Instant Genius - Why your brain might be wired for extremism

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Why do some people become radicalised, while others remain resistant to extreme ideas? What makes one mind more vulnerable to harsh doctrines than another? In a world saturated with competing ideologies, it’s tempting to blame it on chance or circumstance. But in her compelling new book, The Ideological Brain, political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod uncovers a deeper truth: our susceptibility to extremism is shaped by the very architecture of our minds, down to the cellular and genetic level. She explores how our cognitive traits influence ideological thinking, and crucially, why we’re not locked into any one path. To get the exclusive gift box from Shokz, order via this link: ⁠https://bit.ly/4kFt10l⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Tom Howarth, trends editor at BBC Science Focus. Why do some people become radicalised, while others remain resistant to extreme ideas? What makes one mind more vulnerable to harsh doctrines than another? In a world saturated with competing ideologies, it's tempting to blame it on chance or circumstance. But in her compelling new book, The Ideological Brain, political neuroscientist Leorza Migrod uncovers a deeper truth. Our susceptibility to extremism is shaped by the very architecture of our minds, right down to the cellular and genetic level.

She explores how our cognitive traits influence ideological thinking and crucially why we're not locked into any one path choice, she argues, still matters. Leo, welcome to Instant Genius. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you. So you are a political psychologist and neuroscientist, which might sound a bit strange to some of our listeners.

They might not have heard of that before. What does political neuroscience entail? What is it about? Yeah, so these are two words political neuroscience that many people would not have expected to hear come together. But it's actually this really exciting new field that's emerged in the last 10 years or so that uses methods from neuroscience, from experimental psychology, even from genetics, to try to understand people's beliefs and their ideologies.

And what I do in a lot of my research as a political neuroscientist is try to figure out why are some brains more susceptible to extreme ideologies than others and how the methods of neuroscience can reveal things that were really invisible to us before because we only rely on observable behavior or people's self-reports. But with neuroscience, we can delve inside the brain, the ideological brain and see really what happens in there. And the ideological brain. So that's the name of your book, which is all about how it is that people become sort of ideological and adopt extreme views. you talk in the book about where the idea of ideology came from and how it's sort of developed from, well, it's not really what it was meant for originally. It's not an ology anymore, really. But for the purposes of this conversation, when we're talking about ideology, what do we actually mean? Yeah. So ideology does sound like a scientific discipline, right? It sounds to us like zoology, like, you know, biology. And it was originally meant to be a science of ideas. But since then, the definition,

and the meaning of ideology has shifted massively in all kinds of directions. So that actually we often throw the word around ideology a lot without necessarily knowing what we mean. And for me, as a psychologist, I really think about what it means to think ideologically, to be ideological. And some of the hallmarks of that kind of thinking are really about embracing a particular doctrine that has very specific and strict rules for how you should think, what you should not think, how you should act, how you should interact with other. people. And importantly, it is really resistant to evidence. So an ideology is this kind of like absolutist explanation about the world and any new information that might contradict it is immediately rejected. So an ideological thinker tends to resist evidence. They tend to resist alternative

explanations for things. And they tend to be really passionate about that ideological identity that they have when they possess an ideology. They kind of judge everyone according to whether they're a follower or not a follower of that ideology. And that can lead them to be able to commit really acts of hostility, discrimination, and sometimes violence in the name of their ideological cause. Often for people, you know, like myself who try not to be too ideologically extreme in my views, it's very easy to view people who are ideological extremists as being brainwashed or sort of mindless in that act. But you kind of twist that and say, that it's actually missing a piece of the puzzle when it comes to ideology.

Could you expand on what you mean that? That's right. The image that we have of someone being brainwashed is really, you know, even in the language, we hear this notion of something being erased, being taken away. And when we think of someone being thoughtless or mindless as they're being radicalized, we're really kind of relinquishing responsibility or agency. We're just saying, you know, oh, they've gotten swept up in something, but they are not affected.

