The Psychology of Extremism

A Motivational Perspective

Arie Kruglanski, Catalina Kopetz, Ewa Szumowska, Arie Kruglanski, Catalina Kopetz, Ewa Szumowska, Arie W. Kruglanski, Arie W. Kruglanski, Catalina Kopetz, Ewa Szumowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367467623
• eBook ISBN: 9781000454000
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This ground-breaking book introduces a new model of extremism that emphasizes motivational imbalance among individual needs, offering a unique multidisciplinary exploration of extreme behaviors relating to terrorism, dieting, sports, love, addictions, and money.

In popular discourse, the term 'extremism' has come to mean largely 'violent extremism', but this is just one of many different types: extreme sports, extreme diets, political and religious extremisms, extreme self-interest, extreme attitudes, extreme devotion to a cause, addiction to substances, or behavioral addiction (to videogames, shopping, pornography, sex, and work). But do these descriptions have a deeper meaning? Do they reveal a common psychological dynamic? Or are they merely a mode of things about phenomena that have little in common? Bringing together world-leading psychologists from a variety of disciplines, the book uses a brand-new model to examine different expressions of extremism, at different levels of analysis (brain, hormones, and behavior), in order not merely to describe such behaviors but also to explain their occurrence, and the conditions under which they may be likely to emerge.

Also including suggestions for ways in which extremism could be counteracted, and to what extent it appears to be harmful to individuals and society, this is essential reading for students and academics in psychology and behavioral sciences.

PART 1
Motivational Imbalance at Different Levels of Analysis

1
Incentive Salience in Irrational Miswanting and Extreme Motivation

Hannah M. Baumgartner, Erin E. Naffziger, David Nguyen, and Kent C. Berridge

DOI: 10.4324/9781003030898-3

Introduction

Motivated behaviors, including extreme and infrequent ones, are influenced by both subjective cognitive decisions and more basic motivational processes, such as incentive salience, that can occur either consciously or unconsciously (Anselme & Robinson, 2016; Kahneman, Wakker, & Sarin, 1997; Kruglanski, Chernikova, Rosenzweig, & Kopetz, 2014; Kruglanski, Fernandez, Factor, & Szumowska, 2019; Higgins, 2012; Komissarouk, Chernikova, Kruglanski, & Higgins, 2018; Winkielman & Gogolushko, 2018; Berridge, 2018; Wilson et al., 2014). We describe a form of extreme behavior motivated by incentive salience that we call ‘irrational miswanting’, which occurs when the decision utility of an act is extremely high, while predicted, experienced, and remembered utilities of its outcome are all low or even negative. Throughout this chapter, we use the term ‘irrational miswanting’ as shorthand for this category of extreme behavior which can be demonstrated in rodent neuroscience experiments and may also underlie some human extreme behaviors.

For example, why would a rat choose to compulsively seek out and self-administer electric shocks that it has previously experienced repeatedly? Why do some individuals addicted to crack cocaine ‘chase ghosts’ or compulsively search for white specks on the ground to smoke, even if they know that the only specks available are merely small pebbles, or grains of sugar or salt? And why would addicts continue to pursue drugs if they were no longer in withdrawal, knew that their lives would be ruined by any further taking of drugs, and no longer even liked the drugs anymore? We propose that these extreme behaviors arise due to brain mechanisms amplifying incentive salience motivation processes, thus leading to these imbalances in reward utility subtypes. In this chapter, we will describe the reward utility types that become detached during ‘irrational miswanting’ and explain how that may happen psychologically through enhancements in incentive salience, mediated neurobiologically by mesolimbic brain systems. We describe examples of ‘irrational miswanting’ and suggest a theoretical framework for how it might conceivably extend even to extreme human aggression.

Reward Utilities and ‘Wanting’

A useful way of thinking about motivation for rewards is offered by the different subtypes of reward utility proposed by Kahneman et al. (1997), namely, predicted utility, experienced utility, decision utility, and remembered utility. Predicted utility refers to the cognitive or associative expectation of value that a future outcome will have (i.e., how much it is predicted to be liked or disliked). Experienced utility is the affective experience of how much the outcome is actually liked when it is obtained (i.e., the pleasure experienced). Remembered utility is reconstructed memory of a previously experienced outcome’s value (i.e., memory of how much it was liked in the past). Decision utility refers to the final decision or motivation to choose or pursue the outcome, visibly manifested in behavior (Kahneman et al., 1997).

