Motivations for violent extremism: Evidence from lone offenders’ manifestos

Abstract

This study explores the motivational drivers of violent extremism by examining references to motivational goals—values—in texts written by lone offenders. We present a new database of manifestos written by lone offenders (N = 103), the Extremist Manifesto Database (EMD). We apply a dictionary approach to examine references to values in this corpus. For comparison, we use texts from a matched quota sample of US American adults (N = 194). Compared to the general population, extremists referred more often to values of security, conformity, tradition, universalism, and power, and less often to values of benevolence, stimulation, and achievement. In extremist manifestos, ingroup descriptions referred more to security and universalism values, whereas power values dominated outgroup descriptions. Non-extremists referred to the same values in conjunction with “us” and “them” (benevolence and self-direction). The values that extremists referenced suggest interpersonal detachment and a clear delineation of value narratives around “us” and “them”.