Their new Extremist Archetypes Scale spans five dimensions of extremist archetypes: ‘adventurer’, ‘fellow traveler’, ‘leader’, ‘wanderer’ and ‘misfit’. For example, an “adventurer” may be drawn to extremism out of excitement and the prospect of being a hero, while a “wanderer” may strive for group feeling. The researchers chose to treat archetypes as dimensions to allow for situations where an extremist does not fit perfectly within a single archetype and to capture a person’s transition to an extremist archetype.
Next, the researchers performed several analyzes to validate the Extremist Archetypes Scale. They tested associations between people’s scores on the scale and their scores on several established scales that evaluate personality traits, sociopolitical attitudes, ideologies, prejudices and ethnic identification. In addition, they validated the applicability of the scale in different cases with regard to gender, political orientation, age and ethnicity.
The validation analyzes supported the predictive validity of the scale – including across political orientation and ethnicity – as well as the idea that the archetypes consistently reflect different personality and behavioral profiles. For example, the “adventurer” archetype was associated with personality traits of extroversion and violent behavioral intentions, and the “misfit” was associated with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
The researchers suggest that applying their scale in future research could help inform counter-extremism efforts. They also note that they focused on group-based extremism, but future research could examine archetypes of extremists acting alone.
The authors add, “The current research developed the Extremist Archetypes Scale, which measures different archetype dimensions reflecting different motivations to join extremist groups and get different roles within them.”