What if we could predict your politics with some brain scans? The political neuroscientist Dr Leor Zmigrod, the author of a compelling book called The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds, contends that it can be done.
Zmigrod has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020. Her book is, in some ways, the neuroscientific update of the 1950 sociology work, The Authoritarian Personality, by the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W Adorno and University of California, Berkeley researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford, an attempt to define the personality types most likely to succumb to fascism in the turmoil of the last century.
Frenkel-Brunswik is a heroine of Zmigrod’s. “She escaped Nazi Austria and moved to Berkeley to start this research on what makes even children have the potential for authoritarianism, even for fascism,” she says. “And so she started creating these massive questionnaires and handing them to out to every school in the Berkeley area, getting these young children to demonstrate where they lie on a spectrum of xenophobia and prejudice.”
Six decades later, Zmigrod was studying neuroscience and engaging in experiments in small, dark labs. “And I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I use all these [neuroscience] tools to study these questions about radicalisation?’ ... How is your brain affected by the ideologies you hold? What features of your brain and your personality and your cognition and maybe even your genetics, can affect what kinds of ideologies you’re predisposed to being attracted to?”
Initially she focused her research on religious radicalisation. “Young European adolescents were being pulled into Isis,” she says. “There were these questions of why were these particular people attracted to it? Then Brexit happened as I was preparing to launch this research, and suddenly it became clear to me that the ideologies I was going to deal with were much broader and much more mainstream.”
When Zmigrod refers to “ideological” thinking in her book she is, in general, defining this as “ideologically rigid” thinking. A core point in her work is that people who display cognitive inflexibility in tests mapping their ability to adjust to change also adhere to more rigid, radical and extreme ideologies. The “ideological brain” she has uncovered can be better understood in terms of “flexibility” and “rigidity” than traditional political terms like “right” and “left”.
“We’re actually seeing more of a rigidity of the extremes, where both on the political right and on the political left, people, when they’re given tasks that require flexible thinking, will struggle,” she says. “We see, really consistently across different psychological tasks, that people who are cognitively rigid tend to fall into some kind of ideological extreme, regardless of whether it’s left or right.”
These people can now be given brain scans which elicits a whole new realm of information that didn’t exist in the days of Else Frenkel-Brunswik. “What researchers around the world have started to discover is that people who adhere to different ideologies have brains that are slightly structured differently and function and react to the world differently.”
There are people who definitely want for there to be more conformity-minded, obedient kinds of citizens
— Dr Leor Zmigrod
She gives examples. “The amygdala, the centre in our brain that processes negative emotions such as fear and disgust and threat, is actually larger in people with conservative ideologies than people with liberal ideologies, which is fascinating.”
There is even some evidence of ideological predispositions on a genetic level. “What we discovered is that across thousands of participants, that people who have genetic markers that indicate that they have a greater amount of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex [the area of the brain that is responsible for high-level reasoning] and lower levels of general dopamine levels in their striatal regions, tend to be the most cognitively flexible. And the reverse: people who have it the other way around tend to be the most cognitively rigid people who struggle when environments change.
“So our genetics, affecting how our dopamine operates in each person’s brain, can affect how rigidly they process the world, which is fascinating and disturbing.”
Do people start out with these brain types or do they develop them over time? “There’s evidence that we have these psychological and cognitive predispositions that shape which ideologies we’re attracted to, but that also being immersed in a very rigid ideological framework is something that can affect our personalities,” she says. “It is a chicken or egg thing ... Either people with bigger amygdalas are attracted to more conservative ideologies or, if you spend a lifetime in conservative ideologies and environments, that has an impact on how your brain is structured.”
More work needs to be done to establish the actual dynamic, she says. “I have joined a longitudinal study that has been following people from when they were children and they’ve been measuring their brains and personalities,” she says. “I have to wait about 20 years before we can disentangle that.”
There is something inherently disturbing about the notion that our politics are less a product of reason than a consequence of biological processes. Zmigrod understands the discomfort.