It's just they have been swept up in something. But I think that these metaphors of thoughtlessness, mindlessness, even brainwashing, although they can be simple and that can make them convenient, they're really not scientifically grounded. And they can be misleading because they kind of steer us away from thinking about, well, what does actually happen to a brain when it becomes immersed in a really rigid, potentially extreme ideology? What happens to the brain? And in the book, I explore how there are specific distortions, changes that happen to a person's reason, to a person's emotion, even potentially to their neurobiology, when they are immersed in that kind of extreme ideology. Because we often think of becoming an ideological extremist as something quite situational, sort of any of us are predisposed to it given the right situation. I think you write about the Stanford Prison Experiment and the classic electric shock.

experiment. But again, that's not necessarily true, and it ignores a bit of the important puzzle. Exactly. Sometimes we think there's just universal conformity and obedience, and all of us under the wrong circumstances or kind of the toxic situations would become really ideologically extreme. But actually, the first thing is that when we look back at those classic experiments at social psychology, the Milgram experiment that showed how people tend to obey instructions, even to harm an innocent person when they're told to, or conformity experiments from the 1960s. The conclusion we often hear in psychology textbooks is like, okay, yes, everyone just tends to obey, and it's within their human nature, and it's all about, you know, whether we're in a good situation or a bad

situation. But actually, when you look back at those, the data for those experiments, actually, there's a sizable minority of people who did not conform, who did not obey to instructions to harm others. And so actually, it's not true that all of us are equally susceptible to those kinds of ideological pressures. Actually, some of us are more predisposed to that kind of rigid, obedient, conformist thinking, while others really tend to resist that way of thinking. So understanding that there are differences between us in our susceptibility

is really crucial. We'll get into some of the things that might make someone more susceptible or not. It gets quite complicated, though you describe it very elegantly and simply, which is great. But first, looking at the brain and the way it works, you kind of describe it as having two core principles, one being the fact that it's a predictive organ and the other that it's fundamentally communicative. What exactly do you mean that and how does that relate to this idea of ideologies? When we look at what a brain does as it tries to navigate the world, there are these kind of two core principles that can explain a lot.

Now, it's not the only things that characterize a brain very much. We don't want to delve into an ideology of how the brain works. Exactly. So this is not an ideology, but it's a broad description of what we as neuroscientists and cognitive scientists know is key to the brain and to behavior, which is that first of all, our brains really want to understand reality. They want to accurately model the world because they need to navigate the world, right? So if you want to navigate the world in a successful way, you need to know what world you're living in. Right. So we really want good explanations for how the world works, what the past used to look like and what the future might look like and how we should be positioned within that. And the second aspect is that we are such social creatures, right?

So we are not just content with having an understanding of the world and keeping it to ourselves. We want everyone else to buy into it too. And so we are very communicative about our explanations of the world. And these are two great features of the brain, but they can also, to some extent, be its downfall when it comes to ideologies. Because ideologies very much satisfy those two key features, right? because ideologies give us this absolute disnarrative about how the world works, satisfying our predictive tendencies. And they give us a community, a sense of who we belong to.

So they give us an identity. And that's why there's almost this kind of magnetic pull between what the brain seeks to do as it navigates the world and what ideologies offer in return. And understanding that kind of magnetism helps us understand why we are susceptible, even as rational, careful thinkers, why we might be tempted by those ideologies. But it can also, yeah, help us understand maybe how we might be able to climb out of some of those more radical ideologies once we understand why they're so satisfying and seductive. Kind of like having too much of a good thing because those traits of the brain,

they're what make us so successful as a species. We can work together because, and we can create explanations of the world. and that helps us build cities and make electricity, but too much of that can take us way beyond that sort of useful point. Exactly. It's a kind of double-edged sword, right? You'll want to have a good understanding of the world, but if you buy into one that has been predetermined for you, a kind of script or doctrine that tells you what the world is,

you stop sensing it directly, right? You're sensing it through that ideological story rather than trying to figure out actually how it works and when that story fails. Yeah, I mean, it becomes very difficult to know how I, when I was reading this book, I struggled to kind of clock my own ideologies and how much of an ideological person we all are, because everyone kind of has this within them and to a certain extent has their own ideologies. It's just that some are harmful, not all are harmful, right? That's right.

