People who think the world lacks meaning are more prone to political violence

People who believe that few things in the world truly matter tend to report greater willingness to engage in violent extremism, according to research published in Psychology of Violence. A 10-day exercise in photographing and journaling about meaningful things was also followed by lower violent extremism intentions, though the evidence on why the exercise worked was mixed.

The research was led by Daniel W. Snook, an assistant professor of experimental psychology at Florida Gulf Coast University. The study explored how specific “primal world beliefs” relate to political and ideological violence.

Primal world beliefs refer to the broad, largely unconscious assumptions people make about the overall character of reality. These are basic lenses through which humans view their environment. For example, some people assume the world is a generally safe place, while others view it as a highly dangerous one.

“When I learned about primal world beliefs—people’s basic assumptions about the nature of reality—I immediately began to wonder which ones might be related to violent extremism, which is violence for a religious, political, or social cause,” Snook told PsyPost.

“Researchers have long studied how specific ideological beliefs relate to violent extremism (like the White supremacist belief that White people are the superior race or the jihadist belief that strict, literal sharia must be upheld), but none had studied how general worldviews, that is, what people believe is true of the world across contexts, relate to violent extremism,” the researcher explained. “So, in 2021, I started exploring the connections between these newly described worldviews and intentions to do violence for a variety of sociopolitical causes.”

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The concept builds on a 2019 study that identified about two dozen primal world beliefs by analyzing sources ranging from historical texts to tweets. It also builds on a theory outlined in a 2019 book that argues that radicalization is often initially driven by a universal desire to feel significant, and a 2023 study covered by PsyPost found that people with an obsessive passion for their ideology tended to report more support for political violence.

The authors reasoned that people who believe few things in the world matter might find it easier to justify harming people and property for one of the rare causes they do care about, since the collateral damage would seem smaller to them.

To investigate this, the scientists conducted a series of four surveys examining adults from various ideological groups in the United States. The sample included 354 Democrats, 212 Republicans, 262 environmental activists, and 579 Black Lives Matter activists. The first three surveys measured 22 different primal world beliefs; the fourth measured only the three strongest predictors from those surveys. To assess violent intentions, participants rated their agreement with statements about using any means, including physical violence, to advance their group’s objectives.

Across all four groups, the Meaningful world belief was the strongest predictor of violent intentions, though the strength of the association varied widely, from modest among the Black Lives Matter activists to strong among the Republicans. The Meaningful world belief is not about whether a person feels their own life has meaning, nor is it the idea that the universe has a grand, intentional design. Rather, it is the simple belief that most things, including other people, tend to matter. People with lower scores on this measure, meaning those who feel that things and people generally do not matter, were much more open to engaging in violence for their ideology.

“The fact that the belief that the world is a place where meaning is rare was the best predictor of violent extremism, rather than primal world beliefs we might have expected based on previous theory, such as the belief the world is a dangerous or competitive place, was a surprise,” Snook said.

To see if this pattern held among actual offenders, the researchers assessed 125 men incarcerated in Kazakhstan. The researchers worked with prison administrators to identify two distinct groups. Sixty-four of these men were convicted of jihadist terrorism, while the other 61 were convicted of non-ideological violent crimes like murder, rape, or assault. The surveys were conducted anonymously to protect the inmates.

The imprisoned terrorists scored lower on the Meaningful world belief scale than the non-terrorist violent offenders. This provides evidence that a lack of perceived meaning in the world is tied to ideological violence in real-world settings. By isolating terrorists from other types of violent criminals, the researchers found a difference between people convicted of violence for a cause and those convicted of violence for other reasons. The terrorists scored an average of 4.10 on the Meaningful world belief scale, compared to 4.73 for the non-terrorist violent offenders, on a 1-to-6 scale.

Snook noted that the relationships found in these initial surveys were robust. “The effects were consistent across the correlational studies (Studies 1-5), including some large effect sizes,” he pointed out.

The authors then designed an experiment to see if changing these beliefs could reduce violent intentions. They recruited Republicans who endorsed the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Of the 395 people assigned to the intervention, 179 started it (216 declined to participate due to the time commitment) and 71 completed all 10 days. Each day, they used their cellphones to take three photos of things they found meaningful, such as elements of the natural world or things that often go overlooked in daily life.

After taking the photos, they uploaded them to a study portal, picked the most meaningful one, and wrote a short journal entry about why it mattered. On the final day, the participants reflected on how their photos represented only a tiny fraction of the people and things in the world that hold true value. Compared to a passive control group of 359 participants who did not complete the photo exercises, the intervention group reported a higher Meaningful world belief at the end of the study.

The intervention group also reported lower intentions for violent extremism, averaging 1.74 on a 1-to-7 scale compared to 2.26 in the control group. One month later, the 57 intervention participants who responded still reported lower violent intentions than before the program, although their Meaningful world belief scores had drifted back toward where they started, and the control group was not surveyed again.

“This suggests that helping people see meaning in more places than they did before makes them less supportive of political violence, possibly by helping them see meaning in more places than only in their political cause,” Snook said. “This is also the first time any experimental intervention was able to change the levels of a primal world belief, which were previously found to be largely unchangeable.”

A final experiment tested this same 10-day photography intervention on a broader sample of 297 Americans, including 129 people in the intervention group and 168 people in an active control group that completed a course of online safety modules instead of the photo journaling.

Because the general public rarely endorses violent extremism, most participants started this final study with the lowest possible score for violent intentions. The preregistered analysis found a small overall difference between the groups in how violent intentions changed. In an exploratory analysis of the 87 people who did not start at the minimum, the photo intervention was linked to lower violent intentions a month later.

These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that on days when employees felt more burned out, they reported more sympathy for violent extremist ideas, a link partly explained by a weakened sense of meaning. That study focused on workplace burnout rather than general world beliefs.

Comparing the two experiments, Snook clarified the magnitude of the results. “In the experiment with Republicans who endorsed the January 6th Capitol insurrection (Study 6), effect sizes were medium, meaning the intervention noticeably mattered for reducing violent extremism, but in the experiment with general U.S. political partisans (Study 7), effect sizes were small, though significant,” he explained.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. “An important caveat to these results is that in the final experiment with general U.S. political partisans (Study 7), participating in the intervention group compared to the control group resulted in reduced violent extremism, but not increased Meaningful world belief, which calls into question exactly how the intervention caused the reduction in violent extremism,” Snook noted. The authors note that the photo exercise might have simply made meaningful things more noticeable, rather than changing the underlying belief itself.

Additionally, the exercise asked people what matters, and the survey asked how much things matter, meaning participants might have guessed the study’s aim and altered their responses. Most of the participants in these studies were also self-reporting their intentions to use violence, which is a behavioral intention rather than an actual action.

Only the prison study looked at past violent acts. The two groups compared in the prison study might also have differed in unmeasured ways, such as education levels or time served, which could influence their worldviews. The control group in the experiment with January 6 supporters was also passive, meaning they did not complete an alternative 10-day task, and they were surveyed only once, after the program, so there is no baseline to compare.

Future studies will need to test the photography intervention against active control exercises among extremist populations to see how consistently these results hold. “This project is exciting because it opens the door to test other positive psychology interventions for reducing violent extremism,” Snook concluded.

The study, “Is a Meaningless World Easier to Destroy? Low Meaningful World Belief Predicts Violent Extremism Intentions,” was authored by Daniel W. Snook, Nicholas Kerry, Baglan Aidarov, Kairat Abuov, Jeremy D. W. Clifton, and Jocelyn J. Bélanger.