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Remember all those earnest dismantling-racism workshops? They went about it all wrong. They should have set race and guilt and privilege aside and asked participants to think of alternative uses for a brick.
That is not entirely facetious. In The Ideological Brain, neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod cites research based on the Alternative Uses Test, noting that the more rigid people were—freezing at the test, unable think of lots of possible uses—the more ideologically rigid they were, too. Cognitive inflexibility was a reliable (in fact, the only reliable) predictor of dogmatism. And with dogmatism came bigotry.
Why would such a silly test be so revealing? Because imagining other uses for a brick requires you to move past immediate appearances, forget habits and automatic associations, and approach with curiosity instead of judgment. Flexible test-takers also proved responsive to alternative viewpoints and willing to update their beliefs in light of reliable evidence. Their cast of mind was a built-in protection against extremism in any direction.
Zmigrod also takes us back to experiments done in 1944 by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian psychologist. Children raised in overbearing households showed signs of both “disintegration and rigidity.” Though they were desperate for order, they were “fascinated by chaos, upheaval, and catastrophe.” It was easy to distinguish between prejudiced and unprejudiced children, she wrote. “For the prejudiced children…all relationships were unequal and inadvertently abusive.” In adult terms, society was hierarchical, and you had to be above someone else to survive.
What most amazes me is the spillover. When Frenkel-Brunswik gave the kids an arithmetic test, those who had voiced rigid opinions about moral values, ethnic minorities, and gender roles were rigid about their problem-solving, too, sticking with the hard, convoluted way they learned first even after an easier shortcut was suggested. They also interpreted stories more negatively, highlighting or inventing undesirable traits for the characters from ethnic minority backgrounds. “In the recall of the prejudiced children,” Frenkel-Brunswik observed, “the story gets generally more simplified and less diverse.” These children made up details to support their opinions or they latched on to certain phrases and parroted them, both strategies that let them avoid uncertainty.
Zmigrod did her own research (a phrase we need to reclaim from conspiracy theorists). In a study of 300 Americans, those with the most rigid, dogmatic ideologies struggled with a computer game that measured split-second decisions; they had trouble piecing together perceptual evidence efficiently. Yet they described themselves not as slow thinkers but as thrill-seekers, impulsive and reckless, nothing like the cautious conservatives who live closer to the center.
“And so,” she concludes, “the dogmatic mind may be one that makes premature and impulsive decisions based on evidence that was imperfectly understood.” Dogmatic thinkers shy away from ambiguity in favor of absolutes; reject debate; prefer to ignore new or alternative information. And while they are more inclined to burn the world down than the cautious conservatives, they share an instinctive habit of paying more attention to the negative. At least, the negative that might cause them harm.
When people were shown two kinds of videos—people living in poverty who had no home and people talking about fishing or making coffee—those who objected to inequality had high negative arousal watching the poverty videos. Their bodies felt the pain. But for those who justified the current system, the responses to the two kinds of videos were indistinguishable. Someone who was suffering could just as well be chatting about coffee.
• • •
Early on, working in a sleep lab, Zmigrod went looking for “the neural signature of choice, of free will.” Brains look different, she found, when they are obeying versus making free choices. This was her first hint of the tight relationship between physiology and ideology. Years later, she would learn that “the most rigid individuals possess specific genes that affect how dopamine is distributed throughout the brain,” concentrating less dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made.
Next, researchers would find that people who leaned right had a larger right amygdala—which oversees responses of anger, disgust, and fear—than political liberals. Another study found a correlation between the size of the amygdala and “the degree to which people support unequal social systems and prefer to maintain the status quo.” But did the amygdala influence the political stance, or could the political stance have literally altered the size of the amygdala?
Zmigrod found herself facing two big questions: “Could a person’s susceptibility to extreme worldviews be rooted in the idiosyncrasies of their cognition and biology?” And “was it possible that human consciousness could be fundamentally altered by adherence to dogmatic ideologies?”
