Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain

Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, The Ideological Brain.

“I think that from all the research that I’ve done,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.” And while she acknowledges there are times being unbending may be seen as an asset, “rigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.”

In this podcast, she details some of the work – both with social science experimentation and with brain imaging – that determines if people are flexible in their thinking, what are the real-life benefits of being flexible, if they can change, and how an ideological brain, i.e. a less flexible brain, affects politics and other realms of decision-making.

“When you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, you’re focusing on how people are thinking, not what they’re thinking,” Zmigrod explains. “So it’s not like you can have a curriculum of ‘like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,’ but it’s about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn’t so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts.”

Zmigrod was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University and won a winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College there. She has since held visiting fellowships at Stanford and Harvard universities, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. Amond many honors the young scholar received are the ESCAN 2020 Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science by the Cognitive Science Society, . the 2020 Women of the Future Science Award and the 2022 Women in Cognitive Science Emerging Leader Award, and the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association. 

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Suppose you believe something, but then the situation evolves, or you find out some new facts. How willing are you to change your mind? How rigid is your thinking? Leor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and the author of The Ideological Brain. Leor Zmigrod, welcome to Social Science. Bites.

Leor Zmigrod: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

David Edmonds: We’re discussing today the ideological brain. What is an ideological brain?

Leor Zmigrod: An ideological brain is a brain that’s become deeply indoctrinated by a rigid ideology, and it’s a brain that has actually potentially been transformed physically, biologically by the fact that it’s immersed itself in a doctrine that’s dogmatic, that’s rigid. In the book The Ideological Brain, I examine what are the effects of joining an ideology on the brain, and also what kinds of brains are most susceptible to extreme ideological thinking.

David Edmonds: So does that mean that two people with exactly the same beliefs about the world, can function in different ways? So one can have an ideological brain and one can be more flexible about their beliefs?

Leor Zmigrod: What I found is most interesting and important about people’s ideologies is not so much what they believe, but rather how they believe. It is less about whether these two brains believe in the same ideology or the same mission, but more about how they practice these beliefs, and do they hold on to those beliefs in a rigid way, or do they think about the world in a more flexible way, in the less prescriptive way than an ideology typically forces people to think?

David Edmonds: And obviously we’re talking about a spectrum with some people at the far end and some people who have very flexible brains.

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right. So in my research, I’ve found that really, rather than it being a small minority of brains that are susceptible and everybody else is very resilient, actually it’s a continuous spectrum, with some people being incredibly susceptible to ideological, dogmatic thinking, while others being a lot more resilient, and many of us, most of us, are somewhere in between. And when we appreciate that it’s a spectrum and that there are all these factors, psychological factors, social factors, even biological factors that affect where we lie on that spectrum, we start to understand that to some extent, we’re all at risk. But there’s also opportunity for each of us to choose differently and to shift our position on that spectrum.

David Edmonds: So let’s talk about how one can determine whether or not somebody has a more or less rigid brain. You talk about something called the Wisconsin game. What is that?

Leor Zmigrod: So, one of the best ways to measure people’s cognitive virginity or their cognitive flexibility is rather than asking them do you think you’re very flexible, or do you think you’re very rigid? Which is not a great method, because most people have very little self-knowledge, which is why we need these neuropsychological tasks that tap at a person’s rigidity or flexibility, but measures it in an unconscious way, in an objective way, where the person doing this test or this game doesn’t know what it is that we’re measuring. And one of the best tests to do this is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is a classic measure of cognitive flexibility, where a participant is presented with a game, which is a card sorting game, and basically they’re asked to sort a deck of cards according to some rule which initially they’re not sure of. So they start sorting the cards, perhaps according to the color of the shapes on the card, and very quickly, they’ll realize that there’s particular rule that they can follow. For instance, maybe if they follow the shape on the card and they start matching hearts to hearts, circles to circles, they’ll get rewarded each time.

