Neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod has a saying: “demography is not destiny.” She came up with it to counter what she says is a misconception: that people’s ideologies are shaped by their cultural identities.
Zmigrod’s research suggests otherwise: that the biological makeup of the human brain makes it uniquely susceptible to ideological suggestion. The better we understand that, she says, the better we can understand how and why so many are compelled by extremist political movements.
Zmigrod explains the science behind all this in her new book, “The Ideological Brain,” on The Show.
Full conversation
LEOR ZMIGROD: It tries to understand the world, to predict the world, to understand the past, the present and the future, right? Because that's the way in which we can be successful in living in the world. We want a kind of accurate representation of the reality which we navigate. And that is a property of the brain that makes us incredibly intelligent, incredibly successful as a species, but it can also lead to a temptation for narratives that explain the world for us.
And so that's why there is a kind of magnetism between what our brains typically do when they're at their best and what ideology is satisfying what they offer in return, which are these really compelling narratives about the world, but the problem is that those narratives can lead us astray in many ways, and they can even change the bodies of the believers in ways that can sometimes be toxic.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes, and this strikes me as this really important subtlety, which is that it's not that certain people based on what kind of government they live under or where in the world they are, what race or gender they are, or whatever, are predisposed to ideology. It's that the brain and ideology have this magnetic relationship.
ZMIGROD: Exactly. And so we can understand why all of us can be really prone to embracing ideologies to a kind of passionate degree, but by looking at the brains of people who are highly dogmatic and highly ideological, I've been also able to see, well, which people, which kinds of brains are the most likely to run towards an ideology when it comes around, you know, and to embrace it in the most extreme and passionate way.
DINGMAN: And if I'm not mistaken here, what you're referring to is this notion of cognitive flexibility, right?
ZMIGROD: Yeah, so a lot of my research has looked at this trait called cognitive flexibility or on the other side of the spectrum, cognitive rigidity.
And one kind of test that I use to measure this is called the Wisconsin card sorting test, where people are sorting cards according to a rule which they gradually learn. So they gradually learned that when they match a red card with another red card, they'll get a really satisfying positive response from the game and they'll get points, and so they start kind of matching cards according to their color, a blue card with a blue card, a green card with a green card, and so they're playing the game, they figured out this role, they're applying this habit.
And then without the participants knowing, the rule of the game changes. And some of us, when we encounter evidence that maybe we should change our behavior and look for a new rule, we will adapt, right? We will look and say, well, actually maybe I should match the cards according to the shape, like, you know, put stars with stars and cards that have squares with other cards that have squares, and we'll figure out a new rule and change our behavior.
But other people, when they encounter the change, they will really resist, and they'll actually apply the old color rule again, even though all the evidence suggests that they should change their behavior, and those are the most cognitively rigid people.
And what's interesting, as you can tell, this task, this game has nothing to do with politics at all, right? It's just a game. But the way people play this game really predicts their ideologies.
DINGMAN: And if I'm not mistaken, you found that the more cognitively rigid someone is, the more likely they are to resonate with an extreme political point of view. Which might seem obvious, but there's some nuance there, right?
ZMIGROD: Exactly, because one of the almost surprising findings is that actually people who tend to be on the far right and on the far left are both characterized by this cognitive rigidity, so they're actually maybe more similar than they'd like to admit from a psychological perspective, you know.
DINGMAN: I'm sure they would hate to hear that.
ZMIGROD: They might hate to hear that.
DINGMAN: Now Leor, earlier you also talked about how ideology can have these more physical effects.
ZMIGROD: Yeah, so one of the amazing things we're discovering through this new field called political neuroscience is how the biology of our brains, the biology of our nervous system, can also relate to how extremely we adopt an ideology or which kind of ideology we most gravitate towards.
So for instance, one, one of the findings that we're seeing repeatedly across hundreds of people in multiple countries is that people who tend to have right wing beliefs and ideologies tend to have a part of the brain called the amygdala. It tends to be enlarged. And what the amygdala is responsible for is it's responsible for our processing of negative emotions like threat, fear, disgust of things that are foreign.
And so there's this sense that maybe having this neurobiological disposition where you have a larger amygdala that tends to process and engage with those negative emotions, that could potentially lead you to be more likely to adopt a right wing ideology that perhaps also tends to echo those emotions and some of its rhetoric.
DINGMAN: Yes, and, and this seems like another really important delicate element of your research, which is that we don't yet know if politics impact psychology or the other way around, but what we do seem to know is that what you call the resource environment in which the brain experiences ideologies is critical here.
ZMIGROD: That's right. So I can give an example of one study that looked at this. In this experiment, they looked at how much people are willing to share a little pot of money of $10 that they have with the face of random strangers.
And for some of these participants, they made them feel like, oh, they only have $10. That's really not that much. And for other people, they made them feel like, oh my gosh, $10. That's a ton of money that you can share.
And when they were then invited to share that little pot of money with other strangers, with the faces of strangers, they saw that when people were in a condition where they felt that there wasn't enough to go around, their decisions about who to share their money with became more racially discriminatory.
And broadly, what we take away from this is that being in an environment and potentially in the political environment where it feels like there's not enough resources going around, that kind of brings out the most discriminatory in us, even without our knowledge.
DINGMAN: And this makes me think of a scrambling factor when we think of the resource environment, which is the internet.
ZMIGROD: Absolutely. When you think about what happens when you put brains that have all these psychological, even your biological sensitivities to taking an ideology to the extreme. And you put them on social media, which is an information environment designed to give them the most binary information, to give them the most, you know, the information that just confirms their beliefs, that doesn't challenge their beliefs.
And information that's really emotionally negative, right? To make you feel threatened, to make you feel like there isn't enough to go around for your tribe or your group, you're really putting potentially very vulnerable minds in a very radicalizing environment.
DINGMAN: Yeah, and I, I feel like you're also helping me understand something important here, Leor, which I think sometimes gets lost in these conversations when we think about social media, which is that what the social media company in question in the example you just gave is doing is not necessarily endorsing one particular ideology over another.
But rather reacting to the same neurological phenomenon that political ideologies react to, which is the brain's desire to find and then keep and predict future sources of order and identity.
ZMIGROD: Absolutely. And recognizing that, understanding how these ideological and digital settings, really exploit our greatest vulnerabilities. I think that, although that sounds quite negative, I think it can be quite empowering because we have a better understanding of how these processes are working on and through us and what we can do about it.
