In her new book, “The Ideological Brain,” the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod outlines what makes some people prone to rigid thinking.

Archive link

In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

  • VagueAnodyneCommentsEnglish
    16·
    4 days ago

    Oh wow a reductive essay from NYT pushing moral relativism because “ideology is a biological difference.” This is nonsense propaganda from an outlet that pushes war and genocide constantly. Real red-pill stuff. Less of this please.

    • Azzu@lemm.ee
      20·
      4 days ago

      If you had paid attention, or read the article at all, you would have noticed that they noticed changes in brain wiring, but have no idea if it is certain ideology causing brain wiring differences or brain wiring differences causing certain ideology.

      You would have also noticed that it’s an actual scientist talking, who doesn’t seem to be making any outrageous claims, or anything you could call propaganda, no conclusions are drawn, so idk what the propaganda would even be for.

      It is a shortened article, which it also directly says in there, sometimes you just want a quick thought-teaser, allowing you to dive in deeper if it sounds interesting.

      It seems like you fall massively into preconceived notions, that while they may even be correct more often than not, your comment honestly just sounds like nonsense propaganda in this instance.

      • VagueAnodyneCommentsEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Moral relativism is, in fact, pretty closely related to Political science, which is a field of sociology for which the “science” part is a moniker.

        Also I didn’t mention Political science.

        • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
          1·
          4 days ago

          The ideological brain

          In political science, a political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work, offering some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order.

          Saying political science and sociology aren’t real science is silly.

          • VagueAnodyneCommentsEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            I’m open to a definition of science broad enough to include sociology, but political science is a philosophy. Really don’t think this is an assailable position if we are dealing in popular fact.