A new psychological study suggests that an overwhelming need to earn social worth, combined with a belief in the superiority of one’s group, may lay the foundation for developing an extreme personality. The research highlights how these strong inner drives can lead individuals to sacrifice their own well-being for a specific cause or value. These findings were recently published in the journal Frontiers in Social Psychology. Extremism is traditionally viewed as a rigid adherence to an outside political or religious ideology. In recent years, psychological science has added a new perspective to the discussion, proposing an underlying motivational mechanism called the extreme personality. According to this framework, a moderate lifestyle is defined by motivational balance, where a person divides their attention relatively equally among their various daily needs and social obligations. In contrast, an extreme personality emerges when a single motivation becomes drastically over-amplified, pushing the individual to neglect other life aspects to satisfy a single obsession. Lead author Pedro Altungy, a researcher at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, and a team of international colleagues …