**3. Characteristics of a Fundamentalist Attitude**

Considering fundamentalism as an attitude means understanding it as a way of approaching the world, a way of "evaluating" reality. This evaluation, according to the findings of social psychology, consists of three elements: cognitive, emotional (a ffective), and behavioural (Aronson et al. 1994). Consequently, fundamentalism understood as an attitude entails that fundamentalists primarily di ffer from the "rest of the world" by a specific way of thinking (a "fundamentalist mindset") which then determines the trajectories of a fundamentalist approach to the world, both emotionally and behaviourally. Such an understanding of fundamentalism would seem to be rather useful in the perspective of political science research.
