Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

Your book, The Ideological Brain, explores how our beliefs are shaped not just by the world around us, but by what’s happening inside our heads, too. What first sparked your interest in studying the neuroscience of ideology?

Dr Leor Zmigrod

I came to this topic as a trained neuroscientist and psychologist, where people from the outside world come into this dark lab for me to put electrodes on their heads to measure their brain. At the same time, when I was starting thinking about this book about 10 years ago in 2015, it was a politically tumultuous time. There were so many new ideological currents on the rise, and I had a suspicion that it could be fascinating to use the tools I had acquired from studying neuroscience and cognitive science to look at how we respond and process political information, how we form beliefs, what changes them, what doesn’t change them. I wanted to understand how our brains respond to ideological convictions.

At the time, I was fascinated by religious fundamentalist radicalization, especially that of young British girls joining ISIS. I was interested in what psychological—maybe even biological—traits attract people to authoritarian and closed world views. As I started this research, the Brexit referendum had happened. And then the first Trump presidential election in the U.S. It was a perfectly troubling moment for authoritarianism all over the world. That’s when I began my work.

Daphne

Before we get into climate change and ideological thinking, I want to ask more broadly: How do you define ideological thinking, and why do you think it holds such power over us, even in our supposedly rational, information-rich age?

Leor

It’s fascinating because ideology is such a loaded word. Many of us use it, but few of us know how to define it. People often think of it as a broad system of beliefs. But when I think about it from a psychological standpoint, it’s a much more specific way of thinking that we can see, measure, assess. From my research, there are two components that are the most emblematic of what it means to think ideologically. One is to have a very fixed doctrine about the world. This doctrine will typically be a set of absolutist black-and-white descriptions for how the world works, and these very strong prescriptions for how people ought to think and act and interact with others or with the environment or with their past.

So, to passionately embrace ideology is to adopt a very fixed, rigid doctrine. But that’s often not the whole story. In addition to following a fixed doctrine, ideological thinking abides by exclusive identity categories: us and them. Someone who thinks in this way tends to have hostility toward anyone who thinks differently; they tend to exclusively affiliate with people who share their worldview. These people, when triggered, can also become quite hostile—and sometimes violent—toward anyone who doesn’t believe in the same thing or who might threaten their ideological mission in some way.

This combination makes ideological thinkers very resistant to evidence because their doctrine is a sealed universe of ideas, rules, and rituals, especially because they are unlikely to be open to any evidence that contradicts or adds nuance to that worldview. So much of this comes down to how you treat people. Do you dehumanize anyone who thinks differently to you? Or do you continue to see them as full human beings?

Daphne

We’re seeing a sharp rise in far-right ideologies, and within that, anti-climate radicalization—from conspiracy-driven denialism to coordinated attacks on climate scientists and activists. From a psychological and neurological perspective, what makes ideological thinking so appealing at this moment?

Leor

I’d like to reframe that question to discuss what makes a person likely or attracted to evidence-resistant worldviews. We often insult these people by calling them “thoughtless” or “mindless” or “deluded” in some way. What we might be trying to say, however, is that those people are irrational; that they’re not using reason; that they’re driven purely by their emotions and getting swept up in conspiratorial thinking. But my research in The Ideological Brain found that it’s not irrationality that drives people toward authoritarian ideologies. It’s a very specific kind of logic that appeals to them. 

Most ideologies contend with a fight for resources. In patriarchal or sexist ideologies, that fight is framed around gender. Racist ideologies make it a fight between races. A lot of conspiratorial climate ideologies do the same; they frame our existence as a fight between the environment and humanity. They see the two as segregated, and they want humanity to triumph over nature. With that premise in mind, there is a—flawed, problematic, dangerous—logic to even the most pugnacious climate denialist ideologies. Rather than dismiss them, we have to recognize that logic in order to understand where those people are coming from. That’s the only way to promote an understanding culture that invites people into conversations about climate change and encourages the necessary actions on both a personal and a societal level.

My job is to trace these distortions of reason and emotion to understand why those ideologies are so appealing. Because the people who subscribed to climate denialist ideologies believe that they are basing their beliefs on evidence and on information. It’s just that their sources and their thresholds for what counts as evidence have shifted. 

Daphne

Are there particular biological or emotional traits that make people more neurologically vulnerable to adopting rigid or authoritarian belief systems? How much of this is predetermined from, say, birth?

Leor

A lot of my research has looked into the traits that make some people more susceptible to rigid authoritarian ideologies and the traits that make other people more resilient. One of the traits that we found make people most vulnerable to thinking in these dogmatic evidence-avoiding ways is cognitive rigidity. I’ve done many experiments and studies, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, on thousands of participants to understand how people’s levels of cognitive rigidity propel them towards ideological rigidity, too.