And what I've learned a lot from this research is that it's not so much about what you believe, what ideology you buy into. But it's more about how you believe. It's about how passionately, rigidly, dogmatically you embrace an ideology. And we don't all embrace ideologies to that same dogmatic narrow way. And importantly, that's also why neuroscience

and cognitive science are so important, because we're not very good at judging our own psychology. And so that's why we need these instruments to tell us our unconscious thinking patterns and how those relate to why we might find ideologies so powerful. And you mentioned the two key things that are sort of your level of dogmatism and your level of rigidity. So the opposites being sort of having intellectual humility and being a flexible thinker. And there are some really cool experiments that are so simple, but that you use

to probe how flexible or dogmatic people are. I wonder if you could take us through, you know, one or two examples of those, to give our listeners a flavor of how you're sort of delving into the minds of people. Sure. So in these experiments I've run with hundreds and thousands of participants, I get them to play these neuropsychological games that tap into specifically their psychological rigidity and their flexibility. Now, someone who's very rigid tends to kind of see the world more binary terms.

They tend to struggle to adapt in the face of change. and they tend to stick to one narrow mode of thinking rather than kind of switching between ways of thinking. And to measure that, I've given lots of participants this game called Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is an online game that they play on their phones or on their computers, wherever they are around the world.

And it's basically a game where people get a deck of cards and they need to sort them according to some kind of rule. So typically they start playing. the game. They're not super sure what the game is about, but they start matching cards together with other cards, and quickly they'll realize that when they match a card according to its color, like they'll put a blue card with a blue card, they'll get this positive reinforcement. And so they continue with that role, and they match a green card with a green card, and the yellow card with the yellow card with the yellow card. And the game reinforces their behavior. So it builds a kind of

habit, the kind of ritual that feels really satisfying when you're playing the game as a participant. And then after a while of doing this kind of color code to match the cards, suddenly without the participants knowing, the rule of the game changes. And I'm interested in that moment of change because some people will notice that, okay, the evidence suggests that they maybe need to change the pattern of their behavior, right? The old rule doesn't work anymore. Maybe they should look for a new rule to sort the cards. and so they do. They see that this world has changed, this digital online game world has changed, and they change and adapt their behavior in return. Those are cognitively flexible people who are very adaptable. But there are other people who, when they encounter that change, they hate it. They want to reject

the fact that the change has happened, and they'd like to stick to the old behavioral patterns instead. And so they, although they might need to change their behavior and figure out that now they should match the cards according to the shape on the cards, whether it's to match circles with circles or squares with squares, they don't want to change their behavior. And they will continue applying the old rule, even though it doesn't work anymore. And those are the more cognitively rigid thinkers. And as you can see, this neuropsychological task has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with the world of ideologies. But it allows us to test and quantify where person is on the spectrum from a very flexible, adaptable thinker to a more rigid kind of

unadaptable thinker. And importantly, people really have no idea where they lie on this spectrum, right? Someone who's very flexible might not know it, and someone who's very rigid thinks that they're very amazingly flexible. But what I found in my experiments is that people's cognitive rigidity really predicts their ideological and political rigidities. So a person who tends to be cognitively rigid on this kind of neuropsychological task will also tend to adopt ideologies in a really passionate, extreme way. They'll tend to be the most dogmatic thinkers. They'll tend to reject evidence. They'll reject alternative perspectives. Whenever someone doubts their opinion, they'll feel that it's a personal attack. But someone who's cognitively flexible

can be more intellectually humble. They can accept that there are multiple different interpretations of an event, they can understand that plurality is important, they will not be super defensive when their opinions are questioned. And importantly, when we map this on to the political spectrum, we really see that this cognitive rigidity predicts people political extremism on both sides. So it predicts whether a person will go to an extreme right-wing ideology or to an extreme left-wing ideology. And the people who are most cognitively flexible tend to be more independent, more moderate, more suspicious of pre-established political identities. So we're really seeing how people's cognition and their cognitive style with which they approach

