Latest news with #TheIdeologicalBrain
The Herald Scotland
13-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Scientist has a truly mindblowing explanation for what causes fascism
Your individual ideology isn't simply down to how you were raised, or your age, sex, income, race and education. Your biology is just as important, from the structure of your brain to your genetics and the way your body releases chemicals. Spend an afternoon with Zmigrod and you're left pondering what agency – if any – we have over our own political beliefs. Zmigrod has shot to fame in the world of neuroscience as a pioneer of political psychology: the study of what makes us follow certain ideologies. Educated at Harvard and Cambridge, she has taught at some of the world's most prestigious universities, and has just brought out her landmark book The Ideological Brain. She has been showered with awards for her work as a scientist. Zmigrod met with The Herald on Sunday to discuss her research, which raises profound questions about how much control we have over our own opinions, and how primed we are to be exploited by unscrupulous politicians. Zmigrod explains that she set out to answer one of the biggest questions of the 21st century: 'What makes someone susceptible to extreme ideologies?' She wanted to look beyond issues like 'education, background, sociodemographic status', and focus on 'our brains, cognitive styles, and everyday thinking patterns'. In other words, scholars have mostly focused on the 'nurture' side of the debate: what is it in our background and experiences which leads us to hold various political opinions. Zmigrod wanted to explore the 'nature' question. Are our political beliefs innate? Are they 'created' by our biology, brains and DNA? 'Ideology isn't just about our society and culture,' she says. 'It's deep-rooted in our biology.' She wanted to understand 'which brains are most likely to gravitate to extreme worldviews. There are neurobiological traits that make some more susceptible to extreme ideologies, regardless of what that ideology may be'. However, her work went one step further. She didn't just explore 'how our biology affects our ideologies' – Zmigrod also set about unravelling 'how our ideologies might actually sculpt our brains in ways that are really deep and tangible'. What she's suggesting is staggering: that holding certain political views leaves an indelible, physical mark on the shape of your brain. It may sound fantastical, but this has already been proved to be true. Experiments 'Immersion in rigid ideologies can transform our brains,' she says. 'Ideologies become reflected in our bodies – embodied in our bodies. There are parallels between the way we think ideologically and the way our brains are structured at a biological level.' Key to understanding the 'ideological brain' is what Zmigrod calls 'cognitive rigidity'. It's a 'thinking style – a cognitive and emotional way of responding to the world'. Zmigrod carried out experiments on many thousands of participants in order to explore how cognitive rigidity works and what it reveals about political extremism. 'Some of us are very rigid thinkers,' she says. 'That means they see the world in very binary terms. They'll struggle to switch between modes of thinking, and struggle to adapt when the environment changes. 'Some of us are more flexible thinkers. They see the world in more expansive ways. When they encounter situations where the environment changes, they can adapt their behaviour to respond – they're receptive to evidence, they'll listen. 'Whereas a rigid person will reject the evidence which suggests change needs to happen.' Zmigrod found that cognitively rigid people map directly onto those who support extremist ideologies – whether those ideologies are on the far left or the far right. One experiment she has conducted many times takes the form of a game that seemingly has nothing to do with politics. It's more like Tetris, where you sort cards. Some cards may have 'three red circles' on them, other cards may have 'a single blue triangle'. The participant is given no rules and simply told to match the cards. By trial and error, participants will discover that they have, for instance, to match only cards with the three red circles. But then, suddenly, the rules of the game change and matching cards with three red circles is no longer correct.'I'm interested in that moment of change,' says Zmigrod. Some participants will accept 'that the old rule doesn't work any more and they need to change – they need to find the new rules and adapt their behaviour. These are the genuinely cognitively flexible people.' By experimenting, they might discover that the new rule is now matching cards with blue triangles, or other cards with green stars. 'But other people,' Zmigrod explains, 'will reject the evidence that they should change their behaviour. They reject change. They continue to apply the old rule, even though they're getting feedback signals that what they're doing no longer works. But they really want to stick to that old rule. These are the cognitively rigid people.' Now for the kicker. 'What I've found,' she adds, 'is that people who tend to be most rigid on this task also tend to be more ideologically rigid on the left and right, in a way that's really remarkable.' Violence THE data comes out as a 'U-shaped curve, where the people on the extreme far right and far left tend to be the most cognitively rigid, and the people who are more moderate, more independent, more suspicious of pre-established political identities, tend to be the most flexible. 'The game I gave them had nothing to do with politics – it just measures their cognitive style, their way of processing information and responding to change. But we see that this maps on to their political extremity really powerfully.' Zmigrod also found that those who are more cognitively rigid 'tend to be more willing to support violence in the name of their ideological cause and group. They are also the most willing to sacrifice themselves – to commit violence against others and themselves in the name of that ideological cause. 'You can see how the way in which someone approaches the world is very tightly connected to the way in which they process information, to their ideological identity, and how they respond to turmoil.' If you ever wondered what kind of person becomes a suicide bomber, or why some Japanese soldiers refused to surrender at the end of the Second World War, then cognitive rigidity is your answer. 