Milan Obaidi

University of Copenhagen

Using a random sample of 383 Muslims and Christians in Lebanon and Syria, we explored the degree of public support for two distinct kinds of asymmetric violence—“fundamentalist violence” and “resistance violence”—against the United States as a function of three explanatory narratives: a clash of cultures narrative, social identity/self-categorizati...

The psychology of suicide terrorism involves more than simply the psychology of suicide. Individual differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) interact with the socio-structural, political context to produce support for group-based dominance among members of both dominant and subordinate groups. This may help explain why, in one specific con...

Kulturen spiller en vaesentlig rolle for, hvordan man for-tolker og forstår en psykisk lidelse. Det, der i én kultur anses som symptomatisk for sygdom, kan i andre kulturer betrag-tes som normalt. Behandleren bør derfor vaere åben over for ikke bare psykiske lidelsers forskelle og mangfoldigheder, men også for varierende forståelsesmodeller af psyk...

Psychological research has begun considering the dynamics involved in majority-group acculturation, which is the extent to which cultural majority groups adopt the culture of immigrants and minority groups. However, previous research has predominantly concentrated on reactions to 'immigrants' or 'minority groups' as a homogenous entity, overlooking...

Research samples have historically overrepresented men, resulting in worse outcomes for women. Even when women are represented, inequity might persist due to underlying differences in how people reason about gender. Theories of androcentrism argue that, in general, people emphasize gender more about women than men. Based on this theory and building...

Previous research on group‐based hope has predominantly focused on positive intergroup outcomes, such as peace and harmony. In this paper, we demonstrate that hope experienced towards group‐centric political outcomes, such as a victory in a conflict and defeating the enemy, can be detrimental to peace. In Study 1, conducted among Israeli Jews, hope...

Although the importance of temporal perspectives for understanding collective movements has been theoretically emphasised, they are rarely considered in research. Focusing on the mass protests against COVID‐19 policies in Germany, we investigated how protesters make use of temporal references in their protest narratives. Results from 11 multi‐site...

While it is often assumed that Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) ancestry results illuminate one’s true racial or ethnic lineage, the consequence of this inference remains largely unknown. This leaves two conflictual hypotheses largely untested: Do DNA ancestry tests increase racial tolerance or, alternatively, racial intolerance? Two multiwave experimen...

Adolescent suicide attempts are on the rise, presenting a significant public health concern. Recent research aimed at improving risk assessment for adolescent suicide attempts has turned to machine learning. But no studies to date have examined the performance of stacked ensemble algorithms, which are more suitable for low-prevalence conditions. Th...

People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man more than as a woman, but this bias has primarily been observed in language-based tasks. Here, we investigated whether this bias is also present in the mental imagery of faces. A preregistered cross-cultural reverse-correlation study including participants from six WEIRD and non-WEIRD countri...

Research in the emerging field of majority-group acculturation has investigated the predictors that explain why some majority-group members adopt whereas others reject the cultures of minority-group members. The present research investigated an issue that has received comparably little attention. Specifically, with a sample of 2205 majority-group m...

Objective Although violent extremism is often attributed to clinical (dysfunctional) dispositions, it is also possible that violent Jihadists might be clinically “normal” but bear certain personality signatures. This alternative view has yet to be tested. Method In six studies, employing hard-to-reach Muslim samples, including one study of forme...

Psychological research has only recently begun to consider the dynamics involved in the acculturation of majority groups. Recognizing heterogeneity among immigrant groups, the present work investigates the influence of perceived characteristics of these groups on majority-group members’ adoption of immigrant cultures. In three pre-registered studie...

We examined the relationship between adolescents' extremist attitudes with a multitude of mental health, well-being, psycho-social, environmental, and lifestyle variables, using state-of-the-art machine learning procedure and nationally representative survey dataset of Norwegian adolescents (N = 11,397). Three key research questions were addressed:...

Understanding the psychological processes that drive violent extremism is a pressing global issue. Across six studies, we demonstrate that perceived cultural threats lead to violent extremism because they increase people's need for cognitive closure (NFC). In general population samples (from Denmark, Afghanistan, Pakistan, France, and an internatio...

Radicalization-as a complex process of adopting extremist attitudes-includes maladaptive responses to the transformative power of globalization. Globalization contains sociocultural disruptive and acculturative processes, initiating exclusionary and integrative reactions. These reactions have dissimilarly been associated with aspects of extremism....

Do minority-group members welcome or reject that majority-group members adopt other cul-tures? Acculturation is commonly defined as a process of mutual accommodation. Yet, the acculturation of majority-group members has only recently received research attention. To date, we do not know the extent to which minority-group members expect majority-grou...

Collective action is often equated with progressive politics, but are there aspects of group mobilisations that generalise across contexts? We examine general social and personality psychological factors behind endorsement of group-based violence across different types of violent group mobilisation. Specifically, we focus on the endorsement of grou...

Research has identified sociocultural challenges (life attachment) to be a primary motivator for radicalization. While individual differences may provide information about who might be at risk for radicalization, little is known about how different identity processing styles are linked with radicalization. In two studies (N = 975), we examined how...

“Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be, genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” (Said, 1978). Edward W. Said (1978) asks this question in his book ‘Orientalism’ while negotiating the binary constructed between the West and th...

