Violent behavior and search for meaning leading to violence support via moral disengagement, social alienation, and deviant social network

The study investigates the effect of violent activism, peaceful activism, and sensation seeking on seeking meaning and justification of violence based on the mediating structures of moral disengagement, social alienation, and deviant social associations. Instead, a cognitively justified and alienated state of violent activism is prone to guidance by purpose-seeking in the context of morally driven lives and prosocial intents. Past studies indicate that high sensation seekers might be attracted to deviant social networks that encourage violent ideologies and aggression and may engage in risky behavior to create an identity or, in other cases, an identity-defining meaning. The study had a combined purposive sample of two undergraduate samples (N = 864), yielding responses on standardized instruments assessing types of activism, sensation seeking, moral disengagement, social alienation, deviant social networking, and support for violence. Findings showed that the search for meaning was adversely predicted by violent activism, but moral disengagement, social alienation, and violence were positively predicted. Also, sensation seeking showed a positive forecast of support for violence, whose impact was mediated by both deviant social networking as well as an increased search for meaning. Mediation analyses affirmed that moral disengagement, social alienation, and deviant social networks played a large role in elucidating the mechanisms between forms of activism, sensation seeking, and the endorsement of violence. These results reemphasize the importance of psychological characteristics, moral decision-making, and socially situated factors on the exposure of violence tendencies and the necessity of interventions focused on prosocial behavior activities, alienation, and identity-based motives as violence prevention efforts.