And so people learn this kind of rule, and they start applying it, and they sort the cards according to this rule. But after a while, unbeknownst to the participants, the rule of the game changes, and suddenly they’re no longer rewarded for applying this shape rule. And what I’m interested in is that moment of change. Some people adapt really well. They notice that the environment has changed, that the rule has changed, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll adapt their behavior in return. These are cognitively flexible people. Whereas other people, when they notice the change, they really resist it. They hate the change. Instead of changing their behavior, they try to apply the old rule, even though it doesn’t work anymore. And those are the more cognitively rigid thinkers who struggle to adapt in the face of change and who hate any kind of uncertainty.

David Edmonds: So that. That’s the Wisconsin game. You also have another way of determining rigidity, and that’s the Alternative Uses Test. Explain that to us.

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right, because when we’re measuring people’s flexibility or rigidity, I always make sure to use many different kinds of measures that tap into either their adaptable flexibility, like we get at with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is about how they adapt to change. But another important element of flexibility is how people generate ideas, and whether they are flexible in their thinking, in their imagination. What the Alternative Uses Test does is it’s a classic creativity test. What I ask participants to do is to spend a couple minutes and give me as many possible imagined uses as they can for an everyday object. So that might be a paper clip or it might be a brick, and we give people about two minutes to just write down all their ideas.

What’s interesting about this more linguistic imaginative task is it also allows us to measure the flexibility of people’s thought processes. Because one person might say, with a brick, for instance, you can build a house, or you can build a castle, or you can build a garden shed, or you could build a fence. And they might give me 20 different ideas. They’re very fluid, intelligent thinkers with many different ideas, but all of those ideas will be about that conventional use of constructing things with bricks. And that is a more cognitively rigid thinker, because their thinking is more narrow. It’s all following the same pattern along the same kind of mental track.

But another kind of person might say, yes, you can build a house with a brick or a castle with a brick, but you might also be able to use it as a paper weight or a doorstop or as an instrument to crush garlic, or you might use it as an art installation. And so this is a much more flexible thinker, because you can see how they’re not just restricting their imagination to one kind of use. They’re taking the object and they’re rotating it in their minds, right? So they’re breaking down its fixed or conventional essences and thinking about it in a much more wide way. And so when we look at the responses of this more flexible thinker, they might give me the same number of responses as the more rigid thinker, but it’s not about the number of ideas that they have. It’s about the diversity of ideas that they have.

David Edmonds: People listening to this might have some idea of how they think they would perform in these tasks. Are we good at predicting our skills in these various tasks, assessing our flexibility or rigidity?

Leor Zmigrod: Actually, people really struggle to know how flexible or not they are, and I’ve found that when I’ve asked people, “How open and unconventional do you think your thinking is?” that has no correlation with actually how unconventional and wide their thinking is.

David Edmonds: Could you put people in an MRI scanner and work out their level of rigidity just from a scan?

Leor Zmigrod: Well, as a neuroscientist, I wish it was that simple. So we can’t tell from just a single scan whether someone is a flexible thinker or rigid thinker, because that’s not something that’s just structural in the brain. It’s a much more functional, dynamic process.

But what we can do is we can actually look at the function of people’s brains, the structure of it, and from that, we can get some clues about who is most susceptible to think in more extreme ways, who’s more likely to think in more moderate ways, and also who is likely to gravitate towards particular ideologies rather than others. For instance, there have been several studies showing how a particular area of the brain called the amygdala, which many of us know as the brain region responsible for processing negative emotions like fear, threat, disgust. There have actually been several studies finding that people with right-wing ideologies tend to have a larger amygdala than people with left-wing ideologies, and this has been replicated in multiple studies, and it raises a lot of questions, right? Because why would it be that a person with a physically larger amygdala have a more conservative belief system?

And so there are multiple theories. One theory is that perhaps there is something about right-wing ideologies that is involved in the elicitation of emotions like fear, threat, disgust, against anything or anyone that’s foreign. Maybe there’s a kind of natural affinity there, so that people who have this neurobiological predisposition with kind of a larger amygdala might be drawn towards right-wing ideologies that deal with and engage with those kinds of negative emotions frequently. But there is also the possibility that the causal arrows go the other way, and that actually being immersed in the right-wing conservative ideology that constantly obsesses over feelings of threat or negativity and disgust, perhaps that’s actually an experience that could change the brain. This is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem that political neuroscientists are dealing with, but it leads to all these amazing questions about the connection between our ideologies and our brains.

