Leor Zmigrod is a prizewinning scientist and pioneer of the field of political neuroscience. She was listed on Forbes’s “30 Under 30 in Science” and has won numerous awards, including the Women of the Future Science Award and the Glushko Prize. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, Financial Times, and New Scientist.
What’s the big idea?
Why are some people particularly susceptible to extreme worldviews? As it turns out, there are neurobiological differences and variances in everyday thought patterns that can render some people vulnerable to rigid dogmas. There are also key traits that can increase resilience against extreme ideologies. Our brains come to mirror our politics and prejudices in many strange and profound ways that challenge how we understand tensions between nature and nurture, risk and resilience, freedom and fate.
Below, Leor shares five key insights from her new book, The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking. Listen to the audio version—read by Leor herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Ideology is driven by biology.
Ideology is not only about society and culture. It’s also driven by biology. A growing body of research shows that there are psychological and even neurobiological differences between adherence to different ideologies.
We need to shed the assumption that ideologies are primarily a response to sociological movements or historical currents floating above our heads. Instead, we can think of ideologies as personal, tangible, and psychological things that can be observed and measured at the individual level. By examining how ideologies shape human minds, we can pose new questions:
- To what degree can an ideology be internalized by the believer’s brain?
- How does ideology affect cognition and the brain’s structure and function?
- Could certain brains have predispositions for extreme worldviews?
I define ideological thinking as a way of thinking whereby a person adopts a fixed doctrine about the world that resists all opposing evidence and takes on an identity through which they can judge themselves and others. Experimental psychology and neuroscience can illuminate what unconscious traits render some of us more likely to gravitate toward dogmatic ideologies and what makes others more resilient against closed and authoritarian ways of thinking.
2. Susceptibility to extreme worldviews is a spectrum.
We all sit on a spectrum of suggestibility. This spectrum reflects the interaction of all the psychological traits that make people susceptible to ideological thinking, such as their biological or cognitive dispositions, personalities, social experiences, traumas, and perceived resources, abundances, realities, and absences.
Spectrums are less neat than clear binaries. It can be tempting to imagine that there are two categories of people: the vulnerable versus the resilient, the radical minority who can be manipulated into monstrosity versus the sensible majority who are immune to dangerous or extreme ideologies. But there are gradations in vulnerability.
“By nature of existing on the spectrum, we must confront our own vulnerability.”
Recognizing that vulnerability is a continuum allows us to detect subtle differences that we would otherwise ignore. This distribution of susceptibility is like a Gaussian curve, with most people falling in the middle and some people at the outer edges. Acknowledging that susceptibility to extreme worldviews is on a continuum reminds us that few people are completely immune to the power of ideological reasoning. By nature of existing on the spectrum, we must confront our own vulnerability.
3. The science of being susceptible or resilient.
One psychological factor that is most likely to increase people’s susceptibility to extreme ideologies is their level of cognitive rigidity. Cognitive rigidity is a trait that reflects whether people prefer closed, constant ways of thinking that resist change or whether they’re more cognitively flexible and, therefore, able to adapt to changing evidence. In experiments I conducted with hundreds of participants, I found that people on the political extremes are more likely to struggle with cognitive tasks requiring adaptable behavior or inventive imagination.
When I wanted to measure cognitive flexibility, I would give participants specially designed games and linguistic challenges. One of these is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which measures people’s adaptability. In it, people receive a set of cards that they have to sort according to a rule—but they need to figure out what that rule is. Maybe they notice that they get rewarded every time they sort according to color. Once they identify the rule and apply it, then they can make that manner of sorting a habit. The sorting rule becomes a fulfilling ritual. They get confirmation and affirmation every time they apply the rule. But then suddenly the rule changes, unbeknownst to the participant.
“Cognitive flexibility is a form of psychological resilience against extreme ideologies.”
The most cognitively flexible people notice the change and, rather than resisting it, adapt their behavior in search of the new rule and then apply it instead. On the other hand, some people are cognitively rigid. When they encounter the change, they resist it. They hate the change. They stubbornly try to apply the old rule again and again, even though it no longer works. The most rigid people are those who are most insistent that the world should not change.
People’s level of rigidity in these neuropsychological tests revealed the rigidity with which they believe in their social and political ideologies. When they evaluate ideological information, those who are more rigid are most extreme in terms of their nationalisms and are most willing to die or kill for their cause and group. Cognitive rigidity is a risk factor for making people more likely to engage with extreme worldviews. Cognitive flexibility is a form of psychological resilience against extreme ideologies. These unconscious cognitive traits can foreshadow ideological commitments and how willing a person is to adapt behavior in the face of evidence.
4. Brain structure and function can mirror political beliefs.
When we look at the physiology of people’s brains, we discover differences in the structure and function of brains of different ideologues. The areas responsible for high-level decision making in the prefrontal cortex are sized differently and operate differently depending on whether a person is very radical or more independent of ideological ways of thinking. Looking at people’s brains can also help us see who is most prone to left- or right-wing ideologies. Neuroscientists have discovered that people who believe in right-wing ideologies tend to have larger amygdala, which is the area of the brain responsible for processing negative emotions such as threat, fear, and disgust. That finding has been replicated in multiple studies in multiple countries. There is a parallel between people’s brain structure and their ideologies.
“Looking at people’s brains can also help us see who is most prone to left- or right-wing ideologies.”
Perhaps the fact that conservative ideologies sometimes can be obsessed with explaining feelings of threat or fear explains the tendency for a larger, more active amygdala. But there’s still a question about causality, and it’s almost a chicken-and-egg problem. Do we already have these psychological and neurobiological traits that affect which kind of political groups we join, or does being immersed in certain ideologies shape our cognitive patterns and neurobiology?
Our ideological beliefs are related to our cognitive and neural patterns of responding to the world, which means that society needs to face new questions about how our bodies become politicized and how deeply into the body ideologies can penetrate. What are the implications for personal agency? How do we resist authoritarian ideologies? What does it mean to be highly ideological? And how can we all become more flexible thinkers?
5. Habits of flexible thinkers.
We live in a society that glamorizes habits and routines. But habits can be dangerous. Almost all ideologies use the psychological mechanics of habits to establish devotion, loyalty, and passionate commitment to their cause—in ways that can cause people to injure others or themselves.
In The Ideological Brain, I explore what it means to extinguish habitual thoughts in favor of thinking in adaptable and creative ways. Nurturing mental freedom in all domains of life is key to becoming more flexible, evidence-based thinkers. We can all become more rigid and extreme thinkers, which means we can also go the other way and become more flexible and open-minded. Thinking in a more flexible way that is receptive to evidence is an arduous task, but it is also incredibly fulfilling. It’s a way for us to think more authentically, more freely, and become closer to our direct experience of the world.
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