'It's linked to that kind of ideological fanaticism,' Zmigrod adds. The next step in Zmigrod's research was 'connecting this to biology'. After she ran these experiments and discovered how rigidity mapped almost perfectly on to extremism, Zmigrod set out to understand 'what makes a person rigid, what affects whether we're a more rigid or flexible thinker'. She began to 'study the genetics of people who tend to think more rigidly than flexibly'. Now for the second kicker. 'What we find is that there is a genetic profile which puts people at higher propensity of thinking more rigidly. That genetic profile is related to the genes that control dopamine production.' Most people think of dopamine as a chemical messenger linked to reward and mood. We hear about the 'dopamine rush' that comes from running, for example. However, dopamine is also 'the neurotransmitter that fundamentally governs learning, new information, and how we update our beliefs. 'It's tightly connected to our flexibility and adaptability. What I found in this very large genetic study is that people who have particular dispositions in terms of how dopamine is distributed in their brains have more tendency to think rigidly, and be less adaptable.' The science is complicated but broadly the lower the level of dopamine in the brain's prefrontal cortex, and the higher the level in the area of the brain known as the striatum, then the more likely you are to think rigidly. Consequently, that makes you more likely to be an extremist. The pre-frontal cortex is 'responsible for high-level thinking, sophisticated thought and decision-making'. The striatum is 'the mid-brain structure responsible for dopamine production' and 'instinctual responding'. Genetics IN essence: 'People who tend to be more rigid thinkers have particular idiosyncrasies in how dopamine is distributed in their brains.' So there's a 'genetic component' to political 'behaviour'. If scientists artificially altered dopamine levels you wouldn't suddenly become more or less extreme. Extremism depends on your standard body chemistry. This all creates the genetic template for extremism. 'If someone is ideologically extreme, we can trace that back to their cognition, their psychology and then all the way down to how particular genetic and biological mechanisms work.' So do we have any free will? That's the deeply disturbing question raised by Zmigrod's work. Becoming an extremist, however, is a little like getting lung cancer. You might have a genetic predisposition to lung cancer, but that wouldn't become an issue unless you started smoking. It's once you start smoking that your biological predisposition becomes a risk factor. Until now, it was thought that environmental factors explained why someone becomes an extremist. In other words, it was how you were raised, the views of your family and community, and your economic and social experiences which pushed you towards extremism. Now, however, with Zmigrod's work, we're discovering that environmental factors are only half the story. Think of the average German in the 1930s. Some would have grown up with parents who held extremist views. They might also have experienced economic hardship and political turmoil. However, they didn't vote for Hitler. Then, evidently, there were other Germans who might have had liberal parents, and never experienced financial hardship, yet still backed the Nazis. (Image: Adolf Hitler addresses German crowds) Biology may explain 'why'. Zmigrod says: 'We need to look at how biology interacts with environmental factors.' One key environmental trigger that will switch on a brain predisposed to extremism is 'stress'. Again, let's consider Germany in the 1930s and think of the economic chaos in the country. 'When you're in a very stressful situation that makes us more rigid. Think about the time you were most stressed, it's when you're thinking in the most narrow way. You're not exploring the world.' In cognitive flexibility experiments 'people perform lower when stressed'. Scientists can 'put people in really stressful situations and see their brains changing in response to stress factors. When the stress is removed, their brains bounce back and they become more flexible'. It shows that 'susceptibility to rigid thinking' increases when you're 'put in stressful environments'. One experiment on toddlers 'showed that stress impairs their cognitive flexibility'. Half the toddlers were exposed to stress – like being separated from their mum. Half weren't exposed to 'stressors'. Disaster SCIENTISTS measured the toddlers' cortisol levels which rise with stress. The toddlers were given simple 'learning tasks' – like pressing coloured buttons sequentially to make lights flash and music play. For toddlers, Zmigrod says, 'that's a party'. After some time pressing buttons, however, the lights and music stopped. The happy toddlers wandered off to explore. The stressed toddlers, though, just kept pressing buttons. 'Stressors' can be a 'profound driver of ideological behaviour,' says Zmigrod. If you put someone with cognitive rigidity – a person with that particular dopamine cocktail in their brain – 'in a stressful environment you get a perfectly disastrous recipe for being drawn into extreme ways of thinking'. You can see how this research speaks directly to concerns around political extremism today. We live in a highly stressed, volatile world. If a large minority are walking around with the biology and psychology which predisposes them to extremism in cases of high stress, then that may well explain what's gone wrong with 21st-century politics. Previous eras lacked one crucial ingredient when it came to the combustible elements needed to create an extremist: social media. 'Young brains,' Zmigrod notes, are already 'extra sensitive' to emotions. Now, take a young person with a 'tendency towards rigid thinking' and bombard them with the fear, hate, anger and jealousy that's found on platforms like Elon Musk's X and you've a recipe for disaster. 'A big predictor of how willing people are to endorse violence is how emotionally impulsive they are in their everyday lives: are they good at inhibiting their responses or do they seek out thrills and big emotional experiences,' Zmigrod says. Given young people are already 'emotionally impulsive', those who are also predisposed to 'cognitive rigidity' become at risk of 'radicalisation' online. 