puzzles and problems and games can predict their political identities and ideologies too. And it's really important, this circular nature of the sort of extreme ends of this, because I think that a lot of times excluding communism, people assume that sort of the less is more fluid and flexible and that the right conservative views are going to be the more rigid ones. But actually, it's essentially, once you get to the extreme ends, it's a mirror image. That's right. And that's something that's really surprised even scientists, because there's been a long-held assumption in the field that's called the rigidity of the right, you know, that the political right is the side that tries to maintain tradition, to maintain the status quo,

to avoid change. And the left is supposedly the side of change. fluidity. But actually, that's where it really matters how you believe in something, right? Whether you believe it extremely, dogmatically, which is more related to the rigidity of your thought, or whether you believe it in a more fluid way, right, in a way that allows for all the shades of gray. That's a better prediction of your flexibility of thought. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals. because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.

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Today, in partnership with French Acoustic Specialist Focal, Name Audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by Name Boutique. local powered by name.com for more information. There is some unevenness towards the centre, though, right? So people on the centre-left, like liberal, tend to be the most flexible thinkers, according to these studies, whereas people sort of centre-right would be slightly less flexible. Yeah, there is, when we look, it kind of creates this use-shaped curve of the data,

where the most cognitively rigid people are at the extreme ends of a political spectrum, the most flexible are in the middle, but this whole U-shape is slightly shifted to the left. So we have the most flexible thinkers being slightly tilting to the left. And that's why this research really allows us to understand when does it just extremity matter? And when should we actually look at the content of what people believe in the mission that they believe in?

Because there are also actually quite striking differences even between right-wing and left-wing believers in the nature of their brains and the structure of their brains and personalities too. And it's important to note that excluding sort of the extreme ends of things, you're not saying that being, you know, more flexible is necessarily the better way to be. Like, it's okay to be a bit of both and we need both types of people in the world. In many ways, these psychological tendencies are indices of difference. They're not necessarily a case when we're saying you should be one way rather than the other. but to a degree if what you want is to be a thinker that opposes dogmatism and opposes

extreme ways of thinking, then probably the best route towards that is a kind of mental flexibility, adaptability, kind of a malleability of thought. So we've got this idea of dogmatic and rigid thinking and how that leads to extreme ideologies. and then you delve into sort of what's actually going on in the brain, physiologically, genetically. What are some of the characteristics of someone's brain who is a rigid thinker compared to somebody who's more flexible? What can we actually see when we, you know, scan the brain

and look at the size of things and the connectivity? Yeah, so this is where political neuroscience gets really exciting because we can really see differences in the brains of people who are more fanatical, than others or in the brains of people who believe in certain ideologies over others. And I specifically have looked at the genetics of rigid thinking and found that there are particular genetic dispositions that affect how rigidly you tend to think about the world. And those specifically actually are genes tied to dopamine functioning and to how dopamine tends to circulate and exist in your brain.

And so the most rigid thinkers tend to have a particular. kind of balance in dopamine, in the areas of the brain where it's most active, where it's more focused in the striatum, this mid-brain area at the very center of our brain, responsible for reward, for learning, and for instinctual responses. And typically, a rigid thinker will have a higher concentration of dopamine in that area and a lower concentration of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for kind of high-level sophisticated decision-making. This is broadly at baseline at rest. Obviously, dopamine is something that activates.

It's a neurotransmitter that activates us in all sorts of ways. But what we can get from this is a kind of genetic profile for someone who tends to be a rigid thinker, which starts to bring all these disciplines together, right? The genetics, the biology, and making us realize that we're not all equally susceptible, and that could be down to our genes. But sometimes when people hear that there's a genetic component, they become nervous, that this means that it's predetermined, right? That if you have a particular combination of genes,

you're doomed to a dogmatic way of thinking about the world. And that's not the case. These traits, these even genetic predispositions, are potentials, their probabilities, they might be risks, but they are not determined outcomes. And that's what's really interesting about this research, is that it shows that although we can have biological

