Why Our Brains Crave Ideology | Hacker News Reader

Why Our Brains Crave Ideology

nautil.us

14 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

Because a tribe is a real organism, not just as a metaphor, and it is bound together by ideology, and less well bound tribes did not survive. Ideology is a kind of muscle at a higher level of the fractal we inhabit.

Article shows how hard it is for academics to do genuinely neutral research that might yield insights accepted by all. She appears to think of herself as an unbiased researcher but her whole perspective is deeply biased e.g. when discussing the larger amygdala in people on the right, she takes it for granted that the left wing brain is normal and the right wing brain is abnormal, but this stance seems to be based on nothing. A right wing person can just as easily argue that their brain is normal and for people on the left it's atrophied, and they've done exactly that when this difference has been brought up in the past.

She then describes people on the right as "chilling" and "numb to injustice", and those who convert to religion as psychologically "rigid". This is based on observing that people on the right don't get emotional when shown a video that's explicitly designed to trigger people on the left.

Meanwhile the center-left (presumably where she thinks she is) is described as "creative", "flexible", "moderate" and "least likely to latch onto group identities".

All this stuff sails dangerously close to being circular reasoning. Ideological people are more mentally rigid - that can be phrased another way, as moderates are easily pushed around because they don't think hard about what they believe. Flexibility sounds less virtuous when phrased like that, but it's not a more or less valid presentation than what she's doing. All this is far from being scientific.

Fully agree.

Nautilus is usually pretty good but this reads like a piece from someone that is ready to put republicans in camps. “They are physically different so not quite the same humans as the rest of us.”

Wow, I didn't get that at all.

I guess my biggest take-aways were:

1. indicators of political ideology could be determined in sub-second timeframes

2. the size of the amygdala is larger in those that are more ideologically rigid

This is the problem, the article is written in such a loose way it's easy to take away slightly incorrect conclusions. It doesn't actually say (2), what it says is that the amygdala is larger in those who are right wing, and then there's lots of language that dances very close to "and right wing people are mentally rigid" without quite stating it outright. Because she wants to sound neutral this notion of being ideological gets inserted into the middle, and she recognizes there are strongly ideological people on the left, but it wouldn't match the conclusions of the study to say that ideological people have a bigger amygdala.

I've had a book in my life for a little while now, called "I Am That". It's about exploring the space before the "ideology" takes hold. Really enjoying spending time in that space during these times.

This is all fine, but where's the neuroscience? From what I can tell this is a mix of theory, observation, and self-report.

TL;DR: The human brain craves certainty and simplicity, aiming to avoid the mental effort of weighing and reconciling conflicting information.

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