obsessive passion
Definition
Obsessive passion refers to a form of ideological commitment in which self-worth becomes contingent on a cause, crowding out competing goals and producing a rigid, ego-defensive relationship to the ideology. Unlike harmonious passion, which integrates commitment alongside other life pursuits, obsessive passion organizes the self around the cause in a controlled, self-worth-contingent fashion. This distinction is qualitative: two individuals can be equally committed to an ideology yet differ sharply in whether that commitment is harmonious or obsessive, and it is the obsessive quality that predicts support for political violence across ideologically diverse populations including Democrats, Republicans, environmental supporters, and Muslims. Across four cross-sectional U.S. samples, obsessive passion showed strong correlations with violence support ranging from r = .29 to r = .57, whereas harmonious passion showed no comparable association. A three-wave longitudinal study of right-wing Americans further revealed that obsessive passion and deliberate engagement with radical people and settings reciprocally reinforced one another within individuals over six-week intervals, while their connection to violence support was carried entirely by stable, trait-level differences rather than within-person dynamics, suggesting these variables form a self-reinforcing radicalization syndrome rather than a simple causal sequence.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- political violence (1 shared article)
- radicalization (1 shared article)
- deliberate engagement (1 shared article)
- within-person dynamics (1 shared article)
Applications
Obsessive Passion and Deliberate Engagement
Deliberate engagement, defined as actively seeking out radical people, settings, and content, is the specific exposure pathway that consistently links obsessive passion to support for political violence. In a three-wave longitudinal study of right-wing Americans, obsessive passion predicted subsequent deliberate engagement within persons (B = .25, p = .042), and deliberate engagement in turn predicted subsequent obsessive passion (B = .29, p = .036), confirming a reciprocal rather than unidirectional relationship. Incidental or accidental exposure did not mediate the passion-violence relationship in most samples, indicating that the intentionality of engagement, not mere exposure, is what connects ideological obsession to radical outcomes.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
Obsessive Passion and Support for Political Violence
Obsessive passion is among the more consistent psychological correlates of support for political violence across political and religious groups. Its connection to violence support appears to operate through goal-shielding, whereby competing moral considerations are suppressed, and through ego-defensiveness, whereby threats to an identity staked entirely on the cause heighten support for violent retaliation. The longitudinal evidence shows no within-person dynamics between obsessive passion and violence support over time, meaning their strong association (random-intercept r = .58 in the right-wing sample) reflects stable, trait-level coupling rather than one variable causally shifting the other.
Sources: Bélanger et al. (2026)
