Militant extremist mindset predicts higher social distance towards adversarial ethnic groups

Abstract

Radicalization and violent extremism have been operationalized through three-dimensional Militant-Extremist Mindset (MEM), including Pro-violence (PV) – acceptance, justification, and advocacy of the use of violence, Vile World (VW) – the belief there is something wrong with the world we live in, and that the present-day world is vile and miserable, and Divine Power (DP) – beliefs in heaven and God, the role of martyrdom, and afterlife. This construct proved to be predictive for a variety of socially relevant outcomes. The present study explores the predictive power of MEM for social distance toward four ethnic groups – Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians, and Roma - the groups with which Serbs share difficult history or are stigmatized in Serbian society. A total of 173 Belgrade high schoolers between 15 and 18 years of age (M=16.54, SD=0.63; 70.5% females) completed a 24-item version of the MEM scale along with the adapted four-item measure of social distance for each of the groups. We observed the most pronounced social distance toward Albanians and Roma (p<.001), followed by Croats (p<.001), while the lowest social distance was observed for Bosniaks (p<.001) [F(3,516)=88.65, p<.001, ηp2=.34]. Social distance measures toward four ethnic groups showed to be moderately to highly correlated (r=.518–.718, p<.001). Regression analyses showed that three factors of MEM accounted for 15.3% of the variance of social distance toward Bosniaks [F(3,169)=10.19, p<.001; significant predictors PV (β=.314, p<.001), DP (β=.200, p=.006)], 20.8% of the variance of social distance toward Albanians [F(3,169)=14.77, p<.001; significant predictors PV (β=.268, p<.001), DP (β=.339, p<.001)], 21.4% for Croats [F(3,169)=15.38, p<.001; significant predictors PV (β=.329, p<.001), DP (β=.325, p<.001)], and 15.7% of the variance of social distance toward Roma [F(3,169)=10.48, p<.001; significant predictors PV (β=.250, p=.001), DP (β=.279, p<.001)]. In sum, two out of three factors of militant extremist mindset – apologetic attitude towards violent acts and trust in divine power – proved to be significantly related to more distance towards adversarial ethnic groups, whilst, somewhat unexpectedly, belief in vile world was unrelated to it. If MEM is seen as a more dispositional measure, these findings go to show its’ usefulness in predicting very specific intergroup outcomes.