Watching the appointees of the Donald Trump administration deliver their speeches, appear in interviews and conduct press conferences has been an education in itself. You ask whether they speak from a desire to gain the favour of their boss and would shift 180 degrees if required, or if what they say comes from something genuinely ideological.
In the case of a man like Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top aides, or vice-president JD Vance, to listen to them is to wonder at the cold, adamantine quality of their conviction and the facility with which they distort the truth. How did they come to be like that? In neither case does it seem to have been their parents or their schooling, so where does that pitiless certainty come from?
One answer emerges in a new book by Leor Zmigrod, a political neuroscientist of extraordinary distinction for someone hardly out of her twenties and currently attached to Cambridge university. The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds is the product of her research into the physical and psychological origins of extremism.
Zmigrod takes the feminist adage that the personal is political one step further by showing that the biological is political. The answer to the Miller/Vance conundrum, following her thesis, does not stem just from their experiences or the pure operation of their intellects, but from the interaction of genes, brain structure and environment.
Zmigrod’s definition of ideology is a rigid and dogmatic way of thinking that discourages thought in favour of a pre-determined and hermetically sealed belief system. This makes her endeavour something of a throwback to The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodor Adorno and colleagues, which tried to assess whether there was such a thing as a fascist psyche.
One of Adorno’s co-authors was Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who used questionnaires to study the attitudes of Californian children, aged 10-15, towards minority groups and then interviewed the most hostile and the most tolerant on a range of issues. Her findings, as summarised by Zmigrod, were that “prejudiced children’s rigidities were not constrained to one domain: they were everywhere. Rigidity spilled into every response, every reasoned thought and miscalculation.”
This is suggestive. The one response — prejudice — is indicative of a precursor to what Zmigrod calls ideological thought. And there are other ways of correlating rigid thinking to political extremes. She describes the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which measures how people perform when the rules of the game they think they are playing suddenly change; and the Alternative Uses Test, which asks participants to name as many uses for an object — say, a brick — as they can in two minutes, measuring their creativity or “generative flexibility”. (Some readers will now pause while they test themselves — I know I did.)
When the results of these tests are set against the political and social attitudes of participants, according to Zmigrod, the correlations are clear: ideological conservatives — of left or right — are less flexible and less imaginative.
It’s at this point that Zmigrod’s research went a step further. Was there also a physiological correlation? She discovered one in how the hormone dopamine is distributed through the brain. Tiny variations in our genetic make-up mean that such distribution isn’t uniform. Zmigrod “found that the individuals who are most cognitively rigid have a genetic predisposition that concentrates less dopamine in their prefrontal cortex . . . and more dopamine in their midbrain striatum” — the former being the more deliberative part of the brain and the latter an evolutionary older part. Other variations in the size and functioning of parts of the brain, measured through scans, also correlate to a person’s rigidity or flexibility.
So when you see, for example, Miller do his schtick about migrants being criminals, you could be watching someone whose single nucleotide polymorphism (or “snip” as gene scientists call it) has nudged him towards intolerance, right? Or maybe he has a frontal lesion, which one study found to correlate to political conservatism?
Not so fast, says Zmigrod. It is also possible that the brain — plastic as it is — responds chemically to circumstances. The rejected child may have been born with the dopamine distribution of an open-minded, flexible subject, but her experience will affect how parts of the brain interact. The old saw that a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality has some truth to it, though it can work the other way round as well, as some Trump-voting relatives of deportees are discovering.
It is complicated, and we all exist on a spectrum for just about everything. Even so, the thesis of the book is clear: there is an important physical component to our political outlooks, and some of this is likely to be innate. That doesn’t predetermine our adopting extremism or moderation, but like someone with a genetic predisposition towards obesity contemplating their situation, it needs to be understood.
By now some people will be thinking that embedded in this argument is a prejudice held by the author herself, that ideology is per se a bad thing. That she likes to think of herself as a super-moderate, superrational being and wishes to pathologise those who hold strong beliefs, including those who are devoutly religious.
But Zmigrod has an answer to this. “In cognitive tests of rigidity,” she writes, “there is no advantage to inflexible behaviour — in fact, it is a disadvantage. Inflexibility exemplifies a lack of adaptability, an absence of inventiveness, and insensitivity to changing evidence.” None of which makes for a better world.
As a work in progress (as most neuroscience is) Zmigrod’s thesis is fascinating and likely to form the basis of further enlightenment. As a guide to action it feels more problematic. How is the liberal to use the tools of flexibility and open-mindedness to fight back against the ideologue? How do the non-ideological generate the commitment to take on the ideological? It was Hitler who came to power and Else Frenkel-Brunswik who fled to America. It’s Vance and Miller who are in the White House.
The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds by Leor Zmigrod Viking £22, 336 pages/published in the US as ‘The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking’, Henry Holt $29.99, 304 pages
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