Feeling uncertain about your identity for any reason—either because of job loss, disconnection from your culture, or even rapid technological change—“can leave you with a thirst to identify with other people,” as Michael Hogg put it to me. People in situations like these often want a leader who will tell them exactly what their group’s purpose and identity are. Across several studies,206 researchers have found that when people feel like they’re bobbing in a sea of uncertainty, they will float toward the buoy that seems steadiest. They will crave a leader who is ethnocentric and autocratic. They flock to cults, gangs, and other groups that will assign you a new identity and leave no room to question its nature.

Exclusion is one of the things that can trigger what the psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls a “significance quest”—a plot to restore your place in society by becoming “somebody” again.207 You can restore your significance constructively—by, say, volunteering at your mosque, or destructively, by volunteering for ISIS. It all depends on what paths you see available to you, and who your friends are. Kruglanski says that many women who become suicide bombers have been made to feel insignificant in the eyes of their culture. They might be infertile or stand accused of extramarital affairs. Having lost their place in their society, they seek to restore it. Meanwhile, much of ISIS’s propaganda involves highlighting the various ways Muslims have been humiliated by Westerners. Your quest for significance gets triggered, Kruglanski explains, by real or perceived discrimination against you or your group.

This is how social exclusion can become so perverse: it can insert ideas into your head that you don’t even possess. You might not be unusually hateful, but you’re lonely, and that can be enough. Many white supremacists, in fact, don’t even start out with extreme views on race. “People think you develop really racist attitudes, then you go out and find a group that expresses those, but that’s not exactly how this works,” the sociologist Kathleen Blee told PBS208 in 2015. “It often works in reverse, that people start hanging around with people who are racist and they learn really racist attitudes by participating with those people in racist ways.”

The process of deradicalization, meanwhile, often means helping extremists find new groups of people who are not violent or hateful, yet can still provide them with an identity. This new group can help them achieve significance through positive contributions to society, like humanitarian work or a trade. Some programs, for example, teach former fundamentalists new vocational skills, so that they can begin to craft a new “self” outside their hate.

I asked Arie Kruglanski if he worries this kind of research could be construed as excusing extremists. Some of these studies imply that hate-group members aren’t that bad…they just need a hug!