In a world that feels increasingly polarised, many of us know someone who has fallen into an extreme position on at least one topic.
At times, it can seem like chance. Who is and isn’t affected by an ideology often seems puzzlingly random.
But a new field of science – political neuroscience – is challenging that notion. Scientists are revealing that some of us may be more predisposed to extreme views than others. Biology, it seems, has a bigger role to play in how we view the world than you might think.
At the forefront of this nascent area of research is Dr Leor Zmigrod, a political psychologist and neuroscientist and author of The Ideological Brain, a radical science of susceptible minds.
Zmigrod sat down for a conversation with BBC Science Focus to discuss what she’s found out in her research, and, importantly, why choice still matters in a world where the physical make-up of our minds has influence over our views.
What exactly is political neuroscience?
These are two words – politics and neuroscience – that many people would not have expected to come together, but it’s actually a really exciting field that’s emerged in the last 10 years or so, using methods from neuroscience and experimental psychology to understand people’s beliefs and ideologies.
In my work, I try to understand why some brains are more susceptible to extreme ideologies than others – and how we can uncover previously hidden insights about that vulnerability.
Previously, we could only rely on the observable behaviour of people or self-reports. Now, with neuroscience, we can delve inside the brain and see what is really happening in there.
Many of us think that someone who has succumbed to an extreme ideology has become ‘brainwashed’. What is this characterisation missing?
The image that we have of someone being brainwashed is of something being erased or taken away. But when we think of someone being thoughtless or mindless as they’re being radicalised, we’re relinquishing responsibility or agency; we’re just saying ‘oh, they’ve gotten swept up in something’.
These metaphors, although they can be simple and convenient, are not really scientifically grounded. Which can be misleading because they steer us away from thinking about what is actually happening to a brain when it becomes immersed in a really rigid, potentially extreme ideology.
Sometimes we think there is just universal conformity and obedience, and that all of us in the wrong circumstances would become ideologically extreme. But when we look back at classic experiments in social psychology, this isn’t the case.
For example, the Milgram experiments in the 1960s showed how people tend to obey instructions and even harm innocent people when they’re told to. The conclusion we often hear from that is that everyone tends to obey and that it’s within their human nature.
Actually, when you look back at the data for those experiments, a sizeable minority of people did not conform and obey the instructions to harm others. So it’s not true that all of us are equally susceptible to those kinds of ideological pressures.
What are the key traits that dictate someone’s susceptibility to extreme ideologies? And how do you test for them?
I’ve run experiments with thousands of participants where I get them to play these neuropsychological games that tap into their psychological rigidity and flexibility.
Someone who’s a very rigid thinker tends to see the world in more binary terms – they struggle to adapt in the face of change and stick to one narrow mode of thinking rather than switching between ways of thinking.
To measure that, I give participants something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is an online game they play that requires them to sort cards according to a rule. So when they start playing, they’re not sure what the game is about, but they start matching cards together and quickly realise that when they match them according to colour, they get a positive reinforcement.
So they continue with that rule and the game reinforces their behaviour – it builds a kind of habit, a ritual, that feels really satisfying.
Then suddenly, after a while, the rule of the game changes, and I’m interested in that moment of change. Some people will notice that the evidence suggests that they may need to change the pattern of their behaviour and look for a new rule to sort the cards. They see that this digital world has changed and they adapt their behaviour in return.
But there are other people who, when they encounter that change, hate it. They want to reject the fact that the change has happened and stick to their old patterns of behaviour instead. Those are the more cognitively rigid thinkers.
As you can probably see, this task has nothing to do with politics or ideologies, but it allows us to test and quantify where a person is on the spectrum from a very flexible, adaptable thinker to a more rigid, unadaptable thinker.
Importantly, people really have no idea where they lie on this spectrum. Someone who’s very flexible might not know it, and someone who’s very rigid might think they’re amazingly flexible.
What I have found in my experiments is that people’s cognitive rigidity predicts their ideological and political rigidity. So, a person who tends to be rigid on this kind of neuropsychological task will also tend to adopt ideologies in a really passionate, extreme way. They’ll tend to be the most dogmatic thinkers and will reject evidence or alternative perspectives. Whenever someone doubts their opinions, they’ll feel that it’s a personal attack.
Meanwhile, someone who’s cognitively flexible can be more intellectually humble. They can accept that there are multiple interpretations of an event and understand that plurality is important.
When we then map this onto the political spectrum, you really see that cognitive rigidity predicts people with political extremeism on both sides – on the left and right.
That surprised even scientists because there has been a long-held assumption in what is known as the ‘rigidity of the right’ – that the political right is the side that tries to maintain tradition and the status quo. But actually, what really matters is how you believe in something, not what you believe.
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This is where political neuroscience gets really interesting because we can see the differences in the brains of people who are more fanatical than others.
I looked at the genetics of rigid thinking and found that there are particular genetic dispositions that affect how rigidly you think about the world. Specifically, I looked at how our genes are tied to how dopamine circulates and exists in the brain.
The most rigid thinkers, it turns out, have a particular kind of balance in dopamine in the areas of the brain known as the striatum – the area at the very centre of our brain, responsible for rewarding learning and instinctual response.
Typically, a rigid thinker will have a higher concentration of dopamine in that area and a lower concentration in their prefrontal cortex, which is the area responsible for high-level, sophisticated decision making. This is broadly at rest, as dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates in all sorts of ways.
What we can get from this is a kind of genetic profile for someone who tends to be a rigid thinker, which starts to bring together all these disciplines of genetics and biology and shows us that we’re not all equally susceptible, and that part of this could be down to our genes.
Does that mean we have no choice over whether we’re going to become extremists or not?
Sometimes when people hear there’s a genetic component, they become nervous that this means it’s predetermined – that if you have a particular combination of genes, you’re doomed to a dogmatic way of thinking about the world. That’s not the case.
These genetic predispositions are potentials. They’re probabilities, but they’re not determined outcomes. What’s interesting about this research is that it shows that although we can have biological and psychological traits that put us at risk of thinking in extreme ways, they’re not our destiny. We can actually choose our beliefs. There’s a lot of freedom and agency there, too.
What science can do here is equip us with the tools to think about how we can foster the kind of psychological resilience in ourselves and others to reduce the risk of engaging with authoritarian, extreme ideologies when they come along.
New extremisms will continue to mutate and enter our societies, but by focusing on what individuals can do to change their perspectives on the world, we can help make those perspectives more flexible, open, and receptive to evidence.
I think that’s a hugely empowering thing. Now, there’s no recipe or formula for how to become more flexible, but there are broad themes and guidelines we can think about.
We’d like to be receptive to alternative perspectives and to come together with a shared understanding of our humanity. For each of us, that will mean reckoning with our own vulnerabilities and learning to lead lives that are more imaginative, more creative and more expansive in how we see ourselves and others.
Ultimately, I’m an optimist. Despite all these new currents radicalising people and mobilising them to violence, I think there’s a lot of hope because we all have brains that can change themselves and that can become more flexible. We just need to choose that.
To hear the full interview with Leor Zmigrod, check out the Instant Genius Podcast.
About our expert
Leor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and neuroscientist investigating why some brains are susceptible to extreme ideologies and how minds can break free from rigid dogmas. Her first book, The Ideological Brain, is available now from Viking (Penguin Random House) and Henry Holt & Co (Macmillan), alongside over 15 translations.
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