Linguistic Fingerprints and Ideological Fragmentation

The past decade of national security interventions designed to counter or offer alternatives to extremist narratives have had questionable efficacy. Too frequently, interventions have been overly concerned with ‘message dominance’, focusing on ‘what’ people think, at the expense of ‘how’ people think. Intervention strategies have fundamentally ignored the role of cognitive processing in extremist decision making. This is in spite of an increasing body of evidence which demonstrates that low cognitive complexity (black and white thinking) is a recurrent contributing factor to extremist decision making. In this article, Joshua Stewart introduces Integrative Complexity (IC), a psychological measure of cognitive complexity. Through a hypothetical futures scenario, he explores the wider potential of IC in meeting national security objectives and poses that even the most obdurate, black and white thinking can be leveraged towards positive behaviours.◼