Ideology may not be what you think, but how are you wired

So sharp are party divisions these days that it may seem like people to experience completely different realities. It may be in fact, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and a political psychologist at the University of Cambridge. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking”, Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that the physiology and brain biology helps to explain not only why people are prone to ideology, but how they perceive information.

This discussion has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is ideology?

It’s a narrative of how people work and how it should work. This could probably be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: it has really rigid recipes on how to think, how to act, how to interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its predicted rules.

You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is this?

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for the community, for a feeling that we belong to something.

There is also a resource question. The exploration of the world is truly well -known costly and just take advantage of well -known standards and rules may seem to be the most effective strategy. Also, many people argue – and many ideologies will try to tell you – that observance of rules is the only good way to live and live morally.

I really come to this from a different perspective: ideologies mumbled our immediate experience in the world. They limit our ability to adapt to the world, to understand the evidence, to distinguish between reliable evidence and not reliable evidence. Ideologies are rare, if ever, good.

Q: In the book, you describe the study showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?

It is noteworthy that we can observe this result in children. In the 1940s, otherwise Frankel-Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and examined their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, as if they were intended for compliance and obedience or play and imagination. When the children had told a story about young students in a fantastic school and asked to discover the story later, there were significant differences in what the most biased children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children.

Liberal children tend to more accurately recall the proportion of the desired and unwanted characteristics to the characters in history. Their memories had more faithful in history as originally said. On the contrary, the children who were particularly prejudice was frustrated by history. Emphasized or invented unwanted characteristics for characters from the background of ethnic minorities.

Thus, the memories of the most ideologically abused children incorporated fantasies that confirmed their prejudiced prejudices. At the same time, there was also a tendency to parrots and details of parrots, imitating the narrator rigidly.

People who are prone to ideology receive less information? Are they processing it differently?

People who are more prone to ideological thinking tend to resist the change or by the shade of any kind. We can try it with visual and linguistic puzzles. For example, in one test, we ask them to sort cards by playing with various rules, such as a suit or color. But suddenly they apply the rule and does not work. This is because, without knowing them, we changed the rule.

People who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, so when there are elements that have changed the rules, they change their behavior. The ideological thinkers, when they meet the change, resist it. They are trying to apply the old rule, even though it no longer works.

In a study, I found that ideologues and non -ideologues seem to have fundamental differences in their brain reward circuit. Can you describe your findings?

In my experiments I have found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic devices related to how dopamine is distributed in their minds.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower dopamine levels in their frontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their streak body, a basic structure of the middle brain in the reward system that controls our rapid instincts. Thus, our psychological vulnerabilities in rigid ideologies can be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in their natural structure and brain function. This is particularly intense in brain networks responsible for rewarding, emotion processing and monitoring when making errors.

For example, the magnitude of our almond-the almond structure that rules the processing of emotions, particularly negative, emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat-are consistent with whether we maintain more conservative ideologies.

What are you doing from that?

Some scientists have interpreted these findings as reflecting a natural affinity between the functioning of the tonsil and the function of conservative ideologies. Both revolve around the vigilance of reactions to threats and the fear of neutralization.

But why the almonds greater in the conservatives? Are people with greater gravity of almond to more conservative ideologies because their almond is already structured in a way that is more receptive to the negative emotions caused by conservatism? Or can the immersion in a particular ideology change our emotional biochemistry in a way that leads to structural changes in the brain?

Are the ambiguity around these results reflects a problem of chicken and eggs: do our brains determine our policy or do ideologies change our minds?

If we are wired in some way, can we change?

You have an agency to choose how passionate you are adopting these ideologies or what you are rejecting or what you do not do.

I think we can all move on our flexibility. It is obviously more difficult for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities to rigid thought, but that does not mean it is predetermined or impossible to change.