deliberate engagement
Definition
Deliberate engagement refers to the active, intentional seeking out of radical people, settings, and content, as distinct from incidental or accidental encounters with such material. Where passive exposure shows no consistent relationship with support for political violence, deliberate engagement functions as the pathway through which obsessive passion translates into violence endorsement across ideologically diverse populations. Across four U.S. samples spanning Democrats, Republicans, environmental supporters, and Muslims, deliberate engagement mediated the relationship between obsessive passion and violence support in every group, while incidental exposure did not reach statistical significance in most. A three-wave longitudinal study of right-wing Americans further showed that obsessive passion and deliberate engagement reciprocally predicted one another within persons across six-week intervals, forming a self-reinforcing cycle rather than a linear motivational sequence. This coupling, together with its strong trait-level association with violence support, positions deliberate engagement as one facet of a broader radicalization syndrome rather than a discrete behavioral stage.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- political violence (1 shared article)
- radicalization (1 shared article)
- obsessive passion (1 shared article)
- within-person dynamics (1 shared article)
Applications
Deliberate Engagement and Obsessive Passion
Obsessive passion, a form of ideological commitment in which self-worth becomes contingent on a cause, is theorized to drive deliberate engagement by motivating immersion in radical networks and suppressing competing goals. Longitudinal data from a sample of right-wing Americans confirmed a bidirectional relationship: obsessive passion predicted subsequent deliberate engagement and deliberate engagement predicted subsequent obsessive passion, each across six-week intervals. This reciprocal dynamic distinguishes the obsessive form of passion from harmonious passion, which showed no significant association with deliberate engagement or violence support in most samples.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
Deliberate Engagement and Support for Political Violence
Deliberate engagement was the only exposure pathway consistently associated with support for political violence across all four ideologically diverse U.S. samples examined. The indirect effect of obsessive passion on violence support through deliberate engagement was statistically significant in every group, with estimates ranging from B = .15 among environmental supporters to B = .68 among Muslims. Despite this strong cross-sectional pattern, the three-wave longitudinal study found no within-person dynamics between obsessive passion and violence support, indicating that their association is carried by stable trait-level differences rather than moment-to-moment fluctuation.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
