Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker So you, the participant, make a start. Does your card with a single red triangle match with the card with two green triangles above it—by dint of, well, triangles? You give it a go. Uh-uh. Computer says no. So what about with the card with three red circles? Ding! You got it: colours are the key to this particular test. You proceed accordingly though more rounds. Matching blue with blue, yellow with yellow, green with green. Easy. Except there’s a twist. At some point, the rules of the test suddenly change. You match a pair of cards according to their colour, as you know how to, but this time it doesn’t work. So you have to try again. Perhaps shape is what matters now? No. Try again. Number? Ding! You’re back on track. The second response is “cognitively rigid”—“You notice the fact that the old rule no longer works, and you refuse to believe it. You will try again and again to repeat the first rule… ” You are, in an all-too-real sense, what you think Barely minutes into our conversation, Zmigrod has already used the word “rigid” and its derivatives dozens of times—and she admits, laughingly, when I ask, that she wishes there were a broader lexicon. The problem is that simple language can make her extraordinary findings sound commonplace: rigid brains think rigidly about politics—so what? But her findings really are extraordinary, and push into the newest frontiers of neuroscience. The Ideological Brain fits in with the predictive brain in various ways, not least because ideologies are a kind of salve for anyone trying to figure out the world. They tell us not just what to think, but also what to expect of other people, cultures and systems. They seem to help with our predictions. In fact, ideology is not entirely unanalogous to addiction. Excessive drinking or drug use may feel like a comfort—it might calm the disquieted mind—but it’s not good for you in any meaningful sense. The brain and the body are still being harmed. But ideology exists outside of left and right, which is why Zmigrod was so interested in Brexit from an experimental standpoint. “It’s about closedness and openness, rather than right and left; there were people on the hard left who supported Brexit. We did find that people who had the most openness to looser borders, to multiculturalism and to a broad national identity, rather than a narrow one, were all more flexible when it came to the neuropsychological tasks.” ‘Is the psychology affecting our politics, or is the politics affecting our psychology?’ Otherwise, she is keen to explore the practical ramifications of her work. For example, “How we understand what makes someone at risk of radicalisation. We tend to look at their background, their socioeconomic situation, their age—when, actually, that’s only a very small part of the story. We need to look at their psychological traits, their cognitive traits, all these other factors that predict a lot better than demographic factors ever could.”  Zmigrod’s broader goal, however, is stated in the rousing epilogue to her book (which is, incidentally, another conversation—between herself, Charles Darwin, Hannah Arendt and others). “I believe that defying rigidities,” she writes, “requires us to envision what an anti-ideological brain might look like. An existence that actively and creatively rejects the temptation of dogma.” The whole experience is, in the fullest possible sense, mind-expanding. Peter Hoskin is Prospect’s books & culture editor. He is also the Daily Mail’s games critic. Leor Zmigrod is a political neuroscientist based in London, and author of the upcoming book The Ideological Brain. Pro- and anti-abortion activists confront each other in front of the US Supreme Court. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground Kurt Gray Pantheon (2025) Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00407-6 The author declares no competing interests. Walking in two worlds: how an Indigenous computer scientist is using AI to preserve threatened languages Native American tribe teams up with genomicists to confirm link to iconic ancient site Teens with anxiety and depression spend more time on social media Why we need to measure people’s well-being — lessons from a global survey Science’s big problem is a loss of influence, not a loss of trust Trump gutted two landmark environmental reports — can researchers save them? Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts to US science Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW Post Summary of the role The Characterisation & Processing of Advanced Materials. Prof. Valeria Nicolosi research group. HT is an interdisciplinary research institute, created and supported by the Italian government, whose aim is to develop innovative strategies to pr... UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution, with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus, ... Department of Energy and Environmental Materials, Suzhou Laboratory Lead bold science at ONJCRI. Shape strategy, drive impact, and advance cancer research in a leading translational institute. Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. access content via the FT Edit page on FT.com and receive the FT Edit newsletter Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders Terms & Conditions apply Discover all the plans currently available in your country See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times Zmigrod's account illuminates the debate about the nature of ideology and the power it exerts by bringing cognitive neuroscience – in fact an intriguing development of it: ‘political neuroscience’ – to bear on both A Gates Cambridge Scholar is launching her ‘startingly original’ book on political neuroscience with an appearance at two major festivals and a workshop at Bill Gates Sr Leor Zmigrod’s book, The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds It is described by the psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker as being “filled with insightful findings” and showing “that ideological extremism and polarisation are not just problems to fret about but puzzles that can be studied and understood” the book uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours showing that ideologies change our neural architecture and our cells it demonstrates how a simple card sorting game can reveal a person’s entire approach to life as cognitive rigidity in such tasks – struggling to adapt to new rules – mirrors the rigidity with which a person cling to social and political ideologies while some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others all of us can strive to be more flexible and embrace ambiguity showing what ideology does to the human brain and casting a bright new light on the sources and nature of dogmatism ideology and open-mindedness”.  A says it is “a fascinating and important exploration of the causes of cognitive rigidity and of the factors that make some people more vulnerable to it than others” Leor will be speaking about the book  at the Cambridge Festival on the evening of 1st April She is also doing a talk about the book at the prestigious Hay Festival on 25th May.  And she will be leading  ‘how to get published’ workshop for Gates Cambridge Scholars on 19th June Leor [2016] completed her PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College She has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University Harvard University and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study Leor was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and has since won numerous prizes for her trailblazing research and public outreach including the Women of the Future Science Award and MHP’s “30ToWatch” in British Politics Gold Winner Award Leor advises national and international policymakers on developing evidence-based counterextremism policies and her research has been featured widely in the media The Ideological Brain is Leor’s first book and has over 10 translations in French The Gates Cambridge Trust has announced the 95 outstanding scholars and future leaders who will form the 25th cohort of Gates Cambridge Scholars 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of Gates […] What can astronomy tell us about our place in the universe Three Gates Cambridge Scholars discuss the history of astronomy current research into exo-planets and what studying the planets and […] Gates Cambridge Scholars have been active in all fields and none more so than economics Zoljargal Enkh-Amgalan [Zoloo for short] fell in love with Anthropology as soon as she knew what it was It seemed to bring together all her interests in people I want you to write down all of the ways you could use that brick along with a host of other building-based tasks Some of you might have moved on to more alternative uses: doorstops One or two of you might have even progressed to murder weapons How you answered this little experiment — often called the Alternative Uses Test — is a surprisingly good predictor of what psychologists call “generative” flexibility: how malleable is your ability to think spontaneously Registered in England No. 894646. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. Leor Zmigrod: suspicious of nationalism. Photo: Ryan Burnell We probably don’t think of it this way, but most of us have an ideology. Some think very deeply about their political views and are conscious of it. For the rest of us, ideology manifests itself as a vague feeling that emerges when we come up against a new situation or choice. So, what do you think about immigration? Your ideology gives you a mental shortcut to answer that. If you’re a conservative, you might be worried about the impact on the social order. A liberal will think that people should be allowed to move about without too much state interference. A progressive will see migrants as victims of global force who are deserving of support and respect. Daily word puzzles designed to test your vocabulary and lateral thinking skills. Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01647 This article is part of the Research TopicCreativity and Mental ImageryView all 12 articles While recent studies have investigated how processes underlying human creativity are affected by particular visual-attentional states we tested the impact of more stable attention-related preferences These were assessed by means of Navon’s global-local task in which participants respond to the global or local features of large letters constructed from smaller letters Three standard measures were derived from this task: the sizes of the global precedence effect the impact of incongruent letters at the global level on local processing) the impact of incongruent letters at the local level on global processing) These measures were correlated with performance in a convergent-thinking creativity task (the Remote Associates Task) a divergent-thinking creativity task (the Alternate Uses Task) and a measure of fluid intelligence (Raven’s matrices) Flexibility in divergent thinking was predicted by the local interference effect while convergent thinking was predicted by intelligence only We conclude that a stronger attentional bias to visual information about the “bigger picture” promotes cognitive flexibility in searching for multiple solutions which again raises the question of how reliable the reported data are some of the supportive findings are relatively indirect even if affective states can be taken to impact both attention to external stimuli and internal memory the individual characteristics of processing the global and local aspects of visual stimuli should statistically predict the individual characteristics of conceptual processes We take the size of this effect to represent the degree to which the irrelevant local task set affects global processing The participants were instructed to attend in the global block to the global level and in the local block to the local level and identify the target (“H” or “S”) The stimuli could be congruent (same letter in both levels) or incongruent (different letters for each level) supporting the idea that they assess orthogonal components of creativity The global-local task served to derive individual scores for the global-precedence effect which were then used to statistically predict performance in the RAT and the AUT 124 native Dutch Leiden University students (60 men; mean age = 20 years; SD = 2.3 age range: 17–28 years) took part in the study for course credits or a financial reward Three participants were excluded from the analysis one due to misunderstanding of the divergent task All participants were right-handed with normal or corrected-to-normal vision Exclusion criteria included: history of psychiatric disorders The study conformed to the ethical standards of the declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Ethical Committee of Leiden University Participants gave their written informed consent to participate The global-local task was modeled after Navon (1977; see Figure 1) participants are instructed to identify targets (“H” or “S”) either at the global level (the large letter) or the local level (the small letters that comprise the large letter) during separate experimental blocks (global block and local block) The letters can be either congruent (identical letters in the local and global levels) or incongruent (different letters in the local and global levels) The global letters were created from 5 × 5 matrices of the local letters The height of the global letter was seven times as tall as the local letters and both global and local letters had a ratio of 1:1.5 width to height Each trial began with a 500-ms tone signaling the beginning of the task followed by the stimulus that appeared in the center of the screen for 3000 ms Participants responded by pressing on the keyboard buttons “H” or “S” with the index finger as quickly and accurately as possible The experimental blocks were counterbalanced between subjects and prior to each experimental block; the participants read the instructions and completed four training trials Each experimental block consisted of 72 trials The Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices task (APM: Raven, 1965) was used to assess and estimate fluid intelligence and Spearman’s g The task was composed of non-verbal visual patterns with one element missing Participants choose one out of six possible answers we used 30 items which progressively increased in difficulty over the 20 min during which the APM was administered The experiment was controlled by a Targa Pentium 3 attached to a Targa TM 1769-A 17 inch CRT monitor Participants were tested in a small cubical room and they were instructed to sit upright on a wooden chair and look at a fixation point The experimenter ensured that participants faced the monitor at a distance of about 60 cm with the same visual angle The participants read and signed the informed consent form before the beginning of the experiment All the participants completed the four tasks Half of the participants completed the creativity tasks (RAT and AUT) first and half of the participants completed the global-local task first The creativity tasks were also counterbalanced between participants for a detailed presentation of the findings see below Correlations between global–local measurements in directed attention condition and creative style interference from the global level correlates positively with the size of the global precedence effect which again is negatively correlated with interference from the local level Mean reaction times (RTs; with standard error bars) as a function of task (global vs local) and stimulus congruency (congruent vs we reran the analyses after eliminating all data from trials with intuitive solutions this merely rendered all correlations insignificant presumably due to the data loss and the resulting increase in intra-individual variability This observation fits with our expectations: the brainstorming-like divergent-thinking task should benefit from a more global bias rather than from attention to detail While this did not lead to a significant positive correlation between flexibility and the global-precedence effect (which it did yield the expected reduced impact from the local level scattered plot depicting the negative correlation between the local interference effect and the flexibility scores from the divergent thinking task (AUT) Results of linear regression analyses for RAT scores and Flexibility scores with task order and RT as first step of the linear regression and global and local interferences as the second step of the linear regression We carried out additional explorative analyses to identify possible gender effects. However, RTs and accuracy in the global–local task did not differ between males and females, as revealed by one-way ANOVAs with gender as a between-subjects factor, all ps > 0.05, replicating previous findings (Kimchi et al., 2009) The aim of the study was to explore possible links between core functions of attention and creativity. Using the global–local paradigm (Navon, 1977) we observed that attention allocation biases to particular levels of hierarchical stimuli can predict one’s performance characteristics in some aspects of creative thinking we found that convergent and divergent thinking the two components of human creativity that we considered were related to characteristics of performance in the global–local task in very different ways This suggests that all creativity tasks should not be considered the same and it also raises doubts in attempts to integrate different factors into one measure—as various creativity tests have tried Taking together these findings and the present results suggest that individual variability in the local interference effect may be used as an index for cognitive flexibility High values of the local interference effect might be taken to denote rigid whereas low values reflect enhanced flexibility and a capacity for divergent thinking More research into the possibility of the local interference measure as an index for cognitive flexibility is needed In contrast to the divergent-thinking task no systematic connection between visual and conceptual attention emerged from the convergent-thinking task While there was a correlation between convergent-thinking performance and the global interference effect the sign of the effect and the overall pattern including measures of general response speed strongly suggest that this correlation does not reflect mechanistic commonalities between processes underlying performance in the global–local task and the RAT There was also no indication of a possible connection to the global-precedence effect and local interference this suggests that the RAT may not be suitable for identifying relationships between visual and conceptual attention These parallels could suggest that zooming into the brain could provide a fruitful basis for future research into the links between attentional processing biases and creative thinking styles The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest and Maurits van Heusden for their assistance in recruiting the participants of this study and helping with the data collection Akbari Chermahini Development and validity of a Dutch version of the Remote Associates Task: an item-response theory approach Akbari Chermahini The (b)link between creativity and dopamine: spontaneous eye blink rates predict and dissociate divergent and convergent thinking Neuroimaging creativity: a psychometric view A neuro-psychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar Systemizing influences attentional processes during the Navon task: an fMRI study doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.09.003 Happy but still focused: failures to find evidence for a mood-induced widening of visual attention Perceptual and attentional asymmetries in 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Scholar Citation: Zmigrod S, Zmigrod L and Hommel B (2015) Zooming into creativity: individual differences in attentional global-local biases are linked to creative thinking. Front. Psychol. 