By Richard E. Petty, Ph.D., and Joseph J. Siev, Ph.D.

Nearly one-quarter of the adults contacted in a recent survey agreed that people may have to resort to violence to save the country. Also disturbing is that reports of other sorts of violence such as on airplanes and against members of Congress have risen since 2016.

Who are the individuals who support violence against their political opponents? As social psychologists interested in the link between beliefs and actions, this question has grabbed our attention as well as that of many other social scientists.

Some of the initial predictors of support for political violence were ones that many might have expected. For example, some research has shown that people who tend to be aggressive in general and those with extreme political views are more likely to support violence. That makes sense.

In our own research, however, we discovered a surprising new contributor: the extent to which people were ambivalent about their extreme political attitudes. Ambivalence stems from one of three kinds of attitudinal conflict:
(1) having mixed views on an issue
(2) having views that disagree with people you value
(3) holding attitudes different from the ones you wish you had

Each of these forms of ambivalence causes........

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