On Wednesday, Salman Rushdie’s attacker Hadi Matar was to have been sentenced for attempted murder, but that has been adjourned to May 16. Hashem Abedi, who helped plan and prepare the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing in which 22 people were killed and 264 wounded, attacked three prison officers using hot oil and improvised knives at HMP Frankland a few weeks ago. Two officers are in hospital with severe stab wounds. Abedi, already serving a minimum of 55 years, is unlikely ever to be released.
What motivated Abedi’s vicious assaults in prison is unclear, but his earlier murders were, in the words of the sentencing judge: “to advance the cause of Islamism; a matter distinct from and abhorrent to the vast majority of those who follow the Islamic faith.”
Tabloids describe Matar, Abedi and other ideologically driven terrorists as monsters, manifestations of pure evil, or as zombie-like products of indoctrination, but we urgently need a better account than that.
In her recently published The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, Leor Zmigrod attempts one. Her focus is the causes of cognitive rigidity and extremism. She describes how immersion in an ideology can reshape an individual’s brain. As a political neuroscientist, she draws on psychological, social, and neuroscientific research.
Rigid ideological thinkers commit to narratives about the world that explain and confirm their approach. These deliver clear rules about how they should behave. Counter-evidence is invisible to them. Typically, they surround themselves with a community of like-minded believers who reinforce their prejudices and give them a sense of belonging and self-worth. They don’t adapt their views in the light of evidence because they already know the truth: it’s confirmed everywhere.
As Zmigrod puts it: “Ideologies provide easy solutions to our queries, scripts that we can follow, groups to which we belong. Guiding our thoughts and actions, ideologies are the shortcuts to our desire to understand the world and be understood back.”
From within an ideology, everything is neatly ordered, everything is as you expect it to be. Hannah Arendt observed that ideological thinking “proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere else in reality”. Once you’ve settled on some unrevisable axioms, the consequences follow with a terrible logic.
Not all rigid thinkers end up as terrorists, but a small percentage do, with devastating consequences.
People with a highly rigid mindset don’t just treat evidence differently, they also perceive and remember differently. Zmigrod cites experiments in which children were told a story. When asked to recall what happened, those identified by other tests as at the rigid end of the spectrum often invented details, such as undesirable traits for characters from different ethnic groups. Their memories of the story made it consistent with their biases. In contrast, the more “liberal”-minded children recalled events with greater accuracy.
What causes such rigidity? Unravelling the direction of cause and effect is a complex chicken-and-egg task. Zmigrod has discovered that the brains of the most cognitively rigid have lower concentrations of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex (crudely, the brain’s decision-making centre), and more in areas that control rapid instincts. This is something that is influenced by genes.
However, Zmigrod cautions, there’s no “dogmatic gene”. The interactions between different genes is complex and expression of particular genes is not predetermined: it depends on multiple factors, including, of course, experience, and exposure to ideologies.
Not everyone is equally at risk: some individuals are especially susceptible. “There are gradations in vulnerability and recognising this continuity is crucial,” Zmigrod explains. Vulnerable people’s immersion in the world of an ideology changes their brain structures and reinforces and rewards dangerous patterns of thought. That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility, but their brains chemically reinforce what an ideology is telling them.
Most of us share some patterns of thought with rigid thinkers in some spheres. We are all somewhere on that spectrum, but our position is not fixed. At times of stress, for example, people become more dogmatic in their thinking; when less stressed they become more flexible.
Once seduced by an ideology, however, the force of the downward spiral with its patterns of reinforcement can be hard to resist, and for some all but impossible without help. Ideologies, Zmigrod acknowledges, are “terrifyingly alluring”. Our only hope lies in fostering critical and flexible thinking in