6:1647. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01647 Copyright © 2015 Zmigrod, Zmigrod and Hommel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited in accordance with accepted academic practice distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms *Correspondence: Bernhard Hommel, aG9tbWVsQGZzdy5sZWlkZW51bml2Lm5s Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish You are viewing your 1 free article this month Viking has won a 13-way bidding war for a “landmark” debut on how ideologies take hold in the brain by scientist Leor Zmigrod Connor Brown, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Rebecca Carter at her recently launched eponymous agency to The Ideological Brain by Zmigrod a prize-winning scientist and “pioneer in the field of political neuroscience” Viking said: “The book attracted considerable interest at the London Book Fair with Flammarion pre-empting French rights and auctions ongoing in other territories." The book will be published in hardback in spring 2025 The blurb reads: “Why do some people become radicalised And how can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas The Ideological Brain reveals the deep connection between political beliefs and the biology of the brain Dr Leor Zmigrod reveals the complex interplay between biology and environment that predisposes some to ‘rigid thinking’ and explains how ideologies take hold of our brains She shows how ideologues of all types struggle to change their thought patterns when faced with new information culminating in the radical message that our politics are not superficial – politics can become cellular.”  accessible and playful blend of psychology politics and philosophy takes us to the cutting-edge of the new field of political neuroscience explains its historical roots and looks to the future exploring the broader social and political implications of Zmigrod’s experiments We see how everyone can keep their minds open and flexible in the face of extremist ideologies Brown said: “The Ideological Brain will be a lead non-fiction title for Viking and it explores the revolutionary connection between political beliefs and what is happening in our brains As well as being an important new thinker and pioneer in the fascinating field of political neuroscience Leor is a superb writer – her prose is beautiful and accessible and she engages with the reader in a wonderfully playful way We are thrilled to be working with Leor on what promises to be an extraordinary book.”  Zmigrod commented: “I am passionate about science writing that seeks to illuminate both the natural world – including our minds and bodies – and our understanding of politics I hope that The Ideological Brain will be a book that can elucidate the links between our biological lives and political lives weaving together the exciting new discipline of political neuroscience with the timeless questions of what it means to internalise dogmatic belief systems The book will reveal why ideologies are so enticing to our predictive minds and how deep immersion in rigid ideologies can literally shape our brains." She added: "I believe this science should provoke us to rethink and critique the nature of power I’m delighted to be working with Viking to bring these ideas to a wider audience.”  Zmigrod studied at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar before winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College She has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and held visiting fellowships at Stanford Harvard and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study including the Women of the Future Science Award She has spoken at the Hay Festival and TEDx and her research has been featured widely in the media Zmigrod advises policymakers at the United Nations A neuroscientist reveals how to nurture authentic and flexible thinking As the lights in the lecture hall slowly brighten political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod braces herself for the onslaught of questions from an audience brimming with rising hands—and one clenched fist A symbol of solidarity or defiance?” Zmigrod writes at the end of her new book The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking “Before I can point the roving microphone in its direction “I wrote about the ideological phantoms in the human brain long before these strange neuroimaging technologies were invented,” the audience member says but I’m glad to discover these phantoms are real.” The exchange is actually an imagined one—the speaker Zmigrod defends her research against the skeptical remarks of historical luminaries such as Charles Darwin and Hannah Arendt she clarifies why it’s valuable to understand the impact ideologies have on the human brain and body—and underscores to the grumpy German philosopher that her work complements his insights rather than supplants them “What does your ‘new method’ genuinely show?” Zmigrod answers: “That we can bypass self-reports of ideological oppression and that instead of relying solely on the tools of history we can study unconscious processes that are inconspicuous to the observer’s naked eye or the believer’s storytelling tongue.” I was eager to hear Zmigrod explain this in richer detail In our recent conversation over a video call—Zmigrod spoke to me from her home in England—she described her research with verve she was among the first wave of scientists to start investigating the neurobiological origins of ideological thinking “It felt like those methods weren’t being used in the best way to understand our politics and what makes people gravitate toward ideologies in the first place,” she says “And then there were all these very politically charged elections in 2016: both in Europe with Brexit It led to a really exciting and interesting path.” We started with the basics: What makes the human brain so prone to ideology the “brain’s delicious answer to the problem of prediction and communication?” Our brains are these amazingly predictive organs trying to constantly explain the world We have to have a reliable model of reality so that we can know what to expect—for example when there’s going to be a confrontation with someone we’re in a relationship with Ideologies give us the answers for all those predictions Here are rules of conduct and thought.” We can rely on a compelling story and logical system that many other people are buying into Ideologies are incredibly seductive because they give us a community of people who we can belong to research suggests that ideologies can also be very injurious to our capacity for elastic Maybe being immersed in a world that’s focused on negative feelings can actually change the brain Are we all ideological thinkers to some extent Some people are highly ideological and dogmatic in the way they view the world They have this very rigid adherence to a doctrine this embrace of a totalizing explanation of the world part of that is being very resistant to credible evidence This also involves having a very fixed identity and adhering to strict identity categories for who belongs and who doesn’t That results in a strong favoritism toward other people who believe the same thing A very ideological person will exclusively affiliate with people who believe in the ideology and the cause And that rejection can take the form of hostility a willingness to endorse violence against that outgroup or against innocent people who reflect or represent that group And across that spectrum we go all the way to someone being very non-ideological My approach has been to look at every ideology and any ideology—the left and the right But there are some psychological and neurobiological processes that are related to just how extremely people adopt ideologies There are also some things that are dependent on the specific ideology itself There is a whole body of research showing psychological and even neurobiological differences between conservatives and liberals in the U.S. we see that different ideologies might either lead to or attract different kinds of minds What are some of those neurobiological differences you’ve seen between American conservatives and liberals One of the experiments that’s been replicated a few times shows that people who hold right-wing beliefs tend to have a larger amygdala an area of the brain that controls our emotional processing of threat That area is enlarged in people who hold more traditional views who tend to believe that social dominance hierarchies are natural and good Why would a conservative have a brain that’s structured in that way that made them more attracted to ideologies that dealt with fear and threat and disgust which many conservative ideologies try to grapple with and counter Or maybe being immersed in a world that’s very focused on those negative feelings can actually change the brain That makes me think of a line in your book—you write that the “ideologue believing in hierarchies is viscerally numb.”   