and psychological traits that put us at risk for thinking in extreme and rigid ways, they are not our destiny and we can actually choose and change our bodies and change our beliefs and there's a lot of freedom and agency there too. I want to dig down in some more of these sort of biological aspects. You also mention the amygdala and the role that has in sort of people who perhaps are more rigid thinkers. Could you expand on what's going on there? Yeah. So the amygdala is actually a pair of structures in the middle of our brain responsible for the processing of negative emotions like threat, fear, disgust of things that are foreign. And interestingly, multiple

research teams around the world have found that people who hold right-wing beliefs tend to have a larger amygdala than people with left-wing beliefs. And this is replicated in multiple studies, and it raises the question of why, right? Why would a person who has more right-wing beliefs have a larger amygdala, have this area enlarged? And there are multiple theories. It could be that some people think that because right-wing ideologies tend to engage those kinds of negative emotions of fear, of threat, of disgust by people or things that are alien, that perhaps it's a kind of, there's a natural affinity where someone who has a larger amygdala that presumably processes those emotions with greater intensity would be drawn to those more right-wing ideas. ideologies, whereas someone who is left-wing would be less likely to. But there's also the possibility that the causality goes to some extent the other way. And we know the brain is plastic and that it can change in response to experience and environments. And perhaps actually being

immersed in a right-wing ideology that is very obsessed with those emotions could be an experience that physically and literally changes the brain and body and nervous system back. And so, So that's a kind of chicken and egg problem that we're working with in this field and that I tease apart in the book of the degree to which our psychology and biology affect our ideologies, but also how potentially our ideologies can shape our minds and bodies in real and tangible ways. It's almost like lifting weights and your muscles getting bigger, or it could be. We don't know which way or to what extent which way it works. Exactly. Is it kind of the exercising of particular, you know, psychological patterns of thinking, or is it a predisposition? Or probably both, right? So it's probably that some of us have these neurobiological predispositions that propel us towards certain ideologies, but that as we become more engaged in those ideologies, that can accentuate certain traits that can amplify certain psychological and neurobiological processes. Kind of like somebody with big muscles finding it easier to put on muscle. potentially be one way that this is working. Yeah, because you are, I think about it in the book as kind of a spiral towards extremism,

right, where someone who is already susceptible and then gets placed in a radicalizing environment with a very kind of extreme ideological doctrine is more likely to go further and faster towards that radical belief system than someone who doesn't have those predispositions to begin with. I'm sure the people listening will be very relieved to hear when you, said earlier that this isn't predetermined and just because you are maybe more predisposed to holding an extreme ideology doesn't mean that you will. A good example of this in the book is to do with religion where some people who perhaps grew up religious but then chose to become non-believers, they scored very well on flexibility tests or as well as somebody who never had.

And that highlights the ability of people to choose, right? Exactly. And I'm really interested in the book in people who have undergone ideological conversions, and people who have, you know, been in an ideological setting and left it and people who weren't but decided to choose it voluntarily. And I think the key takeaway is that the best reflection of your body and your brain is really what you choose. It's the ideologies that you choose is how passionately or kind of more critically you choose to engage with them. And that should give us hope because we have agency, we have the capacity to choose otherwise, and we can think about what it means to think against ideologies, to live a life that is more

free of ideologies, if that's what we want, and how that might lead us to greater mental freedom. What do you think about sort of the analogy of likening ideological think, to addiction. You know, if people have addictive tendencies, they might swap one addiction for another. Do you find that often as well? So people might have sort of an ideological conversion, but they might actually just swap one doctrine for another. Yeah, that's a phenomenon we see actually quite often that someone who is very militant about one ideology, even if they manage to become de-radicalized, to kind of come to a more nuanced, balanced understanding of the world,

they can sometimes be at very high risk of kind of swinging to the other side and suddenly becoming militant about potentially the opposite ideology. And that's why kind of coming back to this question of the images that we give brainwashing and indoctrination is it's not right to just say, oh, you know, something has been erased and they've been washed and emptied in some way. Rather, they've been given this whole structure for understanding the world. And you can try to change the content of those beliefs, but as long as you have that rigid structure and that rigid relationship to information and to other people, you are not really equipping them with the tools needed to stay in a headspace that's not dogmatic.

