Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, The Ideological Brain.

“I think that from all the research that I’ve done,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.” And while she acknowledges there are times being unbending may be seen as an asset, “rigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.”

In this podcast, she details some of the work – both with social science experimentation and with brain imaging – that determines if people are flexible in their thinking, what are the real-life benefits of being flexible, if they can change, and how an ideological brain, i.e. a less flexible brain, affects politics and other realms of decision-making.

“When you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, you’re focusing on how people are thinking, not what they’re thinking,” Zmigrod explains. “So it’s not like you can have a curriculum of ‘like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,’ but it’s about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn’t so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts.”

Zmigrod was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University and won a winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College there. She has since held visiting fellowships at Stanford and Harvard universities, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. Amond many honors the young scholar received are the ESCAN 2020 Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science by the Cognitive Science Society, . the 2020 Women of the Future Science Award and the 2022 Women in Cognitive Science Emerging Leader Award, and the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association. 

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Suppose you believe something, but then the situation evolves, or you find out some new facts. How willing are you to change your mind? How rigid is your thinking? Leor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and the author of The Ideological Brain. Leor Zmigrod, welcome to Social Science. Bites.

Leor Zmigrod: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

David Edmonds: We’re discussing today the ideological brain. What is an ideological brain?

Leor Zmigrod: An ideological brain is a brain that’s become deeply indoctrinated by a rigid ideology, and it’s a brain that has actually potentially been transformed physically, biologically by the fact that it’s immersed itself in a doctrine that’s dogmatic, that’s rigid. In the book The Ideological Brain, I examine what are the effects of joining an ideology on the brain, and also what kinds of brains are most susceptible to extreme ideological thinking.

David Edmonds: So does that mean that two people with exactly the same beliefs about the world, can function in different ways? So one can have an ideological brain and one can be more flexible about their beliefs?

Leor Zmigrod: What I found is most interesting and important about people’s ideologies is not so much what they believe, but rather how they believe. It is less about whether these two brains believe in the same ideology or the same mission, but more about how they practice these beliefs, and do they hold on to those beliefs in a rigid way, or do they think about the world in a more flexible way, in the less prescriptive way than an ideology typically forces people to think?

David Edmonds: And obviously we’re talking about a spectrum with some people at the far end and some people who have very flexible brains.

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right. So in my research, I’ve found that really, rather than it being a small minority of brains that are susceptible and everybody else is very resilient, actually it’s a continuous spectrum, with some people being incredibly susceptible to ideological, dogmatic thinking, while others being a lot more resilient, and many of us, most of us, are somewhere in between. And when we appreciate that it’s a spectrum and that there are all these factors, psychological factors, social factors, even biological factors that affect where we lie on that spectrum, we start to understand that to some extent, we’re all at risk. But there’s also opportunity for each of us to choose differently and to shift our position on that spectrum.

David Edmonds: So let’s talk about how one can determine whether or not somebody has a more or less rigid brain. You talk about something called the Wisconsin game. What is that?

Leor Zmigrod: So, one of the best ways to measure people’s cognitive virginity or their cognitive flexibility is rather than asking them do you think you’re very flexible, or do you think you’re very rigid? Which is not a great method, because most people have very little self-knowledge, which is why we need these neuropsychological tasks that tap at a person’s rigidity or flexibility, but measures it in an unconscious way, in an objective way, where the person doing this test or this game doesn’t know what it is that we’re measuring. And one of the best tests to do this is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is a classic measure of cognitive flexibility, where a participant is presented with a game, which is a card sorting game, and basically they’re asked to sort a deck of cards according to some rule which initially they’re not sure of. So they start sorting the cards, perhaps according to the color of the shapes on the card, and very quickly, they’ll realize that there’s particular rule that they can follow. For instance, maybe if they follow the shape on the card and they start matching hearts to hearts, circles to circles, they’ll get rewarded each time.

And so people learn this kind of rule, and they start applying it, and they sort the cards according to this rule. But after a while, unbeknownst to the participants, the rule of the game changes, and suddenly they’re no longer rewarded for applying this shape rule. And what I’m interested in is that moment of change. Some people adapt really well. They notice that the environment has changed, that the rule has changed, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll adapt their behavior in return. These are cognitively flexible people. Whereas other people, when they notice the change, they really resist it. They hate the change. Instead of changing their behavior, they try to apply the old rule, even though it doesn’t work anymore. And those are the more cognitively rigid thinkers who struggle to adapt in the face of change and who hate any kind of uncertainty.

David Edmonds: So that. That’s the Wisconsin game. You also have another way of determining rigidity, and that’s the Alternative Uses Test. Explain that to us.

Leor Zmigrod: That’s right, because when we’re measuring people’s flexibility or rigidity, I always make sure to use many different kinds of measures that tap into either their adaptable flexibility, like we get at with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which is about how they adapt to change. But another important element of flexibility is how people generate ideas, and whether they are flexible in their thinking, in their imagination. What the Alternative Uses Test does is it’s a classic creativity test. What I ask participants to do is to spend a couple minutes and give me as many possible imagined uses as they can for an everyday object. So that might be a paper clip or it might be a brick, and we give people about two minutes to just write down all their ideas.

What’s interesting about this more linguistic imaginative task is it also allows us to measure the flexibility of people’s thought processes. Because one person might say, with a brick, for instance, you can build a house, or you can build a castle, or you can build a garden shed, or you could build a fence. And they might give me 20 different ideas. They’re very fluid, intelligent thinkers with many different ideas, but all of thos