This Is Your Brain on Politics

New York Times

31-03-2025

Having a one-track mind can feel pretty good. 'We possess beliefs, yes, but we can also become possessed by them,' the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod writes in her lively new book, 'The Ideological Brain.' We might talk a big game about 'freedom' while also being terrified of the uncertainty that comes with it. It's only human to yearn for the clarity provided by a system that tells us how to think and what to do: 'Human brains soak up ideological convictions with vigor and thirst.'
Zmigrod says she knows this because she has studied the connections between the brain biology and political ideology. She began her experiments in the months between the Brexit referendum in Britain and the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Using a method called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, she tracked how her subjects responded to a sudden and arbitrary change in the rules. She also surveyed research on the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure in each hemisphere of the brain that processes emotions, especially negative ones like fear and disgust.
Conservatives, she says, often have larger amygdalae. Yet figuring out which comes first — whether people with bigger amygdalae are drawn to conservative ideologies, or conservative ideologies make people's amygdalae bigger — 'is an ongoing endeavor.'
The science, in other words, isn't settled. Indeed, 'The Ideological Brain' turns out to have surprisingly little that is definitive to say about the ideological brain. Zmigrod is an able guide through the thicket of scientific research, but her book necessarily includes a few 'to-be-sure' paragraphs conceding that some of the most tantalizing findings haven't been replicated. 'The finest neuroscientific studies are built up slowly, iteratively and thoughtfully,' she writes. 'Warnings and cautious qualifiers are rarely riveting (limits on our imagination seldom are), but they are intellectually honest.'
And intellectual honesty is ultimately what this book is about. Ideologues tend to be 'cognitively rigid,' Zmigrod says. Their resistance to changing their minds makes them slow to adapt to new information that challenges their priors. She cites research conducted by the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, who fled Austria after the Anschluss. Settling in Berkeley, Calif., Frenkel-Brunswik set out to learn how, as she put it, 'the ethnocentric child becomes a potential fascist.' She found that parents who fostered imagination and empathy encouraged their children's cognitive flexibility. By contrast, parents who ruled with an iron fist produced children who welcomed the domination of others. For these children, 'all relationships were unequal and inherently abusive.' They idolized strict fathers. Such worship was a way of 'justifying their own oppressions, the militarization of their imagination and desires.'
In other words, a rigid environment can make a mind more rigid — a finding that's not exactly earth-shattering. But Frenkel-Brunswik did notice something more unexpected. The children raised in overbearing households exhibited signs of both 'disintegration and rigidity.' They were 'fascinated by chaos, upheaval and catastrophe.' They demanded order while also fetishizing disorder.
Zmigrod, in her own experiments, found something analogous. She invited 300 Americans to answer a questionnaire about their ideological worldviews and participate in a computer game that measured split-second decisions. Dogmatic participants struggled to piece together perceptual evidence efficiently, but they did not see themselves as sluggish thinkers. 'They reported loving thrills and making rash choices,' Zmigrod writes. 'A dogmatic person's low-level unconscious cognitive machinery is slower, but their high-level self-conscious personalities mean they make impulsive decisions.' They will insist on law and order yet also revel in burning the establishment down.
It's this recklessness that distinguishes the right-wing extremist from the cautious conservative. But Zmigrod repeatedly emphasizes that her interest is in the ideological brain, whether its politics are identifiable as 'left' or 'right.' About halfway through the book she explains why, according to her findings, the most cognitively flexible individuals are 'nonpartisans who lean to the left.' She insists that she isn't championing a centrist complacency or a 'diluted, shrinking moderation.' But she does make a case for a minimalist form of liberalism, which she defines as 'openness to evidence and debate.' As exhortations go, this one is perfectly reasonable, if banal.
Zmigrod suggests that our understanding of ideology has itself become too ideological. She recounts the fascinating story of Count Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, a nobleman imprisoned during the French Revolution who coined the term idéologie to denote what he hoped would be a 'legitimate science that would use objective methods to ascertain how humans generate beliefs.' The idéologistes envisioned a society that would encourage individuals to think critically. Yet Tracy's approach was derided by an array of detractors, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx and even America's founding fathers, whom Zmigrod characterizes as relying 'too heavily' on the notion of a communal identity. 'Ideology had committed the crime of centering reason and observation at the expense of collective myth and magical thinking,' she writes.
This original understanding of 'ideology' — the dispassionate study of beliefs — has been lost to time, and now conveys its opposite: a passionate commitment to beliefs. Ideologiste gave way to idéologue. Zmigrod laments this turn. The last sentence in 'The Ideological Brain' calls for a day when we might envision a 'mind that is ideology-free.'
It's an argument that is personal for Zmigrod, who describes her own discomfort whenever anybody asks her where she is from. 'My grandparents grew up speaking one language, and my parents cultivated the slang of another, while I learned the grammars and nuances of entirely different scripts,' she writes. 'We all came of age on different continents, hearts breaking under different skies, overlooking different seas, our secrets and curses whispered in different tongues.'
Zmigrod is such an appealing writer that it's easy to glide over some of the knottier implications of her book. What happens when the flexible mind runs up against an autocracy? How does it react to a moral atrocity? Does it put up resistance? Or, in its infinite adaptability, does it acquiesce and go with the flow, however unjust?
'The nonideological person strives toward intellectual humility — continuously being open to updating their beliefs in light of credible evidence and balancing a healthy dose of skepticism against mythmaking practices with a humanist sympathy toward those who feel compelled to engage with collective ideologies,' she writes.
All of this sounds really nice. I can see how we would be better off if every person on the planet was committed to 'intellectual humility' and 'humanist sympathy.' But I'm not sure that I needed a neuroscientist to tell me that.