The Impact of Personal Safety on the Individual Radicalization Tendency

Abstract

Radicalisation works as a global challenge; the interdiscusnal psychological mechanism is normally simplified. This research integrates research about the radicalization process, authoritarian, emotional radicalisation, and political violence, then establishes the three-dimensional framework called cognitive radicalisation, behaviour justification and affective radicalisation. This research is based on the WVS 1981-2022 dataset and the Ologit model to analyse the heterogeneous impact of physical safety, economic security, and trust in families on the three-dimensional radicalisation indexes.

The results show that the three types of sense of safety all have protective effects, but their effect pathways are different. The physical safety main releases the hostile emotion (parameter is -0.100). Economic security mainly restricts the cognitive radicalising (parameter is -0.126); trust in family mainly decreases the behaviour of justification (parameter is –0.105). The control variables also have heterogeneous differences among different dimensions. The males are relatively radical in the behavioural level but limited in the level of cognition and emotion, the higher income individuals are milder in the level of cognition and emotion, but the behavioral elastic is higher. Health has a protective impact on all three dimensions, especially on the emotional effect.

This research emphasises that the sense of security has a unique function in the different dimensions of radicalisation, indicating that public policy should not be generalized in different situations and ought to accurately intervene in the community’s public safety, economic guarantee and family bonds. In addition, radicalisation may also be triggered by social pathology to some extent; social integration and social equality mechanisms are also important.