Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2023

Publication Title

American Behavioral Scientist

Volume

67

Issue

5

Pages

629-648

Publisher Name

Sage Publications

Abstract

The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. Namely, these platforms organize their users in ways that facilitate a nefarious form of collective intelligence, which is amplified and strengthened by systems of algorithmic curation. In short, these platforms reflect and facilitate undemocratic cognition, fueled by affective networks, contributing to events like the January 6 insurrection and far-right extremism more broadly. To demonstrate, we apply this framing to a case study (the “Stop the Steal” movement) to illustrate how this framework can make sense of radicalization and mobilization influenced by undemocratic cognition.

Comments

Author Posting © Sage Publications, 2023. This is the author's accepted version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the Sage Publishing for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in American Behavioral Scientist, Volume 67, Issue 5, May 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221103186

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