The Extreme Actor's Perspective, and Why It Matters for Explanation

This chapter argues that the perspective of extreme actors, such as conspiracy theorists, fundamentalists, extremists, and terrorists, is necessary both for understanding them and for arriving at relevant explanations of their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Their perspective is important not only as source of information (in the context of discovery) but also for falsifying or validating findings (in the context of justification). Whereas one can find this position in applied social science research, as well as defenses of it in theoretical work, what this chapter adds is a combination of the two. It uses two cases of social science research to illustrate the value of the first-person perspective, and then offers theoretical tools to further grasp the nature of reason explanations and their relation to understanding extreme actors and explaining their thoughts, emotions, and behavior.