David Edmonds: Chicken-and-egg problem? It sounds also like a nature-nurture problem. Is that right –that we’re not sure whether this enlarged amygdala is a result of being born with one, or whether we develop one as a result of the culture or the society in which we’re immersed?

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right. It is fundamentally about that nature-nurture dilemma, and one of the things that I’m really interested in is in looking at people who have changed their ideologies over time, right, and people who maybe grew up and had a certain upbringing with a certain kind of ideology, or very devout or authoritarian ideology, and then either stayed with it or left it, right? And what is the nature of those kinds of people? And similarly, what’s the nature of people who grow up in a very secular, tolerant, not very ideological setting, but end up choosing to join ideological groups.

Interestingly, in my experiments, I’ve found that people who tend to leave an ideology later in life, they tend to actually be the most cognitively flexible thinkers. It seems like leaving an ideology, exiting it’s kind of the structure that it imposes on people’s thought, requires immense malleability and adaptability.

David Edmonds: And physically, what happens? Going back to the point you made earlier, if people abandon an ideology, do you find a shrinking in the amygdala?

Leor Zmigrod: I don’t think those kinds of longitudinal tests have been done yet, of actually doing one myself, tracking people over a long period of time and mapping out how their brains and ideologies are changing concomitantly. But it might take some time until we have the results. But what we do know is that obviously, we naturally hear about brain plasticity. What’s interesting, there’s been this experiment done with people who have undergone a very stressful period of time. And what’s interesting about stress is that stress immediately rigidifies our thoughts. And people who have gone through an experience that’s very stressful, you see that they tend to think in more habitual ways. When we give them flexibility tasks, they will struggle.

And what they’ve done is they compared medical students who are in a stressful exam period versus medical students who are not in a particularly stressful exam period. And what they saw over six weeks is that the students preparing for exams became a lot more habitual, a lot more rigid in their thinking, and they underwent brain changes at the same time that corresponded to that period of heightened stress. But importantly, after the stress was alleviated, after it was gone, the exams were done, what the neuroscientists found is that their brains kind of bounced back to the way they were before.

And so there is a real possibility that being in stressful situations, being in environments that rigidify our thoughts, can change our brain. But our brains are so malleable that there’s also the possibility that they can rebound back.

David Edmonds: You threw in another idea there, which was habit. And I’m wondering whether people who have a very habitual life, who drink coffee at the same time every day, who go for a walk at the same time every day, whether people who have a very habitual existence also are more rigid in other ways?

Leor Zmigrod: Yeah. And actually, I’ve measured the degree to which a person relies on routines and habits in their daily lives, and that does seem to correspond to how flexible or rigid their thinking is. Which makes sense, right? If you’re a more rigid thinker, you struggle to adapt to change. You dislike uncertainty. It makes sense that you would rely on routines that would eliminate that uncertainty, that ambiguity, because routines and habits and rituals are all about eliminating change and all about repetition and replication. Sometimes I’m asked if I want to be a more flexible thinker, how do I go about doing that? And I think one of the first things that I suggest is to look at the mental habits that govern your day, your life, and just interrogate them. Interrogate whether repetition does you service to your kind of psychological flexibility in the world, or whether it narrows your thoughts.

David Edmonds: Let’s talk about the implications of all this. One immediate thing that strikes me is that there will be political ramifications, so that people who have rigid brains are unlikely to change political ideology, even when faced with evidence that suggests that maybe they should shift their approach to policy or whatever. Is that one implication, and are there others?

Leor Zmigrod: Yeah. Yeah, we do see that people who have more rigid mindsets have a more rigid way of approaching the world psychologically — that they hate when policies change, they hate any kind of change, really, and that can pose major problems politically for how we live in very complicated, sometimes chaotic, worlds. Rigid minds try to eliminate that chaos with narratives, ideological narratives that simplify their understanding of the world.

