or implicit assumptions, however hallucinatory, about things not seen. No stimulus stands alone. <\/p>\n As to causation, the search for origins is driven by observed or assumed consequences. Having agreed that extremism is bad, people\u2014and the scientists who study it\u2014readily assume that causes resemble their consequences. In particular, bad consequences are thought to follow bad causes. This bias<\/a> is known as immanent justice reasoning in moral psychology (Callan et al., 2014), and it resembles the workings of the representativeness heuristic<\/a> (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972). Hence, the symposiasts at Hotel Visegr\u00e1d naturally attributed political extremism to conspiracy cognition<\/a>, personal and collective narcissism<\/a>, shallow causal reasoning, mean leaders, and of course, the terrors of social media<\/a>. <\/p>\n I believe all these causal stories have merit, but I doubt that these stories are the whole story. There is plenty of evidence from psychology and other sciences for the idea that systems (including political systems) can drift or shift into extreme states. A tiny disruption of a fragile equilibrium of counterbalancing forces can be enough. What is true for climate change<\/a> can also apply to attitude change. A well-ordered republic comprises a diversity of viewpoints, which necessitate one another and keep one another in check. Those on the right or on the left may not fully realize how their views receive meaning and validity only by virtue of being situated within the same system with those whom they so energetically oppose. <\/p>\n In the political world, the notion of an equilibrium means that the right won\u2019t become more right and that the left won\u2019t become more left in the course of events. Likewise, equilibrium means that the right and the left will not collapse into a grand consensus, thereby ending their energetic disputes and turn-taking in political power. A symmetrical increase in extreme positions can preserve the equilibrium, at least for a time, while eroding the common ground both sides rely on for their functioning. <\/p>\n Most thinkers, writers, scholars, and scientists engaging with the issue of extremism are, I believe, worried about disruptions of the political equilibrium by asymmetrical increases. A natural bias is to detect increases in extremism on the other side, away from one\u2019s own. Extreme attitudes are the attitudes we discern among those who disagree with us (Dawes et al., 1972; Ross et al., 1977). Only a true moderate would be equally worried about the far right and the far left; but then, whose views are located precisely in the middle of the spectrum? What is more, if there is a greater growth of extreme attitudes on one side than on the other, the point of true moderation will shift as well (Parducci, 1965). <\/p>\n There are alternatives to the grim view that bad consequences must have bad causes (Krueger & Aizenberg, in press). One such alternative is that extreme positions yield confidence<\/a> and a sense of identity<\/a> simply by virtue of being rare. Extremists own their views even if they are hard-pressed to explain them (Fernbach et al., 2013). Half-range views smack of indifference, ignorance, or both (Goldberg, 1981). Again, we must note the role of opposing forces in a well-balanced system. Although extreme positions can be appealing, people might also be scared of them. They seek out the middle, or middling, ground as a hiding place. A person who has no view cannot be challenged on substantive grounds (Hollingsworth, 1910). <\/p>\n Another alternative is that random sampling observations and experiences will increase the range and the (uncorrected) variance of the data, though slowly so when samples become large (Tippett, 1925). Very large or very small values are improbable in small samples, but virtually assured in very large samples. In the absence of compensating centripetal forces, it is more likely to find extremists in large than in small groups. The same logic holds within a person. The longer we live and the more we experience, the more likely it is that we sample something from the edge of the imaginable. This is one good reason to keep living: we do not know what we have not seen yet (Krueger, 2018). <\/p>\n These ideas are not meant to make light of the problems that come with extreme social views, especially views that are intolerant of dissent. Rather, this essay is meant to be a note of caution. Extreme views do not necessarily signal the presence of extreme (and unsavory) causes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The number 18 is surely extreme. \u2013 Hoca Camide, trying to make an incontestable point. Adeo causa non…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":737960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-737959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/737960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}