And so finding that balance is something that I think a lot about. It's really hard, right? Because the whole point of what you're saying is that somebody who becomes ideological is not willing to accept evidence, which makes it so hard to kind of snap people out of it and try and help them become more flexible thinkers. But that's also where I think that the qualities of the brain that we talked about earlier,

the fact that it is a predictive brain, that it does want an accurate representation of reality, means that we can try to engage people's desire to understand the world accurately. In a way that means that we don't, as scientists need to abandon facts, need to abandon evidence and only rely on emotion and stories. That's kind of a debate now that maybe it's only anecdotes that can help us shift people's

opinions and not evidence. But I'm not sure that that's quite true. I think that we can engage people's desire to predict to understand the world well. And people are, maybe our brains are stronger than we sometimes tend to think. Yeah, more manly. As a journalist and a scientist, you know, I'm sure we both. would hope that evidence and facts would be more engaging for people. Do you think as a global society, are we becoming more ideological?

I mean, it feels that way. It feels like that to a lot of people. I think we might not have the exact evidence on whether society is becoming more ideological or not, but what we do know is that the way in which people are now consuming information, which is online through social media algorithms that are trying to give us the most binary information, right? The information that will confirm our beliefs, not information that will challenge us, but also information that will make us emotionally upset in various ways. That's what those algorithms are designed to do is to circulate the most, you know, rigid

information and the most emotionally dysregulating information. And we see that people who spend a lot of time online, on social media in those kinds of spaces are at very high risk of becoming radicalized to all kinds of extreme ideologies. And so what I worry about is that the more that we rely on these kind of algorithms to govern what information we receive, the more we're at risk for becoming more radicalized by extreme ideologies. And so I think that that's a huge driver of change. And for me, one of the things that worries me is how when I look at the psychological traits

that make people susceptible to extreme ideologies. And I look at how these social media algorithms are designed, it seems like the perfectly terrible recipe where you're putting rigid minds with all these emotional sensitivities, all these neurobiological kind of vulnerabilities, and you're putting them in an environment that exactly preys on those traits and tries to amplify them,

you are, yeah, putting people in a more narrow mindset, and that makes them at very high risk of becoming more extreme. more antagonistic towards other people. So I think that the interaction between our technological diet and our psychological vulnerabilities is a huge driver of change that will change the landscape of the next three to five to ten years. Yeah, we're kind of like all these people who perhaps were susceptible to radical ideologies

that are being exposed a lot more and that helps them spiral in. It gives them that little kick kind of like you talk about. Exactly. And we see that happening with young people at earlier and earlier ages. it's really worrying. So obviously your field is quite nascent and it's in its early days.

I wonder about where it can go and how understanding how people become radicalized like this can help us prevent it. I think that what the science can really do is equip us with the tools to think about how do we foster a kind of psychological resilience in ourselves, in others, in young people, and old people, everyone, to make them less at risk to kind of engage with authoritarian extreme ideologies when they come along. And those new extremisms will continue to mutate

and enter our societies. And by focusing on what the individual can do to change themselves, to change their bodies, to change their perspectives on the world, to make them more nuanced, more flexible, more open and receptive to evidence, I think that's a hugely empowering thing. And now there's no recipe, there's no formula for how to become a flexible,

tolerant thinker. But there are kind of broad themes and guidelines that we can think about when we want to promote a sense that the way which we'd like to be citizens in this world is that we'd like to be receptive to evidence, we'd like to be receptive to alternative perspectives, and we would like to come together with a shared understanding of our humanity. And for each of us, that process will entail, I think, a reckoning with our own vulnerabilities and a reckoning with how can we lead lives that are in some ways more imaginative, more creative, more flexible and fluid and expansive in how we see ourselves and others in this world.

And so I am an optimist, despite this topic being very negative and despite all these new currents, radicalizing people, mobilizing them to violence in ways that are really disastrous in a way, I think there's a lot of hope because we all have brains that can change themselves, that can become more flexible, that can become more resilient, but we just need to choose that. So that was Leaerzymigrod, author of The Ideological Brain, a radical science of susceptible minds, which is on sale now. Thanks for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus. If you liked what you just heard, why not consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform?

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