'Digital environments have algorithms designed to give you the most binary information, and information that's negatively impacting your emotions, making you feel scared, anxious, or threatened.' For 'people already at risk', the online world means that traits like rigidity, impulsivity and stress 'get amplified and accentuated in really dangerous ways'. It explains why some become radicalised online and others don't. Until now, Zmigrod explains, it was believed that cognitive rigidity was mostly found 'on the right' of the political spectrum. That's not the case, though. 'The right is supposedly the side that's about maintaining the status quo and tradition, and avoiding change. The left was seen as the side of progress and change.' When she measured the 'unconscious trait' of cognitive rigidity, she found both camps equally susceptible. Clearly, her findings make sense, if you consider the atrocities committed by communist and fascist regimes – both sides can be as extreme as the other. It's important to understand that Zmigrod isn't talking about people who are simply left or right wing – she's talking about the far left and far right. READ MORE NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'SNP nationalism is destroying education' - the devastating assessment of Sturgeon and schools by leading Scottish educationalist Neil Mackay: Why is the best entertainment from Scotland in years such a secret? Neil Mackay: Gangsters are terrorising Scotland, but do our politicians care? Neil Mackay: Working-class quotas and why we need a taste of social engineering Holocaust THE resistance within psychology to accept that there were similar cognitive behaviours going on within the far left and far right is 'understandable', she explains. Early research began in the late 1940s, when psychologists were trying to understand the Holocaust and 'figure out what makes a potential fascist'. 'But I think it's so important we recognise that we also see psychological rigidity in people who are on the extreme left,' she says. 'Rigidity can exist with regard to any ideology.' Matters take an even more curious turn, however, when you explore the structure of the brains of people with varying political beliefs. 'We can actually see neurobiological differences in the shape of the brain between people who are left and right wing.' These findings have been 'replicated with hundreds of participants in multiple countries like America, the UK and the Netherlands'. The key part of the brain in question here is the amygdala. It 'processes negative emotions, like threat, fear, and disgust of things that are foreign. This area of the brain is enlarged in people who are right wing relative to people who are left wing. And it's consistent. There's a pattern'. One theory is that 'right-wing ideologies tend to engage with those kinds of emotions – disgust, threat, fear. Perhaps there's a natural affinity that makes people with larger amygdala gravitate towards right-wing ideology'. However, it could also work in reverse. 'If you're immersed in the kind of ideology which engages those emotions, that experience can physically change the brain and the structures responsible for those emotions. It's a chicken and egg problem. We're still trying to figure it out.' In other words, people with enlarged amygdala may be drawn to right-wing extremism, or being a right-wing extremist may enlarge your amygdala. Either way, there's a biological link to politics. Zmigrod has investigated what happens 'to flexible brains in dogmatic environments, and to dogmatic brains placed in environments that aren't overly authoritarian or tribal'. She looked at religious conversion, and how some people who 'grew up in incredibly devout environments chose to leave those ideologies behind, and how some people who didn't grow up in religious environments chose to adopt the ideology'. Zmigrod discovered that the people who left religious environments which were 'closed ideologically, were the most cognitively flexible people. And it was true the other way, where the people who didn't grow up with religious dogma, but later choose it, tend to be the most cognitively rigid'. This is the third kicker, because it means that your brain is seeking out the ideological environment which suits its best. For Zmigrod, this proves 'that we do have free will and agency. We have the capacity to leave behind certain environments and choose the one that most accords with our cognitive tendencies'. Where you are born and how you are raised 'don't fully determine your beliefs. Our choices are really fundamental'. Freedom BUT if your pre-programmed brain is seeking out the political environment which most accords with its biology, is that really free will or is it genetics irresistibly pushing you towards an ideology? That's the troubling metaphysical question which remains hanging. Zmigrod says she personally believes we're free to choose, it's just that 'not everybody chooses to practise freedom'. And, of course, setting free will aside, it can be exceptionally hard for anyone – even if they are biologically and genetically predisposed to flexible ways of thinking – to reject their upbringing and the traditions of their family and community. Voting Tory in a socialist household could be tricky. Joining Just Stop Oil if your family are Conservative may not be easy. 'If you want to have mental freedom, you should interrogate the ideologies you believe in,' Zmigrod says. 'That's a really hard struggle, as you have to constantly fight off all these different narrowing pressures, stressful experiences, ideological rhetoric and your own biology.' For those with an ideological brain, political language can be particularly effective when it comes to ramping up fears over issues like a lack of resources. It triggers deep evolutionary emotions. Remember, for instance, how the amygdala, which processes fear and disgust, is larger among right-wingers. Now consider, for instance, rhetoric by far-right parties about migrants taking jobs or homes. Zmigrod believes her work can help us 'build resilience' to propaganda. Although she's also fully aware that in this age of 'scepticism towards expertise and science' that many of the very people she needs to reach will automatically reject her findings. 