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A recent study suggests that longing for a political party’s past is tied to support for political violence in opposite ways, depending on how people relate to their party. Among partisans whose commitment is obsessive, stronger collective nostalgia went along with a stronger link to support for violence, while among those whose commitment is harmonious, it went along with less support. The findings, published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology, suggest that nostalgia for “the good old days” does not carry the same meaning for everyone who feels it.
The way people commit to a political cause can take two distinct forms. Harmonious passion describes a freely chosen involvement that coexists easily with a person’s other life commitments, such as family or hobbies. Obsessive passion describes a more compulsive attachment where the political cause becomes deeply tied to a person’s sense of self-worth. In this state, people often feel inner pressure to defend their beliefs and struggle to step away from politics when they need to.
This distinction helps researchers understand the psychological roots of radicalization. For instance, a 2019 study by Bélanger and colleagues found that obsessive passion for a cause was linked to moral disengagement, a way of justifying harmful actions as acceptable, and to support for political violence, whereas harmonious passion was linked to peaceful activism.
Separately, psychologists have examined collective nostalgia, which is a sentimental longing for the past of a group that a person belongs to. For example, a 2015 study found that a collective longing for a nation’s past can unite people around their own group while also being linked to hostility toward outside groups. In addition, a 2020 study found that the effect of collective nostalgia on attitudes toward outsiders depends on what kind of past people long for, such as whether they yearn for an open society or a more uniform one. Relatedly, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 showed that collective nostalgia is associated with populist attitudes.
These two lines of inquiry left an open question about why only a small fraction of people who feel longing for a past era come to view violence as acceptable. The research, led by Jocelyn J. Bélanger, an associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and co-author of The Three Pillars of Radicalization, sought to connect these ideas. The authors proposed that collective nostalgia might widen the gap between the two forms of passion, going along with more support for violence among the obsessively passionate and less among the harmoniously passionate.
“Politicians on every side sell voters a golden age to reclaim, yet research on collective nostalgia had left a puzzle: longing for the group’s past sometimes breeds hostility and sometimes breeds belonging,” Bélanger told PsyPost. “We suspected the answer lay not in the nostalgia itself but in the kind of passion a person brings to their cause.”
To test this idea, the researchers surveyed 417 adult political partisans in the United States, recruited online in March 2022. The sample was split into two groups, consisting of 263 Democrats and 154 Republicans. Participants answered questions about their political party, rating how much their involvement felt harmonious and how much it felt obsessive.
The survey also measured participants’ feelings of collective nostalgia, asking how often they longed for the “good old days” of their party or past presidents from their side of the aisle. In addition, the authors assessed willingness to support or engage in hostile actions against the rival party, from physically attacking opponents to cutting off friendships with rival supporters. The researchers accounted for participants’ overall ideological commitment, so that the results would reflect how people internalized their beliefs rather than simply how much they cared about their party.
The initial results were consistent across both the Democratic and Republican groups. Obsessive passion was linked to greater support for political violence against the opposing party, while harmonious passion was not. Support for political violence was low overall, averaging about 1.7 to 1.8 on a 7-point scale.
When the researchers looked at collective nostalgia, they observed that the two forms of passion diverged. For participants with high levels of obsessive passion, increased feelings of nostalgia went along with even stronger support for political violence. The authors describe this as an amplification pattern, while stressing that the term describes the shape of a statistical relationship, not cause and effect.
But among participants high in harmonious passion, the pattern ran the other way. When nostalgia was low, harmonious passion was unrelated to support for violence, but when nostalgia was high, people with more harmonious passion reported less support for violence.
“We predicted it, but I was still struck by how cleanly nostalgia cut both ways: the same longing tracked greater openness to violence among obsessive partisans and less among harmonious ones,” Bélanger noted. “That crossover appeared among Democrats and Republicans alike, which tells me we are looking at the psychology of devotion rather than the psychology of one party.”
The researchers interpret this divergence through nostalgia’s bittersweet nature, though they did not measure these feelings directly. For the obsessively passionate, a longed-for past might feel like something stolen that must be forcefully reclaimed. For the harmoniously passionate, reflecting on a shared past might evoke connection and belonging, which could encourage restraint.
“How you care about a cause matters more than how much you care,” Bélanger explained. “Among people whose politics is a freely chosen part of life they can set aside at the dinner table, longing for the group’s glory days went with less support for political violence; among people whose politics has swallowed their identity, the same longing went with more.”
“In statistical terms the effects are modest (the interplay between nostalgia and passion explains an extra 1 to 2 percent of the variation in support for violence), yet the link between obsessive passion and support for violence was roughly twice as strong among highly nostalgic partisans as among less nostalgic ones,” Bélanger said. “Support for violence was low on average, so picture nostalgia as a force that pulls the most zealous toward the dangerous end of the scale, not as a nation primed for conflict.”
The findings align with earlier research covered by PsyPost in 2024 by members of the same research team. That study also examined American political partisans and found that obsessive passion was linked to support for political violence, whereas harmonious passion was not.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “The misreading I’d most like to head off is ‘nostalgia breeds violence,’ because its main role was to magnify whichever kind of passion a person already had, for better or worse,” Bélanger pointed out. “We can show that these things travel together but not that nostalgia causes them, and agreeing with violence on a questionnaire is a long way from committing it.”
It is also possible that an underlying factor drives both, or that a person’s willingness to support violence colors how they remember the past. Collective nostalgia also tends to accompany feelings of threat, anxiety about the group’s future, and grievance, none of which were measured, so these related feelings could account for the pattern. Additionally, the researchers did not directly measure whether participants felt their party had fallen into decline, a perception that often travels alongside nostalgia and might help explain the pattern among the obsessively passionate.
The study also measured how people felt about political violence rather than observing actual behavior. The leap from endorsing aggressive tactics on a survey to carrying out physical harm in the real world is a large one, and future studies would need to track actions over time to see if these patterns hold.
“Next, we want to induce nostalgia in the lab to see whether it causes these shifts, and to test our hunch about why: obsessive partisans may dwell on the bitter half of nostalgia, what was taken from the group, while harmonious partisans savor the sweet half, what the group shared,” Bélanger said. “The long-term goal is practical: if we can help people hold their convictions more harmoniously, we may blunt the political appeals that turn longing into rage.”
“Nostalgia is among the oldest tools of political persuasion, and our findings suggest its effect depends less on the message than on who hears it,” the researcher added. “The same appeal to a golden age that steadies a calm partisan may embolden a zealous one.”
The study, “Collective Nostalgia Widens the Gap Between Obsessive and Harmonious Passion in Support for Political Violence,” was authored by Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Daniel Snook, Danaiym Talantbekova, and Jais Adam-Troian.