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

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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.

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    2•3 days ago

    From a European perspective the liberal American position is racist AF because it accepts the concept of race as something real. That is, the understanding is that while racism exists, race plainly doesn’t. To solve such issues you make sure that all kids go to primary and secondary schools which can develop their whole potential so that kids from all backgrounds have an equal chance. In the American context: Stop financing schools from local property taxes as that means that kids from poor neighbourhoods go to worse schools than rich kids.Those neighbourhoods quite often are predominantly black, which is how racism perpetuates itself systemically, but if you address the issue by “give black folks more money, or require lower test scores” instead of “get all the poor kids the chances that rich kids have” you’re playing the racist game, you’re playing into and reinforcing divisions, resentment, all that BS.

    This goes so far that there was a discussion in Germany about getting rid of the term “race” (Rasse) in the constitution (Article 3) as something that one must not be favoured or disfavoured for, argument being that anything valuable that could be meant by it is already captured by “parentage, homeland or origin”. In the end the Gordian knot was slain by the Jewish community which said “We should keep it as a historical artefact signifying that the constitution was written in reaction to a time where that term had vicious meaning”. That everyone could agree on, would be valuable.