Significance loss and political vs. religious terrorism: a textual analysis

Drawing on Significance Quest Theory, we applied the LIWC-based textual analysis to the Honor Dictionary to investigate lone-actors terrorists’ rhetoric. Specifically, we examined texts from the Extremist Manifesto Database (EMD) 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). Given that religious extremists are particularly sensitive to honor threats, we expected that religious terrorists’ rhetoric would have been more tinged in honor loss than political terrorists’ one. Indeed, we found that lone-actor religious terrorists' rhetoric, compared to lone-actors’ political one, contained more honor-loss words. Contrary to our predictions instead, we did not find any difference with respect to honor-gain words. 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 extreme ideologies endorsement. Further, our research supports the hypothesis that extreme ideologists’ rhetoric reflects significance loss feelings.