'I find that really funny because why would you be closed off to more information?' she asks. She stresses that her book isn't about 'what you believe, but how you believe. So hopefully it speaks to people who believe in very different things. It's not political, it's rooted in science which has implications for politics'. Zmigrod adds: 'It's not trying to say there's a right side, or that one side needs pathologised. It's about trying to understand ideological extremism and radicalisation whether that's for the left, right, nationalistic, globalist, environmentalist, misogynistic, whatever. 'Rigidity exists at the extremes of many different ideologies.' What connects all ideologies, she says, is that when there's any form of conflict, 'all means justify the ends, like violence against innocent people or yourself. All ideologies think they're good, noble, virtuous and ethical'. TERRORIST When a terrorist atrocity happens, therefore, we shouldn't just focus on the perpetrator's 'religion, age, gender, eduction, and income'. Such issues are relevant but 'neurobiology also affects who goes to those really radical, extreme ends. There's a really deep and complicated biology and psychology here'. And we are, all of us, on a spectrum of extremism, she notes. 'Some people are extremely susceptible and a big chunk are moderately susceptible.' Zmigrod's investigations into the role stress plays in radicalisation help us understand 'the particular contemporary moment we're in'. What could be more stressful than a global war on terror, followed by a global financial crash, followed by a global pandemic? 'We're biological creatures, psychological creatures. Pandemics, catastrophes, wars, economic crises affect the brain and make it more ideological, more dogmatic, more discriminatory. Human bodies respond to these crises. 'World events become personal. It's like the old saying 'the personal is political and the political is personal'. All these conflicts and crises become embodied in our bodies. That imbues politics with a new kind of importance, as politics doesn't just exist in the political world it exists within us, in our bodies, existentially and biologically.' Zmigrod notes that today there's a difference in the 'psychology of ideological leaders and the psychology of ideological followers. It can be quite distinct. The leaders are in many ways like entrepreneurs, much more flexible. Many are not necessarily very dogmatic'. Ideologies, she adds, 'sculpt adherents in their image'. A 'catastrophising ideology' will create 'catastrophising minds'. However, this isn't a question of fools being brainwashed by puppet-master politicians. Supporters aren't 'passive participants or passive vessels'. Nor is ideological thinking 'irrational' from the perspective of the believer. It often has a 'compelling logic'. If you accept that life is a competition, for example - between nations, classes, genders or races - then that will lead you to 'a set of conclusions' about how to govern the world. Ideological leaders will use 'seductive logic to present misinformation' to support that narrative. But that's not brainwashing, it's the believer listening to skewed information which fits their worldview and excluding information which undermines their worldview. 'It's not that we're being controlled, we bring a lot to the table ourselves,' Zmigrod says. 'We need to understand our own role and responsibility.' INEQUALITY Here's one final experiment which Zmigrod finds 'chilling'. It was conducted to investigate attitudes to inequality. Participants were shown videos of 'homeless people discussing the struggles of their lives'. People who said they were upset by inequalities showed an accelerated heart rate. 'You could see their bodies were disturbed by the injustice,' says Zmigrod. Those who said they believed 'inequality was good or natural', however, showed no physical change. 'Physiologically, they were unmoved, they were numb.' Zmigrod says she finds the experiment disturbing as it shows ideology playing out biologically before our eyes. 'It shows how our nervous systems can be fundamentally sculpted by the ideologies we believe. Ideologies don't exist outside us in some abstract realm, they're truly embodied physically.' Those with no reaction to inequality weren't psychopaths devoid of empathy, however. 'They weren't people who didn't react emotionally to anything. It was specific to inequality. Your political or economic worldview parallels your nervous system response. I'm still astounded by it to be honest.' The term 'system justification' exists in psychology. It explains how someone can justify inequality as it accords with their political beliefs. This experiment shows 'system justification' playing out in the human body. Zmigrod jumps from this dark example of dehumanisation into thoughts about how ideology itself dehumanises the adherent. 'You force yourself to live according to a particular script,' she says. 'You follow rules, and apply harsh moralities to yourself and others.' To live better, happier lives, we should question the ideologies we believe in, she says. Indeed, we should avoid any notion of 'tolerating intolerance' if we're to build good societies. 'If we uncritically tolerate every kind of intolerance, liberalism and democracy start to fold in on themselves,' she adds. What did she discover about the tolerant, non-extremist brain? 'It's less tied to strict identities and doctrines. You see flexibility of thought in all things not just politics. More tolerant people are more expansive in their imaginations. There's emotional and empathetic sensitivity to other's suffering. There's less numbness. There's the capacity for emotional regulation. 'There's also something called 'intellectual humility', which is the capacity to resist being overly confident about your beliefs. It's not about being endlessly persuadable, it's about being attuned to credible evidence and being willing to change your beliefs.' And how did these traits reveal themselves biologically? People with more moderate political views have a larger part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's involved in 'emotional processing and cognitive control'. It's effectively your inner critic. 'The tolerant brain is much better at recognising its own errors relative to the ideological brain,' says Zmigrod. 'The ideological brain struggles to know when it's wrong, it typically thinks it's right even when it's wrong.'