And so we really need to think about what it means to have people with rigid minds and how they encounter our political world. And I think about that a lot in the context of social media, right? Because it often feels like the algorithms that govern how we receive political information, or any information about the world, that seems to be perfectly designed to give us the most binary information, the information that is most confirmatory of our beliefs. That almost creates this perfectly terrible recipe where rigid minds who are on these platforms getting confirmatory evidence, very binary information, if they are already coming with that predisposition and they’re in an environment that amplifies it, it’s really very dangerous situation for becoming easily radicalized.

David Edmonds: If you were a political party, if you ran a political party, you would want your supporters to have rigid minds, because they would be less likely to defect.

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right. And I often think about how ideological leaders and ideological rhetoric really tries to sculpt their followers in their image, right? If you want to have rigid followers, you will encourage that rigid thought. If you want to have followers who are very catastrophizing in their thinking, you will constantly be speaking in the language of catastrophe, of scarcity, of things that make people feel like there is chaos and they need an anchor.

David Edmonds: You mentioned earlier that at a personal level, one possible solution would be to try and break your habits in some way, to think about how rigid your life is. At a governmental level, at a public policy level, are there things that could be done to make the general population more flexible?

Leor Zmigrod:  Yeah, I think that we really can and need to look at education. And often in education, we say, and it’s true, that we should teach our young citizens to think critically, to be good digitally literate citizens, and that’s really important. But I think that there’s also room there to specifically think about how to cultivate flexibility within young people and in older people, everyone. When you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, again, you’re focusing on how people are thinking, not what they’re thinking. So it’s not like you can have a curriculum of “like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,” but it’s about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn’t so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts, right?

And so teaching children adults to find that balance is, I think, specifically and uniquely an important skill that governments should think about how to nurture, because that’s really how you create citizens that are resilient to the effects of propaganda, to the effect of new extremisms that come along. But you need a government that wants that. If you have a government that actually wants citizens that only value conformity, obedience, uncritical thought, you’re not going to have that kind of agenda. So you also need a government that believes in the value of thinking scientifically, thinking with evidence, thinking in a flexible way, and even thinking sometimes against ideologies rather than with them.

David Edmonds: It’s interesting that throughout our chat, the unspoken premise has been ‘rigidity bad flexibility, good.’ Is that how you think about these things, that there’s a normative element to this?

Leor Zmigrod: I think that from all the research that I’ve done, I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination. And so if you care about elasticity of thought and corresponding to that an elasticity of existence, right, where you can see yourself as this fluid being that can exist in many different forms, rather than one that has to adhere to a certain script, then rigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.

But there are many people and many ideologies that claim actually rigidity is really good. It’s essential for us to coordinate our societies. It’s important for people to have moral principles, and people cannot have moral principles — supposedly — without rigid values. But I think that that’s not true. And I think that from the perspective of the individual, you can have an ethics, and you can have care for other people. In fact, maybe that care is more true if you’re not doing it because you’re following a particular rule, but because you’re doing it from a deep understanding of humanity. I think that, in that sense, flexibility is an important precursor to thinking in a free way.

David Edmonds: Last question. We discussed how rigidity flexibility is a spectrum from very flexible to the very rigid. Where do you place yourself along the spectrum?

Leor Zmigrod: That’s a sneaky question. I don’t know exactly where I am on that spectrum, but what the science, how it has changed me, is it has encouraged me to pursue that flexibility of thought in all things. And I’ve learned that flexibility is not just something you achieve, like, “You made it! You are this ultra flexible thinker, and you’re good for life! You’re resilient for life!” No, it’s actually this constant struggle, an almost Sisyphean pursuit, because there are so many pressures, stressors, trying to narrow our thinking, and sometimes it’s so much easier to rely on those scripts, on those narratives, on those heuristics, rather than do that hard work of balancing things out, thinking about evidence in that careful way, thinking about yourself, your identity and the identity of others in this nuanced way.

And so I think becoming flexible is a pursuit rather than an ultimate achievement. But it’s ultimately a struggle that I think is really important for your own authenticity and freedom.

David Edmonds: Leor Zmigrod, thank you very much indeed.

Leor Zmigrod: Thank you so much.