You often hear about “ideology” these days.
Even if this word is not mentioned, this is what is discussed. When President Donald Trump owes the left, he talks about sexual ideology, critical race theory, or Dei. When the left condemns Trump, they talk about fascism. Wherever you look, the ideology is used to explain, reject or justify policies.
Burn in a lot of this speech is an unimaginable assumption that real ideologies are on the other side. Often, calling a person “ideological” implicitly means that it is fanatic or ideological. But is this the best way to think about ideology? Do we really know what we are talking about when we use the term? Is it possible that we are all ideological, whether we knew it or not?
Leor Zmigrod is a cognitive nerve scientist and author of the book ” The ideological brain. Her book explains that our political beliefs are not just beliefs. They are also nerve signatures, written in nerve cells and our reactions, and with the passage of time these signatures change our brains. The Zmigrod point is not that “the brain is fate”, but it says that our biology and our beliefs are interconnected in important ways.
I called Zmigrod to Gray area Talking about the biological roots of belief and whether something complicated like ideology can be reduced to the brain in this way. As is always the case, there a lot More in full podcast, so listen and follow Gray area on Apple podcastand Spotifyand PandoraOr wherever you find podcast. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview was released for length and clarity.
What is ideology? How do you determine it?
I think the ideology has two components. One of them is a very fixed doctrine, a group of descriptions around the very absolute world, which is very black and black, and this is very resistant to evidence. The ideology will always have a certain type of causal narration around the world that describes what looks like the world and also how we should act in this world. It gives recipes for how to behave, how we should think, and how we should interact with others. But this is not the end of the story.
Thinking ideologically is that you have this fixed doctrine and also have a very fixed identity that affects how everyone is judging. This fixed identity stems from the fact that every ideology, every belief, will have believers and non -believers. So when you think ideologically, you really adopt strict identity categories and decide exclusively with people who believe in your ideology and reject anyone who does not do that. The degree of ideological parties can be set as you hostile to anyone who has different beliefs, whether you are ready to harm people in the name of your ideology.
She writes, “Not all stories are any ideologies and not all forms of collective stories are rigid and repressive.” How do you say the difference? How, for example, distinguish an ideology from religion? Is there room for discrimination like this in your stir?
What I think often is the difference between ideology and culture. Because culture can include eccentric. It can include deviation, different types of traditions or patterns of the past, but it is not a matter of legislation what one can do or one cannot do.
The moment we discover an ideology is the moment when you have very solid recipes about what is permitted and what is not allowed. And when it stops the ability to withstand any deviation, that is when it moved from culture, which can include a lot of deviation and re -interpretation, to ideology.
How do you experience cognitive flexibility against hardness?
In order to test a person’s cognitive hardness or flexibility, one of the most important things is not only to ask him, because people are terrible in knowing whether they are rigid or flexible. The most rigid thinkers will tell you that they are wonderfully flexible, and the most flexible thinkers will not know it. For this reason, we need to use these unconscious assessments, these tests and cognitive games that benefit from your natural ability to be adaptable or to resist change.
One of the tests to do this is called the Wisconsin Cards Sitting Test, which is the cards Torz game where a set of cards they need to be sorted is presented. Initially, they do not know what the rule governs the game, so they are trying to know that. Quickly, they will realize that they must match the cards on the deck according to their color. So they will start placing a blue card with a blue card, a red card with a red card, and they will get confirmation that they are doing it.
They start at the age of this rule, adopt it, and apply it over and over again. After a period of time, without their knowledge, the base of the game changes and suddenly this base of color is no longer working. This is the moment of change that I am more interested in because some people will notice this change and will be adapted. They will then go to search for a different base, and they will quickly discover that they should actually sort the cards according to the shape of the organisms on the card and will follow this new rule. These are very flexible individuals.
But there are other people who will notice this change and hate it. They will resist this change. They will try to say that this has never happened, and they will try to apply the old rule, although negative reactions are obtained. Those people who really resist change are the most solid people. They do not like change. They do not adapt to their behavior when the evidence indicates that they are doing it.
