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Abstract
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OBJECTIVES: Despite its growing importance, few quantitative studies on right-wing terrorism exist. This study develops and tests the implications of a novel theory of right-wing terrorism. It hypothesizes that the right-wing terrorist personality is uniquely characterized by vengefulness and a perception that the world is fundamentally chaotic.
METHOD: Using recently developed approaches in computational personality assessment, a large corpus of texts--by right-wing terrorists (N = 12), Islamist terrorists (N = 12), and controls (N = 9,660)--is analyzed to test whether those written by right-wing terrorists are associated with the proposed personality features.
RESULTS: Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results show that there is a statistically significant relationship between preoccupation with revenge and chaos and right-wing terrorism. Further analysis reveals that the proposed personality features assist in accurately classifying texts written by right-wing terrorists.
CONCLUSION: Results reveal that right-wing terrorists have unique personality features that differ from the general population and other terrorists. Future research is needed to typologize different forms of terrorism based on their personality profiles. Additionally, the method here is shown useful for screening large quantities of text for potential extremists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Language: en |