Research

My research explores why people are drawn to extremist groups and ideologies, taking a perspective informed by motivational psychology. Specifically, Self-Determination Theory posits that we are all driven to satisfy three basic psychological needs: Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy.

These three needs align well with research on what drives people to join extremist groups, who often feel isolated and listless, but find a sense of community and purpose among extreme peers. Despite this theoretical link, research explicitly connecting these needs to extremism remains limited. I seek to fill this research gap through a mix quantitative longitudinal studies and large-scale natural language processing designs.

My hope is that by building a quantitative evidence base for these needs, we could leverage the decades of research and thousands of studies on psychological needs to help inform prevention and deradicalization programs.

Basic Psychological Needs Are Associated With Engagement and Hate Term Use in Extremist Chatrooms

This projecct used a natural language processing approach to assess expression of three psychological needs (Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness), and their association with expressed hate (i.e. the use of hate terms) among ~90,000 users from 233 leaked far-right chatrooms on the popular messaging platform Discord. Results showed that increased expression of Competence and Autonomy was associated with more activity and less hate term use on these chatrooms, while increased expression of Relatedness as associated with less activity but more hate term use. doi:10.1177/19485506251389642

The Role of Basic Psychological Needs in Right-Wing Extremism Risk Among American Conservatives

This project assessed the relationship between three psychological needs (Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness) and extremist attitudes among a sample of conservative-identifying participants in the United States. Results demonstrated that these needs explained incremental variance in extremist attitutes beyond stable factors such as personality, psychopathy, and trait-like aggression. Relationships were similar acorss men and women, and patterns of associations were near identical for different ideological groups.
doi:10.1080/09546553.2023.2178305