That’s right. I was discussing a 2020 study where researchers looked at people’s unconscious reactions to injustice—in particular their responses to people who are suffering from unequal social and economic structures The researchers presented participants with videos of people who have experienced homelessness talking about that adversity They also gave them a control video where they’re just watching coffee beans being processed And what they found is that ideology really conditions the response For people who believe that economic and social hierarchies are wrong and that we shouldn’t justify but instead correct them when they’re watching the videos of homeless people discussing their plight Their heart rate accelerates when we measure their skin conductance response especially relative to watching coffee beans when participants who believe that inequalities are fine watched the video of the homeless people discussing their plight There were no physiological differences when they watch the homelessness video versus when they watch the coffee beans which really shows you how deeply into our physiological reactions ideologies go how we become numb to injustice and difficulty Believing in these ideologies passionately stops you from engaging with others on a human level The mind of an ideological person is so much more sophisticated than thoughtlessness The philosopher Hannah Arendt touched on that point saying it’s one of “her most astute intuitions”—that ideologies aim at the “transformation of human nature itself.”  and the times we’re living in now show how astute her thinking was She had the sense that ideologies don’t just try to change the social world—they try to change our nature But she didn’t have neuroscience or psychology at the time so she couldn’t know how deeply into our psychology and biology we see ideologies trickle What she came up with was the idea that a person who is brainwashed She talked about this when she analyzed the trial of Adolf Eichmann this high-ranking Nazi official who helped architect the Holocaust and said he had this remarkable inability to think—it was sheer thoughtlessness that guided him that to characterize it as thoughtlessness or mindlessness is a wrong and almost dangerous way to look at it Because the mind of an ideological person is so much more sophisticated than that—and dangerous because of that We really need to look at how rational and emotional processes get twisted and distorted by ideologies to understand what an ideological thinker is like All the research strongly suggests that “mindlessness” is a very lazy way to describe it because it means the person’s not responsible To be swept up into that influence is a very complex cognitive process that some brains gravitate to more easily than others Maybe the new explanations or metaphors are not as sexy as thoughtlessness and mindlessness And I think they help guide us in a better direction for understanding who is ideological What metaphor do you use to understand ideological thinking metaphors are both beautiful and can be problematic because they reduce a very complex story into an image but I found it useful to think about how people spiral into extremism a person who is very resistant to ideological narratives who actually is very rooted in thinking carefully flexibly about evidence and about the world—they will need a very strong push and very constant pressure to spiral into an extreme embrace of an ideology who maybe thinks more rigidly about the world who’s maybe more impulsive in their everyday emotional habits who has certain neurobiological sensitivities—when that person is pushed or triggered a little Which factors make people resilient to thinking ideologically and most able to balance evidence are the people who are most resistant to ideological solutions Creativity and cognitive flexibility are really powerful resilience factors against thinking in ideologically closed and authoritarian ways It’s very uniquely flexibility that is predicting people’s resistance to ideologies and predicting their intellectual humility People who choose to leave a religious ideology tend to be the most cognitively flexible people and people who grew up secular and later chose to enter a religious ideology tend to be the most cognitively rigid There’s still a lot of questions about that process of conversion and deconversion How do the most cognitively flexible people tend to identify on the political spectrum The most cognitively flexible people tend to be more independent And if we imagine a spectrum from the very extreme left to the very extreme right we see that the most cognitively flexible people are generally in the center-left and are the least likely to latch onto pre-established group identities Is flexibility a stable psychological trait we all shift along that spectrum very clearly in times of stress When our bodies are stressed—whether that’s because we’re supposed to give a presentation in front of a big audience which we can induce in the lab by asking people to put their hand in a bucket of ice water—what we see is that people’s psychological flexibility diminishes significantly We conserve our resources rather than go and explore the world Flexibility is something that can increase and decrease momentarily and over our lifespan which is why it’s this continuous hard work to keep it up The first step to becoming more open-minded might be to interrogate your habits and your routines Have you studied the basis of cognitive flexibility in the brain In a large study that I ran with thousands of participants we wanted to look at the genetics of rigidity and what we homed in on was a neurotransmitter that we all know and love—dopamine We know that dopamine governs our senses of reward but it does that because it governs our learning And there’s been a lot of research suggesting that our capacity to adapt is rooted in the functioning of dopamine So we looked at whether people with genetic variations that affected how dopamine is distributed in their brain whether those genes could predict people’s cognitive rigidity or flexibility When people have less baseline dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and a greater concentration of dopamine in their striatum the midbrain area that governs learning and reward that’s a particular genetic profile that puts people at risk for rigid thinking We found that people with other combinations of these genes typically tended to be much more flexible Does that mean how flexibly we think is genetically determined Those genetic contributions are significant and real It doesn’t mean that if you have a particular combination of genes you’re doomed to be a dogmatic person for the rest of your life But there is an elevated risk factor that affects how people deal with information how flexible or not they tend to be in the world I was amazed to read that you can even tap into people’s ideology by having them make split-second decisions When we ask participants to make very simple perceptual judgments about whether there’s a red square on the left of the screen or a green circle on the right side of the screen—often in 400 milliseconds or so—this allows us to understand how their brains are processing information how quickly or cautiously they evaluate stimuli You would never think that if I gave you a game where you respond to things really quickly that that would give me any indication about your politics or ideologies at all—but it does We found that people who tend to be more cautious where you have to balance speed and accuracy in the game They tend to adopt conservative ideologies that champion the status quo We also find that people who are the most dogmatic in their ideological decisions—they tend to resist evidence resist changing their opinion—also really struggle to integrate sensory evidence in that span of a millisecond They will struggle and take so much longer to do what we call the evidence-integration process that happens in the brain on the order of 100 milliseconds or so People who are more dogmatic—who struggle with integrating evidence in a nuanced flexible way—also have these rigid evidence-integration systems when they’re processing visual information as well even though this has been replicated over so many different tasks it shows a mirroring between how our brains are integrating or making decisions on the level of a second and the cognitive style with which they approach much bigger such as ones about their ideological convictions It shows a resonance between very different levels of our consciousness between how our brains are processing visual information auditory information—on like a 100-millisecond basis—and how they’re forming ideological decisions over months and years It’s cool that potentially there are these patterns in how our consciousness relates to the world and that exist across many different timescales and many different kinds of problems What’s the best way to become a more open-minded person and ensure you don’t become an ideologue Just wanting to be that kind of human being is already an important step forward A lot of people think it’s actually very good to be ideological—it’s a synonym for being a principled We live in a society that really glorifies habits and the amazing moral virtues of routines habit-oriented way of thinking about the world is a very rigid conformist way of thinking about the world So probably the first step to becoming more open-minded might be to interrogate your habits and your routines and to think about the effect that’s having on how you exist as a human being Our flexibility isn’t something that’s just constrained to one domain about how you adapt to change—whether that’s in an artistic or a relationship domain—all of those flexibilities translate into flexibility in the political and ideological domain Finding your ways to practice that flexibility is a really powerful way to resist all those pressures to think in a more narrow way free way of living and thinking and relating to people in the world around you unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers You’ve read your 2 free articles this month Access unlimited ad-free stories like this one sign up for the free Nautilus newsletter: science and culture for people who love beautiful writing Too many automated requests from this network I’m interested in the ways ideologies are imprinted on our brains and whether we can erase or undo ideologies’ dangerous influences in ways that are healthy What makes some people more vulnerable to extremism than others? How do we build cognitive resilience against extreme ideologies? And how does the brain react to misinformation on social media? These are some of the key political questions that political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod [2016] is exploring putting the science into our understanding of radicalisation.   