{"id":25568,"date":"2025-04-08T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T09:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25568"},"modified":"2025-04-08T09:24:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T09:24:37","slug":"ideology-may-not-be-what-you-think-but-how-youre-wired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25568","title":{"rendered":"Ideology May Not Be What You Think but How You\u2019re Wired"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, \u201cThe Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,\u201d Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.<\/p>\n

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n

What is ideology?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it\u2019s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.<\/p>\n

You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue \u2014 and many ideologies will try to tell you \u2014 that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.<\/p>\n

Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, \u201cThe Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,\u201d Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.What is ideology?It\u2019s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it\u2019s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.There\u2019s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue \u2014 and many ideologies will try to tell you \u2014 that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally.I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25570,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25568"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25571,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25568\/revisions\/25571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}