These days, partisan divisions are so sharp that it can seem like people are experiencing a completely different reality. According to Leor Zmigrod, neuroscientists and political psychologists at the University of Cambridge, they are. In a new book, “The Brain of Ideology: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores new evidence that brain physiology and biology can help explain not only why brain physiology and biology are prone to ideology, but also how information is perceived and shared.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is ideology?
It's a story about how the world works and how it works. This could potentially be the social world or the natural world. But it's not just a story. It has a really strict prescription about how we should think, how to act, how to interact with others. Ideology condemns deviations from the rules set out.
You write that strict thinking is appealing. why is that?
Ideology meets the need to understand the world to explain it. And they meet our needs for our connection, our community, our sense of belonging to something.
There are also resource questions. Exploring the world is very cognitively expensive and seems to be the most efficient strategy simply by leveraging known patterns and rules. Also, many people argue, and many ideologies try to tell you – adhere to the rules is the only good way to live and live morally.
I actually come to it from a different perspective: ideology paralyzes the direct experience of the world. They narrow down to adapt our capabilities to the world, understand the evidence, and distinguish between reliable and reliable evidence. Ideology is rarely a good thing.
Q: The book describes research that shows ideological thinkers can become unreliable narrators. Can you explain it to me?
Surprisingly, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Frenkel Brunswick, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested levels of bias and authoritarianism, including whether he defended suitability and obedience, play and imagination. When children were told about new students at fictional schools and asked to tell stories later, there was a huge difference in how the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children.
Liberal children tended to remember more accurately the proportion of desirable and unwanted traits in the characters of the story. Their memories, as originally told, were greater faithful to the story. In contrast, children scored very well on prejudices that were lost from the story. They highlighted or invented unwanted features of characters from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Therefore, memories of the most ideologically aspirated children incorporated fiction that confirmed existing biases. At the same time, they tended to sternly mimic storytellers and parrot the occasional single phrases and details.
Does anyone have a tendency to incorporate less information with ideology? Do they handle it differently?
People who are prone to ideological thinking tend to resist all kinds of changes and nuances. You can test this with visual and verbal puzzles. For example, in one test, you ask them to sort cards by different rules, such as suits and colours. But all of a sudden they apply the rules and it doesn't work. That's because they're not known to them, so they changed the rules.
People who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, so if evidence changes the rules, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they encounter change, they resist it. They try to apply the old rules, even though it doesn't work anymore.
One study you have conducted found that ideologues and nonverbalism appear to have fundamental differences in the reward circuits in their brains. Could you explain your findings?
My experiments have shown that the most strict thinkers have genetic properties related to how dopamine is distributed in the brain.
Strict thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in the striatum. Therefore, our psychological vulnerability to rigid ideology may be based on biological differences.
In fact, people with different ideologies can see differences in the physical structure and function of the brain. This is especially pronounced in brain networks that cause reward, emotional processing and surveillance when an error is made.
For example, the size of the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that governs emotional processing, particularly fear, anger, disgust, danger, and threat, is related to whether it retains a more conservative ideology that justifies tradition and status quo.
What do you think of this?
Some scientists interpret these findings as reflecting the natural affinity between amygdala function and conservative ideological function. Both revolve around a vigilant response to a threat and a fear of overwhelming.
But why is the amygdala large for conservatives? Are people with the amygdala large enough to attract more conservative ideologies as they are already structured in ways that are more acceptable to the negative emotions that conservatism induced? Or can immerse yourself in a particular ideology change emotional biochemistry in ways that lead to structural brain changes?
Ambiguity regarding these results reflects the chicken and egg problem. Does our brain determine our politics, or can ideology change our brains?
Can I change it if it is wired in a specific way?
You have an agency that chooses to not adopt or reject these ideologies or not.
I think we can all change in terms of our flexibility. It is obviously difficult for those with genetic or biological vulnerability to rigid thinking, but that doesn't mean that it is either pre-changed or impossible.
