Abstract
Drawing on the Significance Quest Theory (Kruglanski et al., 2022), we used the Honor Dictionary (Gelfand
et al., 2015) in a word frequency textual analysis (Pennebaker et al., 2007) to investigate extreme rhetoric. We
thus conducted two studies. The first, investigating the political context, compared speeches of fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini (1918–1945, N = 284) with those of democratic Presidents of the Italian Republic (1949–2006,
N = 901). The second, focused on lone-actors terrorists, examined texts from the Extremist Manifesto Database
(EMD, Grigoryan et al., 2023) and compared writings by terrorists driven by political ideologies (left &
right-wing, ethno-nationalists, and anti-government, N = 65) with those of terrorists motivated by religious
ideologies (N = 23). Notably, we hypothesized and found that, compared to democratic rhetoric, fascist rhetoric
contained (a) more words expressing feelings of lost honor and (b) fewer words reflecting gaining honor.
Moreover, as expected, we found that lone-actor religious terrorists’ rhetoric, compared to lone-actor political
terrorists, contained more words expressing feelings of lost honor and fewer words expressing honor gain.
Notably, this is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary to linguistically measure the activation of the need
for significance, demonstrating a strong correlation with the endorsement of extreme ideologies. Further, our
research supports the hypothesis that extreme rhetoric reflects–and aims to induce–significance loss feelings.