In most cases, decision utility, predicted utility, remembered utility, and experienced utility all cohere together. For example, an individual may be motivated to pursue a chocolate dessert (high decision utility), informed by memories of previous positive experience (high remembered utility), which guides prediction that the dessert will be enjoyed in the future (high predicted utility), which is ultimately confirmed when they consume the treat that is then indeed enjoyed (high experienced utility). In typical cases where people pursue goals, they choose so that all these different types of reward utility are maximized, and so make rational choices.

However, exceptions occur when ‘miswanting’ an outcome (high decision utility) that turns out not to be liked (low experienced utility) (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993). Most cases of ‘miswanting’ turns out to be based simply on wrong expectations (incorrect high predicted utility), due to either wrong memories about what was liked in the past or wrong theories about liking for future outcomes that were never before experienced (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993). As an example of false remembered utility that drives wrong expectations, people can be induced to choose the most painful of two aversive options, based on their false memory that it gave less pain than the other (because it ended with a decrement that distorted their memory of how much pain had been endured); consequently, they pick the ‘wrong’ more painful option when offered the choice again (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993). Other times, wrong predictions are based on false theories or overthinking (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000; Wilson & Schooler, 1991). For example, a wrong theory might include believing that winning the lottery will make a person enduringly happy, then coming to find out that the experience of winning the lottery is followed by other unanticipated obstacles that make life more difficult (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). In an example of overthinking, college students asked to pick the best of several brands of strawberry jam did best at matching experts’ picks when they chose based on immediate ‘gut reaction’, but worse when they introspectively analyzed and explained in detail why they felt the way they did (Wilson & Schooler, 1991). In these cases of ‘miswanting’ based on false expectations, predicted utility, remembered utility, and decision utility all still cohere together and all are high. Only experienced utility stands apart as disappointingly low in these standard cases of ‘miswanting’.

However, we suggest there are other situations where a more truly ‘irrational decision’ may exist, in which experienced utility coheres with remembered and predicted utilities, but decision utility detaches and stands alone. For example, this could mean wanting and pursuing a bad outcome, which is remembered to be bad, expected to be bad, and actually is bad when experienced—but is nonetheless positively wanted as an incentive. Irrational incentive motivation in ‘wanting’ a bad outcome on its own is different from rationally choosing a bad outcome simply to avoid a worse outcome, such as preferring an uncomfortable visit to the dentist today over the worse pain of a toothache tomorrow. It is also different from suppressing recognition of an outcome’s bad consequences to justify its choice, such as succumbing to the temptation of eating high-calorie cake by momentarily suppressing recognition that it will lead to unwanted weight gain. In what we will call an ‘irrational’ case of ‘miswanting’ a bad outcome becomes ‘wanted’ on its own, not to avoid a worse alternative, yet its bad consequences are known from past experiences and are accurately predicted for future. In such ‘irrational miswanting’, remembered utility and predicted utility align with experienced utility and are low, so that predictions and memories are accurate for a disliked outcome. Yet decision utility remains high, and so becomes the outlier that is detached from all other types of utility. In these cases, one may ‘want’ (high decision utility) an outcome that is accurately remembered to be disliked (low remembered utility), accurately predicted to be disliked in future (low predicted utility), and which is actually disliked when obtained (low experienced utility).

What could cause decision utility to detach and soar above remembered, predicted, and experienced utilities for an outcome? A key to this dissociation in some cases, we propose, is mesolimbic incentive salience, a basic psychological process of motivation that can powerfully and specifically influence decision utility. We refer to incentive salience as ‘wanting’ in quotation marks to distinguish this mesolimbically mediated motivational process, which can give urgency to conscious desires but also can sometimes occur unconsciously, from the unmodified term wanting which always means a conscious, cognitive desire mediated by more cortically weighted brain systems (Berridge & Aldrige, 2008; Anselme & Robinson, 2016; Berridge, 2018; Winkielman & Gogolushko, 2018).