Across many of these ideologies—whether political, nationalistic, religious, or social—the people who are most cognitively rigid in how they solve problems unrelated to politics tend to be the most ideologically dogmatic, the most willing to endorse violence in the name of their ideological cause. And that’s true not only of the political right, but also the political left. You also see that people who are extremely attached to leftist ideological groups can display that same kind of cognitive rigidity.

That is really interesting because sometimes we assume—and for a long time the discipline has assumed—that the political right is the side that tries to avoid change; the side that tries to keep the status quo; the side of tradition. And so, surely, that should be the side that is rigid. But the picture is much more complicated. You can also have rigid thinkers on the extreme left. I think recognizing that is important, especially for progressive movements committed to progress and positive change in the world, because it acknowledges that the extreme left can also bring cognitive rigidity to the table.

Daphne

In the last decade, alongside the rise of far-right ideologies, we’ve also seen the pervasiveness of social media. And I wonder: How do you think social media and online echo chambers have shaped the way our brains hold onto strong beliefs? How might it affect cognitive rigidity, for instance, when we’re exposed to the same views over and over again?

Leor

That’s a really perceptive question. Because when you take minds that are particularly cognitively rigid—those that try to avoid ambiguity, avoid nuance, prefer things in black and white, and resist change—and place them in social media environments with algorithms that are almost precisely designed to deliver the most binary, personalized information that confirms their worldviews, you’re putting very vulnerable minds into a very radicalizing environment. And that’s not only true for people who are rigid, it’s true for everyone.

When you understand that these environments prey on our cognitive vulnerabilities—our biases toward confirmation, our preference for simplified narratives of the world, for stories that align with specific identity categories and preferences—you start to see just how dangerous the moment we are in is. The more our social media environments become deregulated, the more they become divorced from any attempt at truth. And that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing over the past four or five months: a technological shift away from safeguards against misinformation. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite. Tech and social media companies seem more motivated than ever to let misinformation persist and even go viral. That’s incredibly dangerous for every kind of mind. Even the most rational thinker can become radical and extreme in those kinds of online environments.

Daphne

Building on the idea that we need to be mindful of how our brains are wired and how they are impacted by algorithms, how can individuals stay self-aware and avoid becoming rigid or absolute in their thinking, even when they believe they’re on the right side?

Leor

There’s no precise formula—and that makes sense, because ideologies aren’t formulas. But there are broad themes to consider about how we can nurture or cultivate a more flexible mindset, and how to do that in a way that feels balanced. Because sometimes people think that flexibility is just persuadability, that you’ll just move with the latest current, but that’s not the case. 

Flexibility is about balancing the ability to update your beliefs in response to credible evidence without simply swaying in response to any new authority. It’s about finding that intellectually humble middle ground of being responsive to evidence and open to debate and plurality, while avoiding two extremes: intellectual overconfidence, where you believe you are the authority, and what we call intellectual servility, where you obey or conform to whatever the majority or authority says.

Flexibility is a fragile thing. You can easily tip into overconfidence or into uncritical persuadability. In the book, I write about how working to maintain that flexibility is an active process. There’s no point at which you just become flexible after reaching some kind of epistemic nirvana. You constantly have to work at staying flexible, because there are so many pressures, both external and internal, that push us toward rigidity. It’s hard work. It’s cognitively demanding to stay flexible, to remain open to plurality and nuance, and to remain critically responsive to what the evidence suggests.

But I think it’s also deeply rewarding. Not just politically, but also personally and existentially. Our ideologies, and how rigid we are about them, can become embodied in our brains, our bodies, and our identities. Pursuing a flexible mindset is really important for your own mental freedom—for your ability to be elastic in your thoughts and authentic in your beliefs, rather than just following the scripts that an ideology has imposed on you.

Daphne

That also speaks to the importance of understanding how we relate to others who don’t share our views. In an age where ideological thinking has taken hold of so many of us, how can we continue to cultivate empathy across the political divide rather than deepening our own, tribalism mindset?

Leor

It’s a great question. I think one of the most dangerous kinds of rhetoric is the kind that constantly obsesses over the scarcity of resources. And that’s really hard for the climate movement, because it is underpinned by the reality that resources are limited. But in many experiments, we find that when you remind people of scarcity, they actually become more rigid, more discriminatory, more sexist, more racist, more xenophobic. Because when people feel there aren’t enough resources to go around, they hoard rather than share.

So that’s kind of what not to do—but it’s very difficult because in the case of the climate crisis you want change to happen because there is scarcity. The challenge is finding a way to reframe that. We also need to recognize that many ideologies justify inequality in ways that make people feel that inequality is natural or even desirable; that it’s something that doesn’t need to be corrected. That means we need to do a lot more work to find narratives that aren’t about exclusion or division, and that instead focus on abundance. Obviously, this needs to be grounded in truth, but emphasizing plentitude where possible is likely to be much more effective in reducing the psychological defenses people have and inviting them in.