Emma A. Bäck, Hanna Bäck, Niklas Altermark and Holly Knapton recently published the article The Quest for Significance: Attitude Adaption to a Radical Group Following Social Exclusion in a special issue on pathways to radicalization. The article will soon be available open access. In the mean time, please read the abstract.
It is a human fundamental to desire to be valued, loved and respected – to be significant. Social exclusion induce significance loss which elicits a ‘quest for significance’ – the search for opportunities to re-gain significance. The present article establishes this relation in a lab experiment, showing that socially excluded individuals who are subsequently included by a radical group, adapt their attitudes in line with this group. We use a modified version of the well-known paradigm ‘Cyberball’ to elicit the quest for significance. The results show that when experiencing social exclusion, highly rejection sensitive individuals tend to adapt to the radical group’s opinions. The results are important, highlighting a mechanism in the radicalization process and the importance of taking social factors into account in this process.