An international research team working under the direction of Dr Katarzyna Jasko from the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University (UJ) in Krakow has investigated how ideological beliefs are linked to violence.
The results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that right-wing ideologies are more often associated with the use of violence than left-wing ideologies.
“Most of the studies to date have largely been surveys of declared opinions”, says Dr Katarzyna Jasko. “Respondents were asked about their political views and were asked to indicate to what extent they supported violent actions, e.g. against foreign groups. Meanwhile, our team decided to use data on real attacks and people who actually engaged in radical violent actions”, she explains.
The team consulted two databases developed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. The first includes data from 1948 to 2018 on more than 1,500 US extremist radicals. The second contains information on more than 70,000 terrorist attacks from around the world since the 1970s.
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