Yes, she now says, to both. “The origins of our ideological convictions emerge from within our bodies, and the outcomes of our ideological beliefs can be felt and seen within our bodies too.” Ideology changes the way we think about anything; it influences our instinctual responses, our physiology, and our brain as a whole. “Your brain comes to mirror your politics and prejudices in strange, profound, and astonishing ways.”
Why? Because every time we repeat a belief or opinion, follow a rule, or engage in a ritual or rote performance, we strengthen those neural pathways and let their alternatives decay. Social rituals make the outer world more important than the inner, silencing doubts and questions and suppressing any impulse to resist. Those who need rigid boundaries in the outside world will also construct rigid internal boundaries, becoming less adaptable to change. They want to believe they have discovered the truth, their way of life is decided, their destiny is fixed.
Though both The Guardian and The Telegraph named The Ideological Brain one of the year’s best books, a New York Times reviewer was left unsatisfied because there were no hard and fast conclusions. Zmigrod is…flexible, pointing out spirals of influence and response. Brain structures are not the only substrate for ideological dogmatism. Personality, parenting, physique, successes and failures, habits and fears—all of that plays a role. And “whether a gene is activated, subdued, or suppressed depends on a person’s lived experience in the world.”
At least understanding that mix of influences, and how it perpetuates itself, has stopped me from banging my head and wailing over the new inability to listen, discuss differing opinions, cut others slack, chill. And that applies to both extremes: the far left is just as prone to rigidity, dogmatism, and even a willingness to use violence. “Regressive ideologies that look backward nostalgically—seeking to preserve or reinstate old hierarchies of power, rooted in characteristics of gender or geography or race or class or caste—exercise control over their followers with the threat of violence or material deprivation.” But in progressive ideologies, anyone who falls short of full commitment will also be ostracized and attacked. Canceled, even.
“The ideologue, whether regressive or progressive, will find ways of appointing people to binaries of good and evil, with nothing in between or beyond,” Zmigrod notes. This is because all extremists have similar cognitive patterns. They struggle to adapt, invent, or change their assumptions. And “the more inflexible you are, the more willing you are to harm others in the name of your group.”
Groups are key here, because “the explanatory premise of most ideologies claims that life is governed by a fight between groups, such as a battle between nations, between economic classes, between genders, between races, between nature and humanity, or between divine gods and earthly apostates,” Zmigrod writes. “Everything is perceived as an existential struggle for scarce resources, a battle for domination and self-determination.”
And those who are flexible, not wholly identified with any particular party or group, comfortable with ambiguity, humble enough to change their mind if warranted? They tend to be less easily startled, less hypervigilant and suspicious and defensive. They are the “most open-minded, most accepting of plurality and difference…. They do not viscerally hate their interlocutors—they may hate their opinions but they do not project that hatred onto the persons voicing them.”
If you were about to wave a celebratory flag, fold it. Because even those predisposed to be flexible can move toward greater intolerance. Reading online comments, my husband has noticed an awful lot of liberals turning vicious toward MAGA, gleeful at the thought of people suffering under the MAGA president’s policies. With so much at stake, even people who were usually open-minded and moderate have been provoked into a hardened stance. I can feel it deep inside myself, this blend of exasperation, maddened frustration, and rage at all that is being destroyed.
But “we should not fall prey to the notion that ‘we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery,’” Zmigrod warns. And that is a real danger, because we all “slide toward heightened ideological susceptibility in moments of stress.”
What we need is a dismantling ideology workshop, and fast. Because ideology, once entrenched, becomes its own cast of mind. “Even if an ideological group dissolves and breaks apart, or if its contradictions and injuries become intolerable to the believer, the believer is already changed,” Zmigrod explains. “They have become habituated to routines, rituals, a certain kind of reverence, surveillance, and insensitivity to their doubts.” It is easier to slide into another dogmatic ideology than to move toward the flexible middle.
And the flexible middle is the only place where we can all coexist.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
