Poor memory could be a sign of being an extremist

According to a study, bad memory and impulsive personality are strong indicators of radical views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism

Extremists have shorter memories and tendencies towards impulsiveness and are also sensation seekers, according to a study by Cambridge researchers in to the psychological “signature” of the extremist mind.

The study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and unconscious cognition – the ways our brains take in basic information – is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.

This combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person’s ideological “group,” said the study.

“By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way,” said Leor Zmigrod, lead author from Cambridge's Department of Psychology.

While still in early stages, this research could help to better identify and support people most vulnerable to radicalisation across the political and religious spectrum, according to the researchers. Approaches to radicalisation policy mainly rely on basic demographic information such as age, race and gender.

By adding cognitive and personality assessments, the psychologists created a statistical model that is between four and fifteen times more powerful at predicting ideological worldviews than demographics alone.

The latest research builds on work from Stanford University in which hundreds of study participants performed 37 different cognitive tasks and took 22 different personality surveys in 2016 and 2017. Across all ideologies investigated by the researchers, people who endorsed “extreme pro-group action”, including ideologically-motivated violence against others, had a surprisingly consistent psychological profile. The extremist mind is cognitively cautious, slower at perceptual processing and has a weaker working memory.