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Is your brain your political destiny?
You often hear about 'ideology' these days. Even if that word isn't mentioned, it's very much what's being discussed. When President Donald Trump denounces the left, he's talking about gender ideology or critical race theory or DEI. When the left denounces Trump, they talk about fascism. Wherever you look, ideology is being used to explain or dismiss or justify policies. Buried in much of this discourse is an unstated assumption that the real ideologues are on the other side. Often, to call someone 'ideological' is to imply that they're fanatical or dogmatic. But is that the best way to think about ideology? Do we really know what we're talking about when we use the term? And is it possible that we're all ideological, whether we know it or not? Leor Zmigrod is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of The Ideological Brain. Her book makes the case that our political beliefs aren't just beliefs. They're also neurological signatures, written into our neurons and reflexes, and over time those signatures change our brains. Zmigrod's point isn't that 'brain is destiny,' but she is saying that our biology and our beliefs are interconnected in important ways. I invited Zmigrod onto The Gray Area to talk about the biological roots of belief and whether something as complicated as ideology is reducible to the brain in this way. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What is ideology? How are you defining it? I think ideology has two components. One is a very fixed doctrine, a set of descriptions about the world that's very absolutist, that's very black and white, and that is very resistant to evidence. An ideology will always have a certain kind of causal narrative about the world that describes what the world is like and also how we should act within that world. It gives prescriptions for how we should act, how we should think, how we should interact with other people. But that's not the end of the story. To think ideologically is both to have this fixed doctrine and also to have a very fixed identity that influences how you judge everyone. And that fixed identity stems from the fact that every ideology, every doctrine, will have believers and nonbelievers. So when you think ideologically, you're really embracing those rigid identity categories and deciding to exclusively affiliate with people who believe in your ideology and reject anyone who doesn't. The degree of ideological extremity can be mapped onto how hostile you are to anyone with differing beliefs, whether you're willing to potentially harm people in the name of your ideology. You write, 'Not all stories are ideologies and not all forms of collective storytelling are rigid and oppressive.' How do you tell the difference? How do you, for instance, distinguish an ideology from a religion? Is there room for a distinction like that in your framework? What I think about often is the difference between ideology and culture. Because culture can encompass eccentricities; it can encompass deviation, different kinds of traditions or patterns from the past, but it's not about legislating what one can do or one can't do. The moment we detect an ideology is the moment when you have very rigid prescriptions about what is permissible and what is not permissible. And when you stop being able to tolerate any deviation, that's when you've moved from culture, which can encompass a lot of deviation and reinterpretations, to ideology. How do you test for cognitive flexibility versus rigidity? In order to test someone's cognitive rigidity or their flexibility, one of the most important things is not just to ask them, because people are terrible at knowing whether they're rigid or flexible. The most rigid thinkers will tell you they're fabulously flexible, and the most flexible thinkers will not know it. So that's why we need to use these unconscious assessments, these cognitive tests and games that tap into your natural capacity to be adaptable or to resist change. One test to do this is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is a card-sorting game where people are presented with a deck of cards that they need to sort. And initially, they don't know what the rule that governs the game is, so they try and figure it out. And quickly, they'll realize that they should match the cards in their deck according to their color. So they'll start putting a blue card with a blue card, a red card with a red card, and they'll get affirmation that they're doing it. They start enacting this rule, adopting it, applying it again and again and again. And after a while, unbeknownst to them, the rule of the game changes and suddenly this color rule doesn't work anymore. That's the moment of change that I'm most interested in because some people will notice that change and they will adapt. They will then go looking for a different rule, and they'll quickly figure out that they should actually sort the cards according to the shape of the objects on the card and they'll follow this new rule. Those are very cognitively flexible individuals. But there are other people who will notice that change and they will hate it. They will resist that change. They will try to say that it never happened, and they'll try to apply the old rule, despite getting negative feedback. And those people that really resist the change are the most cognitively rigid people. They don't like change. They don't adapt their behavior when the evidence suggests that they do. So if someone struggles to switch gears in a card-sorting game, that says something about their comfort with change and ambiguity