Leor says she is interested in delving deeper into how the brain constructs reality and how this relates to our political views Her research shows links between political views and the way people carry out practical tasks – for example those who are more conservative approach them with noticeably more caution – and that people’s cognitive rigidity on neuropsychological tasks predicts their ideological rigidity in politics “The way our brains understand the sensory world can help us to understand why and how people get a grip on the political world,” she states “I want to drill a little deeper into building an account of the origins of our ideological beliefs and why some people are strong believers and others have a looser attachment I’m interested in the ways ideologies are imprinted on our brains and whether we can erase or undo ideologies’ dangerous influences in ways that are healthy.” Next month she will give a talk at the Hay Festival as part of the Cambridge Series on what science tells us about what it means to think in an ideologically extreme way what the consequences of extremist thinking are for our brains and how we get out of that cycle “so that we can be free to live authentically and not beholden to norms and rituals that can be toxic for our brains and for others” Leor’s family moved around during her childhood which gave her an insight into new cultures and different ideas Her high school was an international school in the Netherlands which meant she was surrounded by interesting discussions about how identity is constructed and about people’s different belief systems “In such an international environment I was constantly thinking about where beliefs come from and how we construct the norms and rituals we live by,” she says.  took part in debates and was in various European youth networks that thought about global issues psychology or neuroscience before university her mother bought her a subscription to the Scientific American Minds magazine and that had led to Leor reading books around the subject “I loved all these puzzles psychologists and neuroscientists were grappling with,” she says She became fascinated by human behaviour and mysterious phenomena like phantom limbs and the origins of consciousness.  she applied to Cambridge as the university had just launched a new psychology degree with a focus on experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience She didn’t know anyone who had gone to Cambridge and felt applying was a bit of a gamble – which is somewhat ironic she is a Director of Studies at the university and interviews applicants herself Leor had her interview at Downing College and its master the leading behavioural neuroscientist Professor Barry Everitt She loved her three-year course and spent the summers on research internships Because hers was the first year of the new degree students were allowed to do a research project in the second year That experience proved a turning point for Leor.  She did a meta analysis under the supervision of Professor Jon Simons on what happens to different parts of the brain when people have hallucinations It investigated whether there is a place in the brain that realises that the hallucinations are not real and it linked to new work being done on how we construct our beliefs – in this case The paper on this work remains Leor’s most highly cited study.  Leor really took to research and in the summer of her second year did a research internship at University College London on the neuroscience of free will looking at how the brain distinguishes between voluntary actions and those that they are instructed to perform and whether it can determine if an action was chosen or not.  By her second year Leor knew what she wanted to do her PhD on She had approached Professor Trevor Robbins about using cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology to understand what makes individuals susceptible to extremism “I was really interested in why some people are more susceptible to different ways of thinking,” she says.  Her proposal came before Brexit and Trump’s election in the US changed the political landscape “We thought at the time that my research would be super niche,” says Leor received a Gates Cambridge scholarship and in the summer before she started work – on the day of her graduation indeed – the news that the UK had voted for Brexit broke Yet very few people foresaw the election of Donald Trump as president of the US later that year She immediately set to work putting together a study on political ideology in relation to the elections.   She realised immediately that she could not do a face to face study in Cambridge as it would not be representative so she developed an online study for US participants to gauge their world views and attitudes It involved a set of cognitive tests and was pioneering because similar tests were done in the laboratory at the time Leor was able to measure hundreds of people’s cognitive styles in relation to their political leanings and their response to the election results in real time Leor was able to use her new method to do a lot of studies including of the cognitive traits that predict attitudes to Brexit Her work attracted a lot of press attention.  “The questions that I was fascinated by suddenly within a year seemed to be of interest to everyone,” she says She found the press attention stimulating and it made her reflect on how to communicate science about politics in a highly politicised landscape and how to make sure the science was represented ethnically.  she helped to scope out the parameters of the emerging field of political neuroscience looking at how to define terms such as ideology from a psychological perspective She spent some time in Stanford and five months in Harvard sharing her research and acquiring new research skills.  After finishing her PhD Leor has remained at Cambridge where she is a research fellow and has been collaborating with academics from different disciplines Her current work is focused on people’s susceptibility to different political groups their voting patterns and the relationship between different ideological variables She is also working on a popular science book In September she begins a fellowship at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study which will give her time to think.  Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian Financial Times and The Times, amongst other international outlets Leor was a shortlisted finalist for the prestigious Albert Einstein Fellowship Leor has also been working with policymakers in the UK on counter extremism identifying who is the most vulnerable to extremism based on scientific evidence to make sure deradicalisation work is more evidence-based She is also talking to policymakers in other countries She states: “It has been very exciting to be in such a newly emerging field; the challenge is to ensure the science is as robust as it can be.” *Leor Zmigrod will be speaking at Hay Festival on 29th May at 1pm. You can book tickets here. The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of many of the world’s most eminent scientists scientific meetings and exhibitions held by the Royal Society as well as access to videos of past events and information on our venue Discover new research from across the sciences in our international Find out more about our values as a not-for-profit society publisher our support for open science and our commitment to research integrity Find out about our work in areas of current topical interest to the Royal Society The Royal Society provides a range of grant schemes to support the UK scientific community and foster collaboration between UK based and overseas scientists awards and prize lectures recognise excellence in science and technology Explore the latest work from the Royal Society from news stories and blog posts to policy statements and projects You can also find resources for teachers and history of science researchers A big dimension of science involves invitations – invitations of experts to critique the research that is being done or to help decide which research should be funded and which should not It helps to ensure that science is objective We therefore need to think carefully and critically about who we invite to participate and what happens when we don’t invite certain groups of researchers science is like a party: it is only as good as who is invited It can be tempting to invite only familiar or the popular people who are always invited not only is that boring and repetitive – we don’t learn anything new We start to create echo-chambers and the uninvited people don’t get a chance to contribute to the fun or introduce their own interpretations and there are fewer opportunities to innovate or challenge the status quo.  