Significance loss as the rhetoric of extreme ideologies: Evidence from the political and the terroristic context

• Mussolini's fascist speeches emphasized honor loss more than democratic leaders’ rhetoric, which focused on honor gain. • Democratic speeches included more honor-related words overall, underscoring collective values like unity and progress, while fascist rhetoric leveraged feelings of national humiliation to mobilize support. • Writings by lone-actor religious terrorists contained significantly more honor loss words than those of political terrorists. • Religious extremist rhetoric showed a pronounced focus on grievance and perceived dishonor, consistent with narratives of existential threat. • Innovative Methodology : A custom Python-based approach applied the Honor Dictionary to analyze linguistic markers in texts, providing transparency and reproducibility. • Practical Implications : The study highlights the potential for counter-narratives targeting extremist rhetoric by addressing honor-related grievances and offering alternative pathways for significance restoration. • Novel Contribution : This is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary as a linguistic measure to explore the psychological mechanisms of extremist ideologies across political and religious contexts. Drawing on the Significance Quest Theory ( Kruglanski et al., 2022 ), we used the Honor Dictionary (Gelfand et al., 2015) in a word frequency textual analysis (Pennebaker et al., 2007) to investigate extreme rhetoric. We thus conducted two studies. The first, investigating the political context, compared speeches of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1918–1945, N = 284) with those of democratic Presidents of the Italian Republic (1949–2006, N = 901). The second, focused on lone-actors terrorists, examined texts from the Extremist Manifesto Database (EMD, Grigoryan et al., 2023) and compared writings by terrorists driven by political ideologies (left & right-wing, ethno-nationalists, and anti-government, N = 65) with those of terrorists motivated by religious ideologies ( N = 23). Notably, we hypothesized and found that, compared to democratic rhetoric, fascist rhetoric contained (a) more words expressing feelings of lost honor and (b) fewer words reflecting gaining honor. Moreover, as expected, we found that lone-actor religious terrorists' rhetoric, compared to lone-actor political terrorists, contained more words expressing feelings of lost honor and fewer words expressing honor gain. Notably, this is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary to linguistically measure the activation of the need for significance, demonstrating a strong correlation with the endorsement of extreme ideologies. Further, our research supports the hypothesis that extreme rhetoric reflects–and aims to induce–significance loss feelings.