The assumption underlying our work is that human judgment and behavior are goal-driven and dynamic. What people do depends on the salience and desirability of competing goals, the number of available means, and the presence of alternative goals.
Traditional approaches to radicalization have been mainly conceptual rather than empirical, and focused predominantly on religious extremism. By contrast, our research investigates radicalization across the ideological spectrum — religious, right- and left-leaning movements — to understand how people think, feel, and behave when they follow the drumbeat of extremism.
We investigate these issues through the Theory of Ideological Obsession (Bélanger, 2021, Philosophical Transactions B). This framework posits that radicalization is an addiction to an ideology: an obsession with a belief system, stoked by the loss of personal significance, that triggers sociocognitive mechanisms leaving individuals prone to ideological violence. A meta-analysis comparing 101 risk factors found ideological obsession to be among the strongest predictors of violent extremism.
Ideologically obsessed individuals are ego-defensive and easily threatened by information that challenges their beliefs. Their obsession chronically conflicts with other life domains, producing goal-shielding, self-defeating counterfinal behavior, and the dehumanization of outgroups — processes accelerated when people join networks of like-minded individuals that supply camaraderie and meaning. Reversing radicalization means restoring a person's sense of significance through better self-regulation and a richer, more balanced life.
Environmental sustainability means creating and maintaining the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony for present and future generations. A central question for our lab is which behavioral interventions actually promote pro-environmental behavior. Our meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials — more than 3,000,000 observations — found that social norms and choice architecture (nudges) are among the most promising levers for change, work published across three papers in Nature Communications.
Building on this, we propose that attachment is crucial for understanding sustainability, because anthropogenic climate change is inherently a communal phenomenon requiring collective behavioral change. Across large studies — national surveys, experiments, and preregistered field interventions measuring outcomes such as donations and food waste in kilograms — we find that attachment security raises how much people care about and accept climate change via increased empathy for humanity, helping bypass resistance among politically conservative individuals. Our 2025 field work extends this to real energy use during extreme heat in the UAE.
More than $7.1M in competitive funding across 25 grants.