“I think that a lot of people who, when they think about those big ideologies that they either might be committed to or they might be opposed to, whether it’s Marxism or patriarchy or any of these narrowly defined ideologies, feel like it’s in the air around us, that it affects everything. It’s in our culture. It’s in our language. It’s in our thoughts, but in a very vague way. I think they have an antagonism to the idea that actually maybe it’s something that we can measure and look at on the individual level ... But my hope is that the science is received in a way that shows how actually understanding the ways in which ideologies can in some way infiltrate our cognitive habits, even our neurobiology, should really just empower us to critique ideologies ... I don’t think it opposes a sociological reading or a historical one. I hope it adds this additional lens that helps us understand it all better.”
In moments of stress, we kind of rigidify and narrow and preserve our cognitive resources, and in other times, we can be more exploratory, more imaginative, more open
— Dr Leor Zmigrod
What are the consequences of her discoveries? “I think it allows us to understand people’s susceptibilities better, because we can see that actually they not necessarily just gravitating towards extreme and sometimes hateful ideas on a whim,” she says. “There is something about the structure of those ideologies, the logic of those ways of thinking, that particularly appeals to them because of this more general way in which they understand and process and problem-solve the world.”
As is probably clear from this interview, Zmigrod has a preference for flexible thinking over rigidity. “I think that the research suggests that being a more flexible thinker does give you a more direct access to sensation ... your perceptual and sensory apparatus is less ... constrained or numbed than when you have a very dogmatic way of thinking,” she says. “As a psychologist I value a kind of freedom of thought and elasticity of thought. And so if you value that, I think it’s hard to see a rigid ideological way of being as being a good thing.”
Others might look at the data and take a different position, that there is something admirable in having fixed and rigid belief systems. “Absolutely,” she says. “There are people who definitely want for there to be more conformity-minded, obedient kinds of citizens. Those are the most controllable citizens and the ones where you can probably profit from the most, both economically and politically ... Many people think [rigidity is] a very good thing and the only way to be moral and good.”
Would she like to see a world with less dogmatic, extreme thinking? “I think that would be a world where people can be a lot more authentic and free.”
People can change, she says. “A person’s flexibility or rigidity is not just fixed throughout their lifetime, predetermined at birth by biology,” she says. “People’s flexibility can increase and decrease throughout our lives. In moments of stress, we kind of rigidify and narrow and preserve our cognitive resources, and in other times, we can be more exploratory, more imaginative, more open. I think understanding the dynamics of how those predispositions interact with environments and situations gives us a better understanding of how people fall into these extreme worldviews and also how they can come out.
“If we maybe cultivate a general psychological flexibility in the way in which we approach the entire world and our everyday problems, that will also translate into a more tolerant, open-minded evidence-receptive way of approaching politics.”
Does the idea of someone, whether a rigid extremist or a flexible moderate, socially engineering or medicating certain types of brain away worry her?
“Could this science be used by malicious agents? It’s a question I’ve been thinking for a long time about, because I think any scientist should be so careful about the ethics of what you publish and the science you put out there ... I think it would be difficult to truly use the science for nefarious reasons, because the science shows how complex it all is. It wouldn’t be that simple that you could medicate people towards certain belief systems. But I also completely see what you’re saying, in that there’s a slight vulnerability there. When we’re exposing how this mechanism works, are you giving someone levers to press and to push?
“To some extent, I think that that is already the case when you see how authoritarian leaders use rhetoric and emotion. They are targeting these particular ways in which people respond. Stalin talked about ideological logic and rhetoric as this irresistible force that people are really drawn to. I think it would be difficult to use the science and make things worse than they are.”
What would she like to see people do with this information? “What I hope that people take away from this is that the stakes of adopting really narrow, rigid, dogmatic ideologies are so much higher than we previously thought. Because it’s not just about political debate, it’s about forces happening within you and the kind of human being that you are, biologically and psychologically ... I hope it’s a basis for people to think really critically about the ideologies that they embrace ... Maybe this is an invitation to rethink pride in having very passionate, narrow principles, to realise what it might do to your body and how that might be reflected in your brain.”
[ Obedience to authority: most of us would follow orders to do terrible thingsOpens in new window ]
Has there been any interest in her research from political figures? “Not any nefarious politicians that you might be scared of, I think,” she says. “People thinking about how to counter extremism and how to support people who are at risk are interested in this research because it helps us paint a much more comprehensive picture of what makes someone at risk and what can maybe help them get out of those kinds of extreme cycles. I can’t wait to see how the field evolves. Even in just the next decade I think it’ll be really interesting.”
The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds by Dr Leor Zmigrod is published by Viking
