The choices regarding political candidates and political issues are inherently limited and incomplete, leading many people to have mixed feelings, or even ambivalence, about which candidates or positions they prefer.
In general, ambivalence reduces political participation. For example, people who feel ambivalent about a political candidate are less likely to vote.
We are social psychologists who study how people's beliefs affect their behavior.
In a new article published in the journal Science Advances, we find the opposite of the ambivalence of indifference: people who feel more ambivalent about a political issue are more likely to support violence or other extreme behavior related to that issue.
Ambivalent people tend to support extreme behaviors
In one series of studies we conducted, we measured thousands of people's opinions over several questionnaires on one of several topics, including abortion, gun control, and COVID-19 policy. We also measured their ambivalence toward that opinion. We then asked whether they were likely to take various actions to support their opinion. Some of the actions were common, like voting for a candidate participants agree with, making a donation, or volunteering. Other actions were more extreme, like committing an act of violence against a partisan opponent.
Other studies have looked at national data collected by researchers from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group and the Cooperative Election Study that include similar questions.
When we analyzed the association between people's ambivalence and their willingness to engage in or support each behavior, we found that the results in all studies depended on the extremity of the behavior. As expected, people with high ambivalence were less willing to support or engage in moderate behaviors, such as voting. However, contrary to our initial expectations, people with high ambivalence were also more willing to support or engage in extreme behaviors, especially if they felt strongly about the issue.
People who struggle with political views often feel uncomfortable with their own conflicting feelings. Povozniuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Dealing with discomfort
Subsequent research sought to understand why people with more ambivalent feelings are more likely to support extreme political action, from confronting political opponents and campaigning for their removal from office to more extreme acts including violence.
We hypothesized that one factor may be the psychological discomfort experienced by people with conflicting emotions. When people feel uncomfortable with their beliefs, they often look for ways to compensate by showing strength. For example, when their beliefs are challenged, people may respond by upholding those beliefs even more strongly.
Similarly, we reasoned that people with conflicting emotions might feel anxious and endorse extreme behavior because they want to demonstrate clarity and certainty about their beliefs.
Our results were consistent with the idea that people might compensate for discomfort by endorsing extreme actions: when we asked participants how uncomfortable they felt about their opinions on the issue, people who were more ambivalent reported feeling more uncomfortable about their opinions, which in turn was associated with them endorsing more extreme actions.
Extreme behavior with real risks
However, these are hypothetical behaviors: are people with ambivalent feelings actually more likely to take extreme actions?
We tested this by asking people about specific actions that would have real results. We gave participants the opportunity to allocate funds to environmental groups (such as JustStopOil and EarthFirst!) known for their extreme ideology and tactics, such as destroying energy infrastructure or disrupting traffic. Alternatively, participants could choose the chance to win some or all of the funds for themselves.
We found that people with ambivalent feelings towards environmental protection, especially those who care strongly about environmental issues, donated more money to JustStopOil and EarthFirst! than those who were not ambivalent. This was specific to radical charities. When given the same opportunity to donate to mainstream organizations (Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy), people with ambivalent feelings did not donate more money than those with not ambivalent feelings.
We did not directly examine why people strongly support environmentalism despite having ambivalence about environmental issues. But perhaps people who worry about climate change are also concerned about the economic impacts of addressing it. Or maybe they struggle to make environmentally friendly choices and feel they don't meet their own standards. Or maybe they have a more general type of political ambivalence, such as a belief that even good policies have trade-offs.
Overall picture
The link between ambivalence and support for extreme behavior in our study was correlational: that is, the two items are related, but the cause of the link is not specified. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty that ambivalence causes the support. Perhaps the relationship is the other way around, and support for extreme behavior makes people more ambivalent. Or perhaps there are other factors that we overlooked that influence both.
But when we looked for evidence for these alternative explanations, we didn't find much. For example, asking about ambivalence before or after asking about support for extreme behavior had no effect on the results. And while extreme behavior is associated with other factors, such as aggression tendencies, ambivalence remained significant even when comparing people who were equal on other factors. Still, we don't know everything about the relationship between ambivalence and extreme behavior.
The psychology of extremist behavior is complex. To explain its causes, many studies have highlighted that some people, such as those who have difficulty regulating their emotions, are particularly susceptible to extremism. Our research suggests another possibility: that some beliefs themselves have features, in particular ambivalence, that encourage support for extremist behavior.