Scientific progress and reason depend on this peer review system and funding committees are the gatekeepers of what kind of science is published Being an editor or reviewer offers a range of opportunities to learn about the latest research being conducted in the field help to advance new innovations or directions and offer corrections when the quality of the research can be augmented or enhanced when we look at who tends to be invited to be a reviewer or editor these gatekeepers are frequently not representative of the many brilliant even after accounting for their numerical underrepresentation in science women are significantly underrepresented as reviewers and editors So even in fields where 40% of the scientific authors are women they only make up about 25% of the editors in the field This unbalanced contribution to the peer-review chain is unfortunately consistent across the world and across many fields Sadly this inequity is improving very slowly and it is expected that – without some kind of action or awareness – women will only be adequately represented in scientific reviewing and editing in around 15-20 years’ time or more because the peer review system is based on invitations (like our imaginary party) it is actually fairly straightforward to correct for unequal representation We just need to re-evaluate and expand the scope of our invitations Equity and equality can be rapidly achieved if we pay attention to inviting a diverse range of researchers along multiple axes of diversity Encouraging a balance between the wisdom and expertise of senior researchers with the fresh perspectives of early career researchers is particularly valuable in newly emerging or rapidly accelerating scientific fields Thomas Kuhn already wrote in his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that paradigm shifts can only occur when researchers experience a radical change in perspective and focus Such a change often requires the imaginative lens of new generations of scientists who can re-assess the evidence base or existing methodologies unencumbered by decades of old scientific practices Scientists in positions of power as publishing editors therefore have a responsibility to offer opportunities to scholars at various career stages with potential to reimagine the field’s assumptions and craft new trajectories.  Diversity and plurality are especially important when the science's subject matter involves human beings who exist in complex social and cultural spheres; if we want to understand what is universal and what is culturally specific about human cognition we must be attuned to fostering multiple dimensions of diversity in experiments' producers New online technologies are now transforming the accessibility and diversity of research participants allowing researchers to reach participants in remote corners of the world But these methodologies could be easily misused or misconstrued without local researchers and local pools of knowledge regarding cultural and linguistic norms Editorial practices can powerfully build bridges between researchers in different cultural and geographical contexts it has never been easier to extend our invitations to scholars everywhere – and we should.  One of the most beautiful and troubling aspects of science is that although it seeks to be an objective and rigorous approach to understanding the world the objectivity of science is collectively constructed; research is only rigorous and neutral if we take steps to ensure that it reflects the world which it seeks to illuminate Actively fostering plurality in the peer review system is a goal that will not only improve the rigor and resonance of current science but will also help cultivate scientific communities that are inclusive and enjoyable places for us to build knowledge about the natural world and ourselves The Royal Society’s publishing team is proactively working to increase diversity across its Editorial Boards and reviewer lists We also actively work with Guest Editors to balance geographical diversity gender and career stage in our invited contributions to theme issues.  Find out how to volunteer to review for the Royal Society’s journals and the benefits that we offer our reviewers Publisher Phil Hurst discusses the decision to collect gender data for Royal Society journals with… Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FMedSci FRS on unconscious bias and the most promising route to… Royal Society Researcher Duncan Cameron discusses what further progress is needed for LGBTQ+… we can benefit humanity and tackle the biggest challenges of our time Subscribe to our newsletters to be updated with the latest news on innovation The Royal Society is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence Story: Fred Lewsey Political extremists storm the United States Capitol on January 6 A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and types of unconscious cognition – the ways our brain takes in basic information – is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs including nationalism and religious fervour These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower “perceptual strategies” – the unconscious processing of changing stimuli such as shape and colour – as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.       This combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person’s ideological “group”, according to findings published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B The study also maps the psychological signatures that underpin fierce political conservatism as well as “dogmatism”: people who have a fixed worldview and are resistant to evidence Psychologists found that conservatism is linked to cognitive “caution”: slow-and-accurate unconscious decision-making compared to the fast-and-imprecise “perceptual strategies” found in more liberal minds Brains of dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence but they are more impulsive personality-wise The mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies Researchers from the University of Cambridge say that this research could help to better identify and support people most vulnerable to radicalisation across the political and religious spectrum Approaches to radicalisation policy mainly rely on basic demographic information such as age By adding cognitive and personality assessments the psychologists created a statistical model that is between four and fifteen times more powerful at predicting ideological worldviews than demographics alone “Many people will know those in their communities who have become radicalised or adopted increasingly extreme political views whether on the left or right,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology “We want to know why particular individuals are more susceptible.” “By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way,” Zmigrod said “Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies.” The research is published as part of a special issue of the Royal Society journal dedicated to “the political brain” compiled and co-edited by Zmigrod who recently won the Women of the Future Science award She has also been working with the UK Government as part of an academic and practitioner network set up to help tackle extremism The new study is the latest in a series by Zmigrod investigating the relationship between ideology and cognition. She has previously published findings on links between cognitive “inflexibility” and religious extremism, willingness to self-sacrifice for a cause, and a vote for Brexit A 2019 study by Zmigrod showed that this cognitive inflexibility is found in those with extreme attitudes on both the far right and far left of the political divide The latest research builds on work from Stanford University in which hundreds of study participants performed 37 different cognitive tasks and took 22 different personality surveys in 2016 and 2017 including Cambridge psychologist Professor Trevor Robbins conducted a series of follow-up tests in 2018 on 334 of the original participants using a further 16 surveys to determine attitudes and strength of feeling towards various ideologies A gallows erected outside the US Capitol by right-wing extremists on January 6 Study participants were all from the United States Part of the study used tests of the “executive functions” that help us to plan restacking coloured disks to match guidelines and keeping a series of categorised words in mind as new ones are added results from various rapid decision-making tests – switching between visual stimuli based on evolving instructions for example – were fed into computational models allowing analyses of small differences in perceptual processing.   Researchers took the results of the in-depth self-reported personality tests and boiled them down to 12 key factors ranging from goal-directedness and emotional control to financial risk-taking The examination of social and political attitudes took in a host of ideological positions including patriotism religiosity and levels of authoritarianism on the left and right.   The Cambridge team used data modeling techniques such as Bayesian analyses to extract correlations They then measured the extent to which blends of cognition and personality could help predict ideological attitudes.   Political conservatism and nationalism was related to “caution” in unconscious decision-making as well as “temporal discounting” – when rewards are seen to lose value if delayed – and slightly reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain.  Personality traits for conservatism and nationalism included greater goal-directedness Demographics alone had a predictive power of less than 8% for these ideologies but adding the psychological signature boosted it to 32.5%.  Dogmatism was linked to reduced speed of perceptual “evidence accumulation” and reduced social risk-taking and agreeableness but heightened impulsivity and ethical risk-taking in the personality domain Religiosity was cognitively similar to conservatism but with higher levels of agreeableness and “risk perception” Adding the psychological signatures to demographics increased the predictive power for dogmatism from 1.53% to 23.6% Across all ideologies investigated by the researchers people who endorsed “extreme pro-group action” including ideologically-motivated violence against others had a surprisingly consistent psychological profile.  