in general. And someone who struggles with change and ambiguity in a card game will probably also have an aversion to something like pluralism in politics because their brain processes that as chaotic. Is that a fair summary of the argument? Yeah, broadly. People who resist that change, who resist uncertainty, who like things to stay the same, when the rules change. They really don't like it. Often that translates into the most cognitively rigid people, people who don't like pluralism, who don't like debate. But that can really coexist on both sides of the political spectrum. When we're talking about diversity, that can be a more politicized concept, and you can still find very rigid thinkers being very militant about certain ideas that we might say are progressive. So it's quite nuanced. It's easy to understand why being extremely rigid would be a bad thing. But is it possible to be too flexible? If you're just totally unmoored and permanently wide open and incapable of settling on anything, that seems bad in a different way, no? What you're talking about is a kind of immense persuadability, but that's not exactly flexibility. There is a distinction there because being flexible is about updating your beliefs in light of credible evidence, not necessarily adopting a belief just because some authority says so. It's about seeing the evidence and responding to it. Focusing on rigidity does make a lot of sense, but is there a chance you risk pathologizing conviction? How do you draw the line between principled thinking and dogmatic thinking? It's not about pathologizing conviction, but it is about questioning what it means to believe in an idea without being willing to change your mind on it. And I think that there is a very fine line between what we call principles and what we call dogmas. This gets particularly thorny in the moral domain. No one wants to be dogmatic, but it's also hard to imagine any kind of moral clarity without something like a fixed commitment to certain principles or values. And what often happens is if we don't like someone's values, we'll call them extremists or dogmatic. But if we like their values, we call them principled. Yeah, and that's why I think that a psychological approach to what it means to think ideologically helps us escape from that kind of slippery relativism. Because then it's not just about, Oh, where is someone relative to us on certain issues on the political spectrum? It's about thinking, Well, what does it mean to resist evidence? There is a delicate path there where you can find a way to have a moral compass — maybe not the same absolutist moral clarity that ideologies try to convince you exists, but you can have a morality without having really dogmatic ideologies. How much of our rigid thinking is just about our fear of uncertainty? Ideologies are our brains' way of solving the problem of uncertainty in the world because our brains are these incredible predictive organs. They're trying to understand the world, looking for shortcuts wherever possible because it's very complicated and very computationally expensive to figure out everything that's happening in the world. Ideologies kind of hand that to you on a silver plate and they say, Here are all the rules for life. Here are all rules for social interaction. Here's a description of all the causal mechanisms for how the world works. There you go. And you don't need to do that hard labor of figuring it out all on your own. That's why ideologies can be incredibly tempting and seductive for our predictive brains that are trying to resolve uncertainty, that are trying to resolve ambiguities, that are just trying to understand the world in a coherent way. It's a coping mechanism. In the book, you argue that every worldview can be practiced extremely and dogmatically. I read that, and I just wondered if it leaves room for making normative judgments about different ideologies. Do you think every ideology is equally susceptible to extremist practices? I sometimes get strong opposition from people saying, Well, my ideology is about love. It's about generosity or about looking after others. The idea is that these positive ideologies should be immune from dogmatic and authoritarian ways of thinking. But this research isn't about comparing ideologies as these big entities represented by many people. I'm asking if there are people within all these ideologies who are extremely rigid. And we do see that every ideology can be taken on militantly. Not every ideology is equally violent or equally quick to impose rules on others, but every ideology that has this very strong utopian vision of what life and the world should be, or a very dystopian fear of where the world is going, all of those have a capacity to become extreme. How do you think about causality here? Are some people just biologically prone to dogmatic thinking, or do they get possessed by ideologies that reshape their brain over time? This is a fascinating question, and I think that causality goes both ways. I think there's evidence that there are preexisting predispositions that propel some people to join ideological groups. And that when there is a trigger, they will be the first to run to the front of the line in support of the ideological cause. But at the same time, as you become more extreme, more dogmatic, you are changed. The way you think about the world, the way you think about yourself, changes. You become more ritualistic, more narrow, more rigid in every realm of life. So yes, ideology also changes you. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Vox
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Is your brain your political destiny?
You often hear about 'ideology' these days. Even if that word isn't mentioned, it's very much what's being discussed. When President Donald Trump denounces the left, he's talking about gender ideology or critical race theory or DEI. When the left denounces Trump, they talk about fascism. Wherever you look, ideology is being used to explain or dismiss or justify policies. Buried in much of this discourse is an unstated assumption that the real ideologues are on the other side. Often, to call someone 'ideological' is to imply that they're fanatical or dogmatic. But is that the best way to think about ideology? Do we really know what we're talking about when we use the term? And is it possible that we're all ideological, whether we know it or not? Leor Zmigrod is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of The Ideological Brain. Her book makes the case that our political beliefs aren't just beliefs. They're also neurological signatures, written into our neurons and reflexes, and over time those signatures change our brains. Zmigrod's point isn't that 'brain is destiny,' but she is saying that our biology and our beliefs are interconnected in important ways. I invited Zmigrod onto The Gray Area to talk about the biological roots of belief and whether something as complicated as ideology is reducible to the brain in this way. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What is ideology? How are you defining it? I think ideology has two components. One is a very fixed doctrine, a set of descriptions about the world that's very absolutist, that's very black and white, and that is very resistant to evidence. An ideology will always have a certain kind of causal narrative about the world that describes what the world is like and also how we should act within that world. It gives prescriptions for how we should act, how we should think, how we should interact with other people. But that's not the end of the story. To think ideologically is both to have this fixed doctrine and also to have a very fixed identity that influences how you judge everyone. And that fixed identity stems from the fact that every ideology, every doctrine, will have believers and nonbelievers. So when you think ideologically, you're really embracing those rigid identity categories and deciding to exclusively affiliate with people who believe in your ideology and reject anyone who doesn't. The degree of ideological extremity can be mapped onto how hostile you are to anyone with differing beliefs, whether you're willing to potentially harm people in the name of your ideology. You write, 'Not all stories are ideologies and not all forms of collective storytelling are rigid and oppressive.' How do you tell the difference? How do you, for instance, distinguish an ideology from a religion? Is there room for a distinction like that in your framework? What I think about often is the difference between ideology and culture. Because culture can encompass eccentricities; it can encompass deviation, different kinds of traditions or patterns from the past, but it's not about legislating what one can do or one can't do. The moment we detect an ideology is the moment when you have very rigid prescriptions about what is permissible and what is not permissible. And when you stop being able to tolerate any deviation, that's when you've moved from culture, which can encompass a lot of deviation and reinterpretations, to ideology. How do you test for cognitive flexibility versus rigidity? In order to test someone's cognitive rigidity or their flexibility, one of the most important things is not just to ask them, because people are terrible at knowing whether they're rigid or flexible. The most rigid thinkers will tell you they're fabulously flexible, and the most flexible thinkers will not know it. So that's why we need to use these unconscious assessments, these cognitive tests and games that tap into your natural capacity to be adaptable or to resist change. One test to do this is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is a card-sorting game where people are presented with a deck of cards that they need to sort. And initially, they don't know what the rule that governs the game is, so they try and figure it out. And quickly, they'll realize that they should match the cards in their deck according to their color. So they'll start putting a blue card with a blue card, a red card with a red card, and they'll get affirmation that they're doing it. They start enacting this rule, adopting it, applying it again and again and again. And after a while, unbeknownst to them, the rule of the game changes and suddenly this color rule doesn't work anymore. That's the moment of change that I'm most interested in because some people will notice that change and they will adapt. They will then go looking for a different rule, and they'll quickly figure out that they should actually sort the cards according to the shape of the objects on the card and they'll follow this new rule. Those are very cognitively flexible individuals. But there are other people who will notice that change and they will hate it. They will resist that change. They will try to say that it never happened, and they'll try to apply the old rule, despite getting negative feedback. And those people that really resist the change are the most cognitively rigid people. They don't like change. They don't adapt their behavior when the evidence suggests that they do. So if someone struggles to switch gears in a card-sorting game, that says something about their comfort with change and ambiguity in general. And someone who struggles with change and ambiguity in a card game will probably also have an aversion to something like pluralism in politics because their brain processes that as chaotic. Is that a fair summary of the argument? Yeah, broadly. People who resist that change, who resist uncertainty, who like things to stay the same, when the rules change. They really don't like it. Often that translates into the most cognitively rigid people, people who don't like pluralism, who don't like debate. But that can really coexist on both sides of the political spectrum. When we're talking about diversity, that can be a more politicized concept, and you can still find very rigid thinkers being very militant about certain ideas that we might say are progressive. So it's quite nuanced. It's easy to understand why being extremely rigid would be a bad thing. But is it possible to be too flexible? If you're just totally unmoored and permanently wide open and incapable of settling on anything, that seems bad in a different way, no? What you're talking about is a kind of immense persuadability, but that's not exactly flexibility. There is a distinction there because being flexible is about updating your beliefs in light of credible evidence, not necessarily adopting a belief just because some authority says so. It's about seeing the evidence and responding to it. Focusing on rigidity does make a lot of sense, but is there a chance you risk pathologizing conviction? How do you draw the line between