Name: Your brain's role in your politics | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T17:02:06.000Z
Duration: 48 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A word you hear a lot these days is ideology.

In fact, you could argue this is the political term of the moment.

When Trump is denouncing the left, he's talking about gender ideology or critical race theory or DEI.

When the left is denouncing Trump, they're talking about fascism or Project 2025.

Wherever you look, ideology is being used to explain or justify policies, and buried in all that is an unstated assumption that the real ideologues are on the other side.

Often to call someone ideological is to imply that they're fanatical or dogmatic.

Most of us don't think of ourselves as ideological for that reason.

And if someone does call you an ideologue, you might recoil a little bit.

I mean, sure, you have beliefs, you have a worldview, but you're not an ideologue.

Maybe this isn't the best way to think about ideology.

Maybe we don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about ideology.

Is it possible that we're all ideological in ways we don't recognize?

And if we could see ourselves a little more clearly, might that help us see others more clearly?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

She's a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of The Ideological Brain.

The book makes the case that our political beliefs aren't just beliefs.

They're neurological signatures written into our neurons and reflexes.

That's a fancy way of saying that how we think and what we believe is a product of the way our brains are wired.

To be clear, she isn't saying that our beliefs are entirely shaped by our biology.

The point isn't that brain is destiny, but she is saying that the way our brains handle change and uncertainty may shape not only the beliefs we adopt, but how fiercely we cling to those beliefs.

A book like this feels especially relevant in such a polarized moment, because it's hard to imagine bridging the divides in our society without understanding ourselves and each other much better.

And part of that understanding is knowing what's really motivating us.

Let's try that again.  Leor McGrath, welcome to the show.

This is a very interesting book, full of a lot of provocative, compelling claims.

Before we do, I am just curious, what drew you to this question?

Well, in many ways, ideology is all around us.

But often we don't really know what it is, right?

We kind of say, well, an ideology is just a system of beliefs or just a kind of insult.

We used to kind of demean someone who believes something totally different to us, which we think is wrong.

And I was really interested in delving into what it means to think ideologically and what it means for a brain to really be immersed in ideology and whether that's a kind of experience that can change the brain, that certain brains might be more prone to taking an ideology and kind of embracing it in an extreme and intense way.

And that's why in the book, in The Ideological Brain, I really delve into this question of what makes people gravitate towards ideologies and what is it about some brains that makes them especially susceptible.

And in doing that, I'm really interested in thinking about ideology in a more precise way than we typically think about it as, which is not just as a broad system of beliefs floating above our heads in an ambiguous way or something that's purely historical or sociological, but it's something that's really deeply psychological and that we can see inside people's brains.

What does it mean to think ideologically?

How are you defining it and how is that different from how people typically define it?

So the way I think about ideology is as really being comprised of two components.

One is a very fixed doctrine, a kind of set of descriptions about the world that's very absolutist, that's very black and white, and that is very resistant to evidence.

So an ideology will always have a certain kind of causal narrative about the world that describes what the world is like and also how we should act within that world.

It gives prescriptions for how we should act, how we should think, how we should interact with other people, but that's not the end of the story.

To think ideologically is both to have this fixed doctrine and also to have a very fixed identity that you really kind of judge everyone with.

And that fixed identity stems from the fact that every ideology, every doctrine will have believers and non-believers.

And so you kind of, when you think ideologically, you're really embracing those rigid identity categories and deciding to exclusively affiliate with people who believe in your ideology and really reject anyone who doesn't.

The degree of ideological extremity can really be mapped onto how hostile you are to anyone with differing beliefs, whether you're willing to potentially harm people in the name of your ideology.

You write that, and now I'm quoting, not all stories are ideologies and not all forms of collective storytelling are rigid and oppressive, end quote.

How do you, for instance, distinguish an ideology from a religion?

Is there even room for a distinction like that in your framework?

What I think about often is the difference between ideology and culture, because culture can encompass eccentricities.

It can encompass deviation, different kinds of traditions or patterns from the past.

But it's not about legislating what one can do or what one can't do.

The moment we detect an ideology is the moment when you have very rigid prescriptions about what is permissible and what is not permissible.

And when you stop being able to tolerate any deviation, that's when you've moved from culture, which can encompass a lot of deviation and kind of reinterpretations, where as an ideology, there is no room for those kinds of non-conformities or differences.

What you're doing here and what you do in the book that is interesting to me and novel as far as I know, is this reframing of ideology more as a style of thinking rather than just a set of beliefs.

I mean, as you know, like the conventional way to think about ideology has always been to focus on the content, on what people believe, not how they think.

What does this understanding let us see that other definitions missed?

What that inversion reveals is that embracing an ideology in an extreme way and thinking really about what are the mechanics of thinking ideologically, what are the ways in which reason gets shifted, how emotion gets distorted, how our biological and kind of even physiological responses to the world get distorted, is that we stop thinking about ideologies as things that just envelop us from outside and that just kind of are almost tipped into us by external forces.

And we start to see how it's a much more dynamic process and that we can even see parallels between ideologues who believe in very different things and partisans to completely different parties, to different missions.

But that really it's how they think that's very similar, even if what they think is very different.

I mean, some people might be more ideological than others, but does everyone more or less have an ideology, even if they don't think of themselves as having an ideology?

I kind of think about ideological thinking as something more specific, that it's this antagonism to evidence, this very kind of tight embrace of a particular narrative about the world and rules about how the world works and how you should behave within that world.

And so when we think about it as that kind of fixed, rigid set of behaviors, of compulsions, we see that not everyone is obviously equally ideological.

And I don't know whether there's a perfect human being completely without any ideology, but in the book I do talk about, you don't think so.

I don't think so, we'll get there, but I don't think so.

I think that you can be a lot less ideological and that's almost the challenge that I talk about in the book is what does it mean to think non-ideologically about the world, maybe anti-ideologically about the world?

Well, tell me how you test for cognitive flexibility versus rigidity.

So in order to test someone's cognitive rigidity or their flexibility, one of the most important things is not just to ask them because people are terrible at knowing whether they're rigid or flexible.

The most rigid thinkers will tell you they're fabulously flexible and the most flexible thinkers will not know it.

And so that's why we need to use these kind of unconscious assessments, these cognitive tests and games that tap into your natural kind of capacity to be adaptable or to resist change.

And so one test to do this is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is a card sorting game where people are presented with a deck of cards that they need to sort.

And initially they don't know what the rule that governs the game is.

So they try and figure it out and quickly they'll realize that they should match the cards in their deck according to their color.

So they'll start putting a blue card with a blue card, a red card with a red card, and they'll get affirmation, the kind of positive feedback that they're doing it right.

And so they start enacting this rule, adopting it, kind of applying it again and again and again.

And after a while, unbeknownst to them, the rule of the game changes and suddenly this color rule doesn't work anymore.

And so that's the moment of change that I'm most interested in because some people will notice that change and they will adapt.

They will then go looking for a different rule and they'll quickly figure out that they should actually sort now the cards according to the shape of the objects on the card and find they'll follow this new rule.

Those are very cognitively flexible individuals.

But there are other people who will notice that change and they will hate it.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Your brain's role in your politics | The Gray Area

vulnerable

cognitive

sort

approach