The extremist mind – a mixture of conservative and dogmatic psychological signatures – is cognitively cautious slower at perceptual processing and has a weaker working memory This is combined with impulsive personality traits that seek sensation and risky experiences Added Zmigrod: “There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines Understanding this could help us to support those individuals vulnerable to extremism and foster social understanding across ideological divides.” Dr Leor Zmigrod will be speaking as part of this year's Cambridge Festival on March 29 at 6pm Top and behind quotations: The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 2021. All credits: Tyler Merbler Inset images: details from the FBI poster seeking information on rioters following the storming of the US Capitol By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org The family of a Bronx baker donates a ritual heirloom to a Warsaw museum as a gesture of remembrance and healing Like Dave and Benji, the oddly matched cousins in Jesse Eisenberg’s new feature film, “A Real Pain,” I recently embarked with five of my American Jewish cousins on an unusual family heritage journey to Poland but we were inspired by a powerful idea: bringing back to Poland a beautiful family heirloom — a Jewish prayer shawl that one of our ancestors brought to the United States nearly a century ago my great-grandfather on my mother’s side of the family My older cousins had known Max as their grandfather Max’s life story is a thread that binds us together as a family because it was his initiative that created the basis for our family life in the United States Max was born in 1884 into a Hasidic family of bakers in Nowy Zmigrod a small town now located in southeast Poland he emigrated to the United States and settled on the Lower East Side he worked for two full years as a beker yingl he was fed by the baker’s wife and allowed to sleep on a large sack of flour Max found work that paid $4 a month and then went into business for himself he established successful bakeries across New York City including one on Brooke Avenue in the Bronx and another on West 117th Street Max and Rose Lang and their son Leo stand in front of their first bakery at 417 Brooke Avenue in the Bronx circa 1915 Max could afford to travel to his hometown in Poland to visit his large religious family he appears clean-shaven and dressed like a “Yankee” in a fashionable suit and hat during that visit his observant brother Pinkhas presented him with a gift — a magnificent tallis as synagogue worship was not part of his or his children’s lives When Max returned to New York, with the tallis in his luggage, he had no idea that he would never see his family again. In 1939, German forces occupied Nowy Zmigrod. On July 7, 1942, they murdered nearly all the town’s Jews, including Max’s cousins, in a nearby forest. After this terrible massacre, almost every physical remnant of Jewish life in Nowy Zmigrod was pillaged or destroyed stowed safely in a dresser drawer in New York suddenly became one of the few surviving relics from centuries of Jewish life in this town I “friended” on Facebook some young Poles from Nowy Zmigrod who were interested in their town’s Jewish history They helped me research my family history and encouraged me to visit the town in July when local Christians hold an annual ceremony honoring the memory of the town’s Jews gathering in the forest where the massacre had taken place I remembered that my cousins had Max’s tallis and I asked them if I could bring it with me to Nowy Zmigrod I wore the tallis while speaking at the memorial so that its beauty could represent the members of our large family who had been killed in the forest where we stood I also read from a description of the massacre taken from testimony given to the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem by one of Max’s cousins who had survived this atrocity and the Holocaust I organized a family Zoom to share the details of my visit My cousins were moved by my renewed connection to our family history especially after they read Szymon’s Yad Vashem testimony I told them that the director of the local museum in Nowy Zmigrod had asked me to donate Max’s tallis to the town museum under-resourced museum cared for its collection we decided it was too risky to donate it there Still, the idea of returning Max’s tallis to Poland inspired us, and we decided to offer it to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews the museum is dedicated to telling the 1,000-year-history of the Jews of Poland in all its complexity wearing his great-grandfather’s tallis in his NYC apartment just before his July 2023 trip to Nowy Zmigrod to participate in a memorial ceremony for the murdered Jews of the town which they view as a key to Poland’s future as an inclusive Given our family’s deeply felt commitment to Jewish dignity to human rights for all people and to multiethnic democracies my cousins and I concluded that POLIN was the perfect home for Max’s tallis journalists and a broad swath of American Jews have focused on Poles’ complicity in the Holocaust and their postwar antisemitism we understand that these Poles’ anti-Jewish attitudes and actions are not the full story rather than leave Max’s tallis sitting in a drawer in the United States we should make it available to the Poles who are curious about the millions of Jews who had once been their neighbors We are delighted that Max’s tallis will connect our family history with a new surge of interest in Jewish history among Poles we are playing a small role in healing some of the harsh history experienced by Polish Jews over the centuries and bridging the divide with contemporary Poles of good will who are drawn to understanding this complex history The New York Jewish Week brings you the stories behind the headlines, keeping you connected to Jewish life in New York. Help sustain the reporting you trust by donating today I accept the Privacy Policy 2022Get email notification for articles from Ofer Aderet FollowApr 27 2022The memorial plaque for Holocaust survivor Blanka Zmigrod in Frankfurt contains a phrase she uttered not long before her death: Surviving and living as long as she could compensated for what the Nazis did to her Latest research shows that reduced cognitive flexibility is associated with more 'extreme' beliefs and identities at both ends of the political spectrum Researchers say that “heightening our cognitive flexibility might help build more tolerant societies” We want to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility This 'mental rigidity' makes it harder for people to change their ways of thinking or adapt to new environments mental rigidity was found in those with the most fervent beliefs and affiliations on both the left and right of the political divide conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge is the largest – and first for over 20 years – to investigate whether the more politically 'extreme' have a certain 'type of mind' through the use of objective psychological testing The findings suggest that the basic mental processes governing our ability to switch between different concepts and tasks are linked to the intensity with which we attach ourselves to political doctrines – regardless of the ideology “Relative to political moderates, participants who indicated extreme attachment to either the Democratic or Republican Party exhibited mental rigidity on multiple objective neuropsychological tests,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge Gates Scholar and lead author of the study, now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology “While political animosity often appears to be driven by emotion we find that the way people unconsciously process neutral stimuli seems to play an important role in how they process ideological arguments.”  “Those with lower cognitive flexibility see the world in more black-and-white terms and struggle with new and different perspectives The more inflexible mind may be especially susceptible to the clarity and safety frequently offered by strong loyalty to collective ideologies,” she said The research is the latest in a series of studies from Zmigrod and her Cambridge colleagues Dr Jason Rentfrow and Professor Trevor Robbins on the relationship between ideology and cognitive flexibility Their previous work over the last 18 months has suggested that mental rigidity is linked to more extreme attitudes with regards to religiosity and a willingness to endorse violence and sacrifice one’s life for an ideological group the Cambridge team recruited 743 men and women of various ages and educational backgrounds from across the political spectrum through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform Participants completed three psychological tests online: a word association game shapes and numbers are matched according to shifting rules – and an exercise in which participants have a two-minute window to imagine possible uses for everyday objects “These are established and standardized cognitive tests which quantify how well individuals adapt to changing environments and how flexibly their minds process words and concepts,” said Zmigrod The participants were also asked to score their feelings towards various divisive social and economic issues – from abortion and marriage to welfare – and the extent of 'overlap' between their personal identity and the US Republican and Democrat parties Zmigrod and colleagues found that 'partisan extremity' – the intensity of participants’ attachment to their favoured political party – was a strong predictor of rigidity in all three cognitive tests They also found that self-described Independents displayed greater cognitive flexibility compared to both Democrats and Republicans were not related to heightened political partisanship which researchers argue suggests the unique contribution of cognitive inflexibility “In the context of today’s highly divided politics it is important we work to understand the psychological underpinnings of dogmatism and strict ideological adherence,” said Zmigrod “The aim of this research is not to draw false equivalences between different We want to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities,” said Zmigrod “Past studies have shown that it is possible to cultivate cognitive flexibility through training and education Our findings raise the question of whether heightening our cognitive flexibility might help build more tolerant societies and even develop antidotes to radicalization.”  “While the conservatism and liberalism of our beliefs may at times divide us our capacity to think about the world flexibly and adaptively can unite us,” she added Credit: Adam Cohn I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. We are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold. Please read our email privacy notice for details. What if we could predict your politics with some brain scans The political neuroscientist Dr Leor Zmigrod the author of a compelling book called The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds Zmigrod has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020 the neuroscientific update of the 1950 sociology work by the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W Adorno and University of California Berkeley researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik an attempt to define the personality types most likely to succumb to fascism in the turmoil of the last century Frenkel-Brunswik is a heroine of Zmigrod’s. “She escaped Nazi Austria and moved to Berkeley to start this research on what makes even children have the potential for authoritarianism “And so she started creating these massive questionnaires and handing them to out to every school in the Berkeley area getting these young children to demonstrate where they lie on a spectrum of xenophobia and prejudice.” Zmigrod was studying neuroscience and engaging in experiments in small why don’t I use all these [neuroscience] tools to study these questions about radicalisation?’ .. How is your brain affected by the ideologies you hold What features of your brain and your personality and your cognition and maybe even your genetics can affect what kinds of ideologies you’re predisposed to being attracted to?” Initially she focused her research on religious radicalisation “Young European adolescents were being pulled into Isis,” she says “There were these questions of why were these particular people attracted to it Then Brexit happened as I was preparing to launch this research and suddenly it became clear to me that the ideologies I was going to deal with were much broader and much more mainstream.” When Zmigrod refers to “ideological” thinking in her book she is defining this as “ideologically rigid” thinking A core point in her work is that people who display cognitive inflexibility in tests mapping their ability to adjust to change also adhere to more rigid The “ideological brain” she has uncovered can be better understood in terms of “flexibility” and “rigidity” than traditional political terms like “right” and “left” “We’re actually seeing more of a rigidity of the extremes where both on the political right and on the political left when they’re given tasks that require flexible thinking really consistently across different psychological tasks that people who are cognitively rigid tend to fall into some kind of ideological extreme regardless of whether it’s left or right.” These people can now be given brain scans which elicits a whole new realm of information that didn’t exist in the days of Else Frenkel-Brunswik “What researchers around the world have started to discover is that people who adhere to different ideologies have brains that are slightly structured differently and function and react to the world differently.” There are people who definitely want for there to be more conformity-minded the centre in our brain that processes negative emotions such as fear and disgust and threat is actually larger in people with conservative ideologies than people with liberal ideologies There is even some evidence of ideological predispositions on a genetic level “What we discovered is that across thousands of participants that people who have genetic markers that indicate that they have a greater amount of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex [the area of the brain that is responsible for high-level reasoning] and lower levels of general dopamine levels in their striatal regions And the reverse: people who have it the other way around tend to be the most cognitively rigid people who struggle when environments change [ Critical thinking training can reduce belief in conspiracy theories, study by UCC psychologists findsOpens in new window ] affecting how our dopamine operates in each person’s brain can affect how rigidly they process the world Do people start out with these brain types or do they develop them over time “There’s evidence that we have these psychological and cognitive predispositions that shape which ideologies we’re attracted to but that also being immersed in a very rigid ideological framework is something that can affect our personalities,” she says Either people with bigger amygdalas are attracted to more conservative ideologies or if you spend a lifetime in conservative ideologies and environments that has an impact on how your brain is structured.” More work needs to be done to establish the actual dynamic “I have joined a longitudinal study that has been following people from when they were children and they’ve been measuring their brains and personalities,” she says “I have to wait about 20 years before we can disentangle that.” There is something inherently disturbing about the notion that our politics are less a product of reason than a consequence of biological processes when they think about those big ideologies that they either might be committed to or they might be opposed to whether it’s Marxism or patriarchy or any of these narrowly defined ideologies I think they have an antagonism to the idea that actually maybe it’s something that we can measure and look at on the individual level .. But my hope is that the science is received in a way that shows how actually understanding the ways in which ideologies can in some way infiltrate our cognitive habits should really just empower us to critique ideologies .. I don’t think it opposes a sociological reading or a historical one I hope it adds this additional lens that helps us understand it all better.” we kind of rigidify and narrow and preserve our cognitive resources What are the consequences of her discoveries “I think it allows us to understand people’s susceptibilities better because we can see that actually they not necessarily just gravitating towards extreme and sometimes hateful ideas on a whim,” she says “There is something about the structure of those ideologies that particularly appeals to them because of this more general way in which they understand and process and problem-solve the world.” Zmigrod has a preference for flexible thinking over rigidity “I think that the research suggests that being a more flexible thinker does give you a more direct access to sensation .. your perceptual and sensory apparatus is less .. constrained or numbed than when you have a very dogmatic way of thinking,” she says “As a psychologist I value a kind of freedom of thought and elasticity of thought I think it’s hard to see a rigid ideological way of being as being a good thing.” Others might look at the data and take a different position that there is something admirable in having fixed and rigid belief systems “There are people who definitely want for there to be more conformity-minded Those are the most controllable citizens and the ones where you can probably profit from the most Many people think [rigidity is] a very good thing and the only way to be moral and good.” Would she like to see a world with less dogmatic “I think that would be a world where people can be a lot more authentic and free.” “A person’s flexibility or rigidity is not just fixed throughout their lifetime predetermined at birth by biology,” she says “People’s flexibility can increase and decrease throughout our lives I think understanding the dynamics of how those predispositions interact with environments and situations gives us a better understanding of how people fall into these extreme worldviews and also how they can come out “If we maybe cultivate a general psychological flexibility in the way in which we approach the entire world and our everyday problems that will also translate into a more tolerant open-minded evidence-receptive way of approaching politics.” whether a rigid extremist or a flexible moderate socially engineering or medicating certain types of brain away worry her “Could this science be used by malicious agents It’s a question I’ve been thinking for a long time about because I think any scientist should be so careful about the ethics of what you publish and the science you put out there .. I think it would be difficult to truly use the science for nefarious reasons because the science shows how complex it all is It wouldn’t be that simple that you could medicate people towards certain belief systems But I also completely see what you’re saying in that there’s a slight vulnerability there When we’re exposing how this mechