Latest news with #TheIdeologicalBrain
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.
