Latest news with #TheIdeologicalBrain:TheRadicalScienceofFlexibleThinking
New European
29-04-2025
- Politics
- New European
Everyday Philosophy: Inside the minds of extremists
What motivated Abedi's vicious assaults in prison is unclear, but his earlier murders were, in the words of the sentencing judge: 'to advance the cause of Islamism; a matter distinct from and abhorrent to the vast majority of those who follow the Islamic faith.' On Wednesday, Salman Rushdie's attacker Hadi Matar was to have been sentenced for attempted murder, but that has been adjourned to May 16. Hashem Abedi, who helped plan and prepare the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing in which 22 people were killed and 264 wounded, attacked three prison officers using hot oil and improvised knives at HMP Frankland a few weeks ago. Two officers are in hospital with severe stab wounds. Abedi, already serving a minimum of 55 years, is unlikely ever to be released. Tabloids describe Matar, Abedi and other ideologically driven terrorists as monsters, manifestations of pure evil, or as zombie-like products of indoctrination, but we urgently need a better account than that. In her recently published The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, Leor Zmigrod attempts one. Her focus is the causes of cognitive rigidity and extremism. She describes how immersion in an ideology can reshape an individual's brain. As a political neuroscientist, she draws on psychological, social, and neuroscientific research. Rigid ideological thinkers commit to narratives about the world that explain and confirm their approach. These deliver clear rules about how they should behave. Counter-evidence is invisible to them. Typically, they surround themselves with a community of like-minded believers who reinforce their prejudices and give them a sense of belonging and self-worth. They don't adapt their views in the light of evidence because they already know the truth: it's confirmed everywhere. As Zmigrod puts it: 'Ideologies provide easy solutions to our queries, scripts that we can follow, groups to which we belong. Guiding our thoughts and actions, ideologies are the shortcuts to our desire to understand the world and be understood back.' From within an ideology, everything is neatly ordered, everything is as you expect it to be. Hannah Arendt observed that ideological thinking 'proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere else in reality'. Once you've settled on some unrevisable axioms, the consequences follow with a terrible logic. Not all rigid thinkers end up as terrorists, but a small percentage do, with devastating consequences. People with a highly rigid mindset don't just treat evidence differently, they also perceive and remember differently. Zmigrod cites experiments in which children were told a story. When asked to recall what happened, those identified by other tests as at the rigid end of the spectrum often invented details, such as undesirable traits for characters from different ethnic groups. Their memories of the story made it consistent with their biases. In contrast, the more 'liberal'-minded children recalled events with greater accuracy. What causes such rigidity? Unravelling the direction of cause and effect is a complex chicken-and-egg task. Zmigrod has discovered that the brains of the most cognitively rigid have lower concentrations of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex (crudely, the brain's decision-making centre), and more in areas that control rapid instincts. This is something that is influenced by genes. However, Zmigrod cautions, there's no 'dogmatic gene'. The interactions between different genes is complex and expression of particular genes is not predetermined: it depends on multiple factors, including, of course, experience, and exposure to ideologies. Not everyone is equally at risk: some individuals are especially susceptible. 'There are gradations in vulnerability and recognising this continuity is crucial,' Zmigrod explains. Vulnerable people's immersion in the world of an ideology changes their brain structures and reinforces and rewards dangerous patterns of thought. That doesn't absolve them of responsibility, but their brains chemically reinforce what an ideology is telling them. Most of us share some patterns of thought with rigid thinkers in some spheres. We are all somewhere on that spectrum, but our position is not fixed. At times of stress, for example, people become more dogmatic in their thinking; when less stressed they become more flexible. Once seduced by an ideology, however, the force of the downward spiral with its patterns of reinforcement can be hard to resist, and for some all but impossible without help. Ideologies, Zmigrod acknowledges, are 'terrifyingly alluring'. Our only hope lies in fostering critical and flexible thinking in
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Ideology May Not Be What You Think but How You're Wired
So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, 'The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,' Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. What is ideology? It's a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it's not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules. You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that? Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something. There's also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue — and many ideologies will try to tell you — that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally. I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good. Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain? Remarkably, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, like whether they championed conformity and obedience or play and imagination. When children were told a story about new pupils at a fictional school and asked to recount the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children. Liberal children tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story; their memories possessed greater fidelity to the story as it was originally told. In contrast, children who scored highly on prejudice strayed from the story; they highlighted or invented undesirable traits for the characters from ethnic minority backgrounds. So, the memories of the most ideologically-minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases. At the same time, there was also a tendency to occasionally parrot single phrases and details, rigidly mimicking the storyteller. Are people who are prone to ideology taking in less information? Are they processing it differently? The people most prone to ideological thinking tend to resist change or nuance of any kind. We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For instance, in one test, we ask them to sort playing cards by various rules, like suit or color. But suddenly they apply the rule and it doesn't work. That's because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule. The people who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, and so when there's evidence the rules have changed, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they encounter the change, they resist it. They try to apply the old rule even though it doesn't work anymore. In one study you conducted, you found that ideologues and nonideologues appear to have fundamental differences in their brains' reward circuitry. Can you describe your findings? In my experiments I've found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains. Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences. In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors. For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo. What do you make of this? Some scientists have interpreted these findings as reflecting a natural affinity between the function of the amygdala and the function of conservative ideologies. Both revolve around vigilant reactions to threats and the fear of being overpowered. But why is the amygdala larger in conservatives? Do people with a larger amygdala gravitate toward more conservative ideologies because their amygdala is already structured in a way that is more receptive to the negative emotions that conservatism elicits? Or can immersion in a certain ideology alter our emotional biochemistry in a way that leads to structural brain changes? The ambiguity around these results reflects a chicken-and-egg problem: Do our brains determine our politics, or can ideologies change our brains? If we're wired a certain way, can we change? You have agency to choose how passionately you adopt these ideologies or what you reject or what you don't. I think we all can shift in terms of our flexibility. It's obviously harder for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities toward rigid thinking, but that doesn't mean that it's predetermined or impossible to change.
