Acute is partisan divisions these days so that it can look as if people suffer from completely different facts. Perhaps they are, in reality, according to Laor Zerjdar, a nervous psychologist and a political psychologist at the University of Cambridge. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking”, Dr. Zamarthod explores emerging evidence that brain and biology physiology helps not only to explain the reason for people presenting ideology but how they imagine and exchange information.
This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.
What is ideology?
It is a narration on how the world works and how it should work. This can be the social world or the natural world. But it is not just a story: it has really solid recipes for how to think, how we should act, and how we should interact with others. An ideology condemns any deviation from its specified rules.
She writes that strict thinking can be tempting. Why this?
Ideology meets the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. We want our need to communicate, for society, just because we belong to something.
There is also a supplier question. Exploration of the world is very expensive, and it may seem just the exploitation of the most efficient strategic patterns and rules. Also, many people – and many ideologies will try to tell you – that adherence to rules is the only good way to live and live morally.
I actually came from a different perspective: ideologies that numb our direct experience in the world. They narrow our ability to adapt to the world, understand the evidence, and distinguish between reliable evidence, not reliable evidence. Ideology is rarely good, if any.
Q: In the book, research that shows that ideological thinkers can be less reliable. Can you explain?
It is striking, we can notice this effect on children. In the 1940s, Fronzwick, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted an interview with hundreds of children and tested their levels of bias and authoritarianism, such as whether they are defending matching, obedience, playing and imagination. When children were told a story about the new students in a fictional school and asked the story later, there were great differences in what the most prejudiced children remember, instead of the most liberal children.
Liberal children tend to remember the percentage of desired and unwanted features more in the characters of the story; Their memories have a greater accuracy of the story, as it was originally said. In contrast, children who have been strongly recorded on the bias have gone astray; They highlighted or invented unwanted features of characters from the backgrounds of ethnic minorities.
Therefore, the most ideological mental memories of children included stories that confirmed their existing prejudices. At the same time, there was also a tendency to individual phrases and details from time to time, strictly mimics stories narrators.
So, through “liberal”, you mean flexibility in thought instead of liberalism politically, yes?
right. Working with children revolves around bias instead of preserving. The ideology are strong revolutionaries, either to the left or right. Psychological hardness is associated with ideological parties regardless of ideological mission.
Are people exposed to ideology take less information? Do they treat it differently?
People most vulnerable to ideological thinking tend to resist change or differences of any kind. We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For example, in one test, we ask them to sort the play leaves according to different rules, such as the lawsuit or color. But suddenly they apply the base and does not work. This is because, without their knowledge, we changed the rule.
People who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, and so when there are evidence that has changed the rules, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they face change, resist it. They try to apply the old rule even though it is no longer working.
In one of the studies I conducted, I found that ideologists and non -internationals seem to have basic differences in their bonus circles. Can you describe the results you reached?
In my experiences, I found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic actions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.
Al -Sarmun thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in the frontal lobe cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their scheme, which is the mid -brain structure in our bonus system that controls our fast instincts. Therefore, our psychological weaknesses for solid ideologies may be based on biological differences.
In fact, we find that people who have different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and the function of their brains. This is particularly clear in the brain networks responsible for the reward and the treatment of feelings and monitoring when we make mistakes.
For example, the size of the almonds-the structure in the form of almonds that governs the treatment of emotions, especially negative emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat-if we carry more conservative ideologies that justify the current traditions and friendly.
What do you do from this?
Some scientists have interpreted these results as a natural rapprochement between the function of the amygdala and the function of conservative ideologies. They both revolve around vigilance reactions to threats and fear of overcoming them.
But why is the tonsils greater for conservatives? Are people with the largest amygdala are attracted towards more conservative ideologies because their amygdala is already organized in a more receptive way to the negative emotions raised by conservatives? Or can indulge in a certain ideology change our emotional biological chemistry in a way that leads to structural brain changes?
The ambiguity on these results reflects the problem of chicken and Big: Does our brains determine our policy, or can ideologies change our brains?
If we walked in a certain way, can we change?
You have an agency to choose the extent of your passion for adopting these ideologies, what you reject, or what you do not.
I think we all can switch in terms of our elasticity. It is clear that it is more difficult for people who have genetic or biological weaknesses towards rigid thinking, but this does not mean that it is pre -determined or impossible to change it.