So if someone is struggling to switch the gears in the cards Torz game, this says something about his comfort with change and ambiguity in general. It is possible that a person who is fighting from change and ambiguity in the paper game also has aversion to pluralism in politics because their brain addresses chaos. Is this a just summary of the argument?
Yes, widely. People who resist this change, who resist uncertainty, and who love things to stay the same, when the rules change. They really don’t like it. This is often translated into more intense people, and people who do not like pluralism, who do not like discussion.
But this can really coexist on both sides of the political spectrum. When we talk about diversity, it can be a more politicized concept, and you can still find very rigid thinkers who advance about some ideas that we might say are progressive. So it is very accurate.
It is easy to understand why you are very rigid. But is it possible to be very flexible? If you are completely not engraved and open permanently and unable to settle for anything, this looks bad in a different way, no?
What you are talking about is a kind of huge persuasion, but this is not exactly flexibility. There is discrimination there because exposure to flexibility revolves around updating your beliefs in light of reliable evidence, and not necessarily adopting belief just because some authority says that. It comes to seeing and responding to evidence.
Focusing on hardness is very logical, but is there a chance of the risk of satisfactory condemnation? How to paint the separation line between initial thinking and ideological thinking?
It is not a matter of pathological condemnation, but it is about questioning the meaning of believing in an idea without being ready to change your opinion. I think there is a very thin line between what we call the principles and what we call beliefs.
This becomes especially thorny in the moral field. Nobody wants to be ideological, but it is also difficult to imagine any kind of moral clarity without anything like a fixed commitment to some principles or values. What happens often is if we do not love the values ​​of a person, we will call them extremists or ideologists. But if we love their values, we call it initially.
Yes, and for this reason I think the psychological approach to what it means to think about an ideology helps us escape this type of slippery relativity. Because after that it is not only about, Oh, where is someone for us regarding specific issues on the political spectrum? It is related to thinking, Well, what does evidence mean?
There is a sensitive path there where you can find a way to get a moral compass – perhaps not the same absolute moral clarity that its ideologies are trying to convince you, but you can get morals without having really ideological ideologies.
How strict thinking about our fear of uncertainty?
Ideology is the way of our brains in solving the problem of uncertainty in the world because our brains are the amazing predictive organs. They are trying to understand the world, looking for shortcuts where possible because they are very complex and very expensive to find out everything that is happening in the world. Ideology of a kind of hand to you on a silver plate and say, Here are all the rules for life. Here are all the rules of social interaction. Here is a description of all causal mechanisms for how the world works. There you go. And you do not need to do this hard work to find out everything on your own.
For this reason, ideologies can be incredibly attractive and attractive to our predictive brains that try to solve uncertainty, which try to solve mystery, which only tries to understand the world in a coherent way. It is the adaptation mechanism.
In the book, you argue that every very universal and ideological vision can be practiced. I read it, and I just wondered whether it was leaving a room for a standard judgments about different ideologies. Do you think that every ideology is equal to extremist practices?
Sometimes I get a strong opposition from people who say, Well, my ideology revolves around love. It is related to generosity or to take care of others. The idea is that these positive ideologies must be immune from ideological and authoritarian thinking. But this research is not related to comparing ideologies because these large entities represented by many people. I ask if there are people inside all these ideologies very solid. We see that every ideology can be taken into account.
Not every ideology is equally violent or fast on the imposition of rules on others, but every ideology has this very strong utopian vision of what life and the world should be, or for fear of Dysopia where the world is going, and all of these have the ability to become extremists.
How do you think about causing here? Are some people just a biological vulnerable to ideological thinking, or do they possess ideologies that reshape their brain over time?
This is a great question, and I think the causality is going in both directions. I think there is evidence that there are pre -existing preparations that push some people to join ideological groups. And that when there is an operator, they will be the first to run to the front of the line to support the ideological cause.
But at the same time, the more extremist and more ideological, you are changed. The way you think in the world, and the way you think about yourself, changes. It becomes more ritual, tight and more solid in every world of life. So yes, an ideology also changes you.
