Assessment of Potentially Extremist Attitudes Test

People who want to interpret their own attitude profile can use the Assessment of Potentially Extremist Attitudes Test as a structured self-report exercise. A cross-domain result may clarify whether a pattern is concentrated in one area or appears across several, giving readers a more focused starting point for reflection. This extremism assessment helps organize that interpretation without reducing it to a single response.

What This Assessment Explores

Statements address justifications for violence, religious authority and secular law, national or ethnic groups, and attitudes toward laws, authorities, and social norms, including their rejection. They cover compassion, tolerance, conspiracy beliefs, and democratic institutions. This extremist attitudes profile maps tendencies, not one opinion.

The dimensions are:

• Violent Extremism (9-45) captures justification and support for extreme, religiously motivated violence: Low 9-25; Moderate 26-35; High 36-45.
• Legal (10-50) captures legal nihilism and norm rejection: Low 10-23; Moderate 24-33; High 34-50.
• National Extremism (10-50) captures nationalism, fanaticism, and chauvinism: Low 10-20; Moderate 21-36; High 37-50.
• Religious (25-125) captures religious extremism and intolerance toward other faiths: Low 25-67; Elevated 68-125.
• Overall Level of Extremism (45-225) reflects severity across extremist domains: Low 45-117; Moderate 118-150; High 151-225.

Methodology and Evidence Base

The sample items use five ordered choices from strong disagreement to strong agreement, with variants such as undecided, unsure, or not sure. The statements address beliefs and judgments rather than conduct history. The result screen reports a score for each domain and places it in a displayed category; these ranges describe how the questionnaire reports results, not universal thresholds.

The Militant Extremist Mindset instrument is the closest conceptual reference, examining pro-violence attitudes, hostile worldviews, and divine power. This questionnaire is conceptually consistent with that work but is not an adaptation of it. A separate Stankov scale-development study offers a conceptual reference for militant-extremist themes but does not document this questionnaire's wording or scoring. Religious fundamentalism and prejudice connect conceptually with the work of Altemeyer and Hunsberger; these sources do not establish provenance or validation for this questionnaire.

When interpreting this potentially extremist attitudes assessment, emphasis should fall on the cross-domain pattern rather than one answer. Self-report is sensitive to current emotion, social desirability, and self-awareness, while the displayed categories are reporting bands for this questionnaire rather than a diagnosis.