Attribution of Incentive Salience

For most goals, a high level of ‘wanting’ usually tracks a high predicted utility for a cognitively wanted goal, and both contribute to decision utility. That is, usually one both wants and ‘wants’ what is expected to be ‘liked’. However, in some special cases to be described here, high ‘wanting’ that leads to high decision utility can be directed toward an outcome that is not predicted to be ‘liked’ nor ‘liked’ when actually received. In such cases, one may irrationally come to ‘want’ an outcome that is accurately expected to be not ‘liked’, and cognitively might not be wanted. It is even possible to ‘want what hurts you’: a bad outcome that is remembered to be painful, predicted to be painful, and experienced as painful can still become positively ‘wanted’ with high decision utility in certain circumstances, as will be shown here.

Similar to ‘wanting’, we use ‘liking’ in quotations to describe the basic hedonic impact that is derived from consuming a pleasant reward. ‘Liking’ typically corresponds to conscious pleasure, as an input to brain circuitry underlying subjective hedonic experience, but can also in some circumstances occur as a basic hedonic reaction that is not necessarily consciously experienced (Winkielman & Gogolushko, 2018; Berridge, 2018; Berridge & Winkielman, 2003; Anselme & Robinson, 2016). ‘Liking’ is enhanced by a set of brain anatomical hedonic hotspots operating together as an integrated hedonic circuit. Hedonic hotspots are small, specialized subregions in orbitofrontal cortex, insular cortex, nucleus accumbens, and ventral pallidum with unique capacity to amplify hedonic impact in response to neurochemical opioid, endocannabinoid, and orexin signals. Brain mechanisms of ‘liking’ are separable from those of ‘wanting’, which is mediated by a larger mesocorticolimbic circuitry that additionally includes the mesolimbic dopamine system (Castro & Berridge, 2017; Berridge & Kringelbach, 2015).

Incentive salience operates by a signature set of psychological rules, involving Pavlovian learning that enables reward cues to trigger motivations, dynamic brain modulations that can amplify the motivational power of particular cues, and major individual differences in susceptibility to attribute extreme levels of incentive salience to particular cues (Bindra, 1978; Toates, 1986; Colaizzi et al., 2020; Berridge, 2018). Incentive salience is typically triggered by reward-associated Pavlovian cues (i.e., cues that were previously paired with actual rewards as ‘wants’ to consume the relevant reward) (Bindra, 1978; Toates, 1986). In addition, reward cues become attractive in their own right, so that a cue elicits approach, which is sometimes called sign-tracking (Flagel, Watson, Robinson, & Akil, 2007), and may even elicit attempts to ‘consume’ the cue similarly to its associated reward.

When the cue is encountered again, surges in mesolimbic dopamine transmission are an important step in imbuing the cue itself with incentive salience and momentarily enable the cue to take on some motivational properties of its associated ‘wanted’ reward (Robinson & Berridge, 2013; Berridge, 2012). At a given moment, the intensity of incentive salience triggered by a particular cue can be powerfully amplified by relevant physiological appetites, stress or emotional excitement states, by drug intoxication, or by direct brain manipulations of ‘wanting’ circuitry—including heightening mesolimbic dopamine reactivity to reward cues (Robinson & Berridge, 2013; Berridge, 2012). Thus, encountering the same reward cue can trigger varying degrees of incentive salience in different situations, in some cases leading to surprisingly high levels of ‘wanting’—a phenomenon that can contribute to relapse in addiction.

The mesolimbic dopamine system is an important contributor to dynamic amplification of incentive salience. Increases in dopamine can interact with reward cues to produce irrational elevations in decision utility. For example, in early studies of cue-triggered ‘wanting’ in our laboratory, rats were first trained to work for sucrose pellets by pressing a lever (Wyvell & Berridge, 2000). In separate training sessions, the same rats learned that Pavlovian auditory cues predicted free sucrose rewards, without having to work for them (i.e., Pavlovian pairings of conditioned stimulus [CS, auditory cue] that predicted reward unconditioned stimulus [sucrose]). Instrumental lever pressing behavior was then tested in what is called a Pavlovian to instrumental transfer (PIT) test, during an extinction session wherein pressing the lever no longer led to sucrose reward. Although they decrease their responding on the lever the rats learned that engaging with the lever no longer led to reward (lowered experienced utility); therefore, in future encounters with the lever, the rats should gradually come to expect that engaging with the lever will not produce a rewardi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• The Psychology of Extremism
• Part 1 Motivational Imbalance at Different Levels of Analysis
• Part 2 Motivational Imbalance Across Domains of Human Endeavor
• Index