principled thinking and dogmatic thinking? It's not about pathologizing conviction, but it is about questioning what it means to believe in an idea without being willing to change your mind on it. And I think that there is a very fine line between what we call principles and what we call dogmas. This gets particularly thorny in the moral domain. No one wants to be dogmatic, but it's also hard to imagine any kind of moral clarity without something like a fixed commitment to certain principles or values. And what often happens is if we don't like someone's values, we'll call them extremists or dogmatic. But if we like their values, we call them principled. Yeah, and that's why I think that a psychological approach to what it means to think ideologically helps us escape from that kind of slippery relativism. Because then it's not just about, Oh, where is someone relative to us on certain issues on the political spectrum? It's about thinking, Well, what does it mean to resist evidence? There is a delicate path there where you can find a way to have a moral compass — maybe not the same absolutist moral clarity that ideologies try to convince you exists, but you can have a morality without having really dogmatic ideologies. How much of our rigid thinking is just about our fear of uncertainty? Ideologies are our brains' way of solving the problem of uncertainty in the world because our brains are these incredible predictive organs. They're trying to understand the world, looking for shortcuts wherever possible because it's very complicated and very computationally expensive to figure out everything that's happening in the world. Ideologies kind of hand that to you on a silver plate and they say, Here are all the rules for life. Here are all rules for social interaction. Here's a description of all the causal mechanisms for how the world works. There you go. And you don't need to do that hard labor of figuring it out all on your own. That's why ideologies can be incredibly tempting and seductive for our predictive brains that are trying to resolve uncertainty, that are trying to resolve ambiguities, that are just trying to understand the world in a coherent way. It's a coping mechanism. In the book, you argue that every worldview can be practiced extremely and dogmatically. I read that, and I just wondered if it leaves room for making normative judgments about different ideologies. Do you think every ideology is equally susceptible to extremist practices? I sometimes get strong opposition from people saying, Well, my ideology is about love. It's about generosity or about looking after others. The idea is that these positive ideologies should be immune from dogmatic and authoritarian ways of thinking. But this research isn't about comparing ideologies as these big entities represented by many people. I'm asking if there are people within all these ideologies who are extremely rigid. And we do see that every ideology can be taken on militantly. Not every ideology is equally violent or equally quick to impose rules on others, but every ideology that has this very strong utopian vision of what life and the world should be, or a very dystopian fear of where the world is going, all of those have a capacity to become extreme. How do you think about causality here? Are some people just biologically prone to dogmatic thinking, or do they get possessed by ideologies that reshape their brain over time? This is a fascinating question, and I think that causality goes both ways. I think there's evidence that there are preexisting predispositions that propel some people to join ideological groups. And that when there is a trigger, they will be the first to run to the front of the line in support of the ideological cause.
The Citizen
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
World Book Day: Best new book releases to add to your reading list
There's a new book waiting for you! This World Book Day, with the theme 'Read Your Way,' readers are invited not only to pick up a new book but also to open their minds in the process. As highlighted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this theme encourages individuals, especially children, to embrace the joy of reading by choosing books that resonate with them. Whether you're curious about how the brain works, looking for business inspiration, or seeking a recipe that brings comfort, there's a new book waiting for you. These fresh reads have something for everyone. ALSO READ: Jo Watson's the Queen of steam books Best new book releases to add to your reading list The Ideological Brain by Dr Leor Zmigrod This book delves into the neuroscience of belief systems and radicalisation. Dr Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge-trained academic dubbed a trailblazer in 'political neuroscience', uses her research to explore how ideologies shape not just opinions, but our very brain structures. Based on over 30 peer-reviewed studies, Dr Zmigrod shows how rigid thinking contributes to extreme ideologies. She encourages readers to avoid fixed beliefs and be open-minded in today's divided world. This book urges readers to think carefully about how beliefs are formed and how they can be changed. Entrepreneurship is Not for Everyone! Is It for You? by Lerato Bodibe Serial entrepreneur and tech innovator, Lerato Bodibe, will release his first book, Entrepreneurship is Not for Everyone!, this May. The book offers a candid look at what it really takes to build a business in today's world. Drawing from his own experiences, from growing up in QwaQwa to starting ROCVEST and the fintech platform ScheduPay, Bodibe shares valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey. The book also reflects his passion for helping South African youth. His foundation recently supported a young golfer from Welkom, covering school fees and providing equipment, showing his belief that with the right help, anything is possible. Food Trail South Africa by Warren Mendes In Food Trail South Africa, chef Warren Mendes takes readers on a tasty journey across the country. The cookbook, based on his travel series, features a mix of traditional recipes and new twists, gathered from markets, kitchens, and communities. With training from Le Cordon Bleu and experience co-producing the Australian TV series, Mendes encourages home cooks to explore South African food and proudly recreate these dishes at home. I Am Lovely and Dark by Ntombi Meso On World Book Day, 23 April 2025, multi-award-winning broadcaster and DJ Ntombi Meso makes her debut as an author with I Am Lovely and Dark, a children's book about self-love and identity. The story follows Kayise, a young girl learning to embrace her dark skin. Through Kayise's journey, Meso shares an empowering message about self-worth in a world where diverse representation in children's books is still limited. NOW READ: 'It's time I shared my full capabilities': Dineo Ranaka to launch a new talk show
New York Times
31-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
This Is Your Brain on Politics
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.
