This could help explain why perceived group marginalization is such a powerful force in radical politics.
Access the article for free till Sept 9th following this link: doi.org/10.1016/j.je...
#Psychology #Extremism #SocialExclusion #GroupDynamics

🧠 Our key takeaway: Group-based rejection isn’t just psychologically harmful — it may be politically dangerous.
It’s not just about individual pain. It’s about what happens when people feel their group is pushed out, demeaned, or excluded.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

When considering higher levels of hostility in participants who were excluded, we found increases in radicalism, perceived outgroup threat, and willingness to engage in costly sacrifices.

Not just hurt feelings—hostility drives radicalization.

Across all conditions, exclusion made people feel worse — more distressed, more hostile — regardless of how strongly they identified with the group.

We created a new paradigm called RateME, designed to isolate the effects of group rejection from personal rejection.
We also compared it with Cyberball, the classic task that simulates being socially ignored.

⚠️ These findings highlight how AI-powered polarizing messages can distort public discourse and shape extremist attitudes, making regulation of AI-driven influence campaigns more urgent.

📄 Preprint available on OSF: osf.io/preprints/os...

🧠 Our findings suggest that AI-generated arguments can fuel extremism by making political issues seem sacred and non-negotiable - even a brief exposure to these messages increased justification of violence.

We found that short AI-generated messages using universal moral framings increased perceptions of political issues as absolute moral obligations and even justification of violence in defense of values like affordable healthcare, abortion & gun rights.

🤖 In Study 2 we experimentally manipulated people's perceptions of political issues using AI-generated messages.

We found that sacred values—oprationalized as absolute moral obligations—are strongly related to universal moral concerns, which explain 12%-27% of the effect of moral absolutism on willingness to fight and die and justification of violence.

👥 In Study 1 we examined the relationship between universal moral concerns (welfare, rights, fairness) and moral absolutism.

We tested 40 LLM-generated arguments on contentious political issues such as affordable healthcare, access to abortion, and the deportation of illegal immigrants. We prompted the LLM to frame each argument in terms of welfare, rights, fairness, or pragmatism.

Read more in our paper: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Download RateME from our Lab's Gitbub , cutomize it, and use it in your fMRI studies (github.com/SBL-Barcelon...) or implement it directly on Qualtrics in your behavioral studies (github.com/SBL-Barcelon...)!

This shared neural response may explain why group rejection can feel so personal, leading to psychological distress, hostility, and intergroup animosity.

Your brain seems to process the rejection of your group as if it’s happening to you—even if you don't strongly identify with the group. Being a member of the group is enough to experience these feelings.

Group rejection, though, is characterized by increased brain activity in the same areas as personal rejection.

What we found 🧠💬:
• Personal rejection involves increased brain activity in areas associated with self-identity and autobiographical memory (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex).
• Ostracism involves increased brain activity in areas linked to pain and salience (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex).

Using RateMe and Cyberball, we compared brain activity during:
• Group rejection (exclusion based on negative attention towards one's group)
• Personal rejection (exclusion based on negative attention towards oneself)
• Ostracism (exclusion based on social isolation/lack of connection)