Nowadays they are so acute partisan divisions that it may seem that people have completely different realities. Perhaps in reality they are, according to Leor Zmigrod, neuroscientist and political psychologist of the University of Cambridge. In a new book, “the ideological brain: the radical science of flexible thought”, Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help to explain not only because people are prone to ideology, but how they perceive and share information.
This conversation has been modified for clarity and brevity.
What is ideology?
It is a narrative on how the world works and how it should work. This could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: it has really rigid prescriptions on how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.
Write that rigid thought can be tempting. Why?
Ideologies meet the need to try to understand the world to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for the community, only for the meaning we belong to something.
There is also a question of resources. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive and exploiting the well -known models and rules can be the most efficient strategy. In addition, many people support – and many ideologies will try to tell you – that adhere to the rules is the only good way to live and live morally.
In reality I come from a different perspective: ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They reduce our ability to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible tests and non -credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.
D: In the book, describe the research that demonstrates that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?
Surprisingly, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, otherwise Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist from the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and felt their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, as if they had supported compliance, obedience or game and imagination. When a story was told to the children on the new pupils in a school of imagination and asked to tell the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, unlike the liberal children.
Liberal children tended to remember more carefully the relationship between desirable and unwanted traits in the characters of history; Their memories possessed greater loyalty to history as it was originally told. On the contrary, the children who have marked a lot on prejudices have moved away from history; They highlighted or invented unwanted sections for ethnic minority background characters.
Therefore, the memories of the most ideological children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre -existing prejudices. At the same time, there was also a tendency to parrots and single details, strictly imitating the narrator.
Do people who are prone to ideology take less information? Are they elaborating it differently?
The people most inclined to ideological thought tend to resist the change or nuance of any kind. We can test it with visual and linguistic puzzles. For example, in a test, we ask them to order the game cards with various rules, such as the dress or color. But suddenly apply the rule and does not work. This is because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule.
People who tend to resist ideological thought are adaptable, and therefore when there are evidence that the rules have changed, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they meet the change, resist it. They try to apply the old rule even if it no longer works.
In a study you conducted, you discovered that ideologists and non -ideologues seem to have fundamental differences in the reward circuits of their brains. Can you describe your results?
In my experiments I discovered that the strictest thinkers have genetic provisions relating to how dopamine is distributed in their brain.
Rigid thinkers tend to have lower dopamine levels in their prefrontal cortex and higher dopamine levels in their striar, a key structure of the mesencephalon in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies can be based on biological differences.
In fact, we discover that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brain. This is particularly pronounced in the brain networks responsible for the reward, the elaboration of emotions and monitoring when we make mistakes.
For example, the dimensions of our amygdala-The almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, in particular the emotions shaded negatively as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threats is linked to the fact that we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and status quo.
What do you think of this?
Some scientists have interpreted these results as reflecting a natural affinity between the function of the amygdala and the function of conservative ideologies. Both revolve around the vigilant reactions to the threats and fear of being overwhelmed.
But why is the amygdala bigger in conservatories? Do people with a greater amygdala gravito towards more conservative ideologies because their amygdala is already structured in a more receptive way to the negative emotions that conservatism arouses? Or can immersion in a certain ideology alter our emotional biochemistry in a way that leads to structural changes in the brain?
The ambiguity around these results reflects a problem of chicken and eggs: do our brains determine our policy or can ideologies change our brain?
If we are wired in a certain way, can we change?
You have an agency to choose how passionately you adopt these ideologies or what you waste or what you don’t do.
I think we can all move in terms of flexibility. It is obviously more difficult for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities towards rigid thought, but this does not mean that it is predetermined or impossible to change.