Previous work has often disregarded the psychological heterogeneity of violent extremists. This research aimed to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the psychological diversity of violent extremists. Based on qualitative work, we developed and validated the Extremist Archetypes Scale, identifying five distinct archetype dimensions: “adve...

Globalization has transformed local contexts through increasing intercultural and intergroup contact across geographical distance. Such transformations have disrupted the traditional sociocultural order and made people’s sense of self and belonging more uncertain and negotiable. In contemporary societies, people are reacting to the growing sociocul...

Even when people hold little prejudice themselves, expectations about how members of other groups perceive them may negatively influence interracial relations. In four pre-registered experiments, each using a full intergroup design with Black and White participants, we show that people infer negative meta-attitudes from out-group members whose appe...

Inequities still exist in today's society, and this book advances awareness, an equitable mindset, and transformative change toward the goal of eliminating inequities and promoting inclusiveness and social justice. Racialized inequity is injustice or unfairness and exists when prejudice or discrimination based on any aspect of difference precludes...

The question of why people become terrorists has preoccupied scholars and policy makers for decades. Yet, very little is known about how lay people perceive individuals at risk of becoming terrorists. In two studies conducted in the U.K., we aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 showed that Muslims and non- Muslims perceived a potential minority-group te...

Increased immigration and demographic changes have not only resulted in political pushback, but also in violent attacks against immigrants. Several recent terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists invoke rhetoric around a deliberate attempt to make Whites extinct and replace them with non-Western immigrants. Yet, while it is widely acknowle...

Acculturation is commonly conceptualized as a two-way process in which all groups involved in intercultural contact change. Yet, very little is known about the acculturation orientations of majority-group members and the factors that differentiate those who adopt aspects of minority groups’ culture from those who reject them. In the present researc...

Uncertainty, perceived threats, and a generally insecure life attachment have been associated with endorsement of extremism. Furthermore, salient identification with a group can influence radicalized ways of addressing insecure life attachment through an established and sometimes extreme worldview and ideology. In the present study, we replicated t...

A sense of shared Muslim suffering seems to play a key role in uniting Muslims around the world. Therefore, in the current paper we hypothesized that the social psychological underpinnings of Islamist extremism would be similar for Muslims living in the West and Muslims living in countries with prolonged and ongoing exposure to Western-led military...

Recently, the world has experienced a wave of violent protest, and in particular Islamist and right-wing extremism have become increasing challenges for many societies. We argue that especially the experience of relative deprivation, that is the perception that oneself or one’s group is undeservingly worse off than others, can explain various, cont...

Although jihadist threats are regarded as foreign, most Islamist terror attacks in Europe and the United States have been orchestrated by Muslims born and raised in Western societies. In the present research, we explored a link between perceived deprivation of Western Muslims and endorsement of extremism. We suggest that Western-born Muslims are pa...

Preliminary Results

While jihadist threats are regarded as foreign, most Islamist terror attacks in Europe and the United States have been orchestrated by Muslims born and raised in Western societies. This paper explores a link between perceived deprivation of Western Muslims and endorsement of extremism. We suggest that Western-born Muslims are particularly vulnerabl...

Forskere, der beskæftiger sig med radikalisering og terrorisme, er uenige om, hvad der udgør de vigtigste forklaringsmodeller. Uenighederne følger ofte et mønster baseret på kontroversen om, hvorvidt det er den individuelle psykologi eller situationsbestemte faktorer, der er bestemmende for vores adfærd (“person vs. situation-debatten”). Et gennemg...

In this report, we introduce a tool for risk assessment in written communication – the profile risk assessment tool (PRAT). PRAT extracts a profile consisting of 30 personality and risk-behavior-related variables from any given text. PRAT includes a theoretically generated threat profile to be used as a comparison norm. To assess threat potential,...

Islamist extremism is often explained by the suffering endured by Muslims in Islamic countries as a result of Western‐led wars. However, many terrorist attacks have been carried out by European Muslims with no personal experiences of war. Across two studies among Danish Muslims, we tested if what we call “victimization‐by‐proxy processes” motivate...

Hateful comments, swearwords and sometimes even death threats are becoming a reality for many people today in online environments. This is especially true for journalists, politicians, artists, and other public figures. This paper describes how hate directed towards individuals can be measured in online environments using a simple dictionary-based...

This research demonstrates a common psychology of outgroup hostility driven by perceived intergroup threat among three groups and seven cultural contexts: non-Muslim Westerners, Muslims in Western societies, and Muslims in the Middle East. In Study 1, symbolic, but not realistic and terroristic threats, predicted non-Muslim Norwegians’ intentions t...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one’s...

Moderated mediation model for Study 2, in which fusion with the out-group is replaced with knowledge about the conflict. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. (TIF)

Moderated mediation model for Study 2, in which knowledge about the conflict is controlled for. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p ≤ .001. (TIF)

Reversed mediation model for Study 1. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. (TIF)

Far-right political parties in Europe regularly portray Muslims and Islam as backward and a symbolic threat to secular and/or Christian European culture. Similarly, Islamist groups regularly portray Westerners and Western culture as decadent and a symbolic threat to Islam. Here, we present experimental evidence that meta-cultural threat-information...

The psychology of suicide terrorism involves more than simply the psychology of suicide. Individual differences in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) interact with socio-structural, political context to produce support for group-based dominance among members of both dominant and subordinate groups. This may help explain why, in one specific context...