Extremists often aim to paint a biased picture of the world. Radical narratives, for instance, in forms of internet memes or posts, could thus potentially trigger cognitive biases in their users. These cognitive biases, in turn, might shape the users’ formation of extremist attitudes. To test this association, an online experiment (N=392) was conducted with three types of right-wing radical narratives (elite-critique, ingroup-outgroup, violence) in contrast to two control conditions (nonpolitical and neutral political control condition). We then measured the impact of these narratives on the activation of three cognitive biases of relevance in the formation of extremist attitudes: the ingroup-outgroup bias, the negativity bias, and the just-world hypothesis. The results indicate that violence narratives seem to be particularly harmful as they heighten participants’ negativity bias and increase just-world views. Just-world views in turn show a positive relationship to extremist attitudes, which highlights the need of regulating violence invocations on social media.

中文翻译：

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一个充满偏见的在线世界。认知偏见对极端主义态度的中介作用

极端分子通常旨在描绘一幅有偏见的世界图景。例如，以网络模因或帖子形式出现的激进叙事可能会因此潜在地引发用户的认知偏见。这些认知偏见反过来可能会影响用户形成极端主义态度。为了测试这种关联，我们进行了一项在线实验 (N=392)，其中包含三种类型的右翼激进叙事（精英-批评、内群体-外群体、暴力）与两种控制条件（非政治和中立的政治控制条件）形成对比。然后，我们测量了这些叙述对极端主义态度形成中三种相关认知偏见激活的影响：内群体-外群体偏见、消极偏见和公正世界假设。结果表明，暴力叙事似乎特别有害，因为它们会加剧参与者的消极偏见并增加正义世界观。正义世界的观点反过来表明与极端主义态度存在正相关关系，这突出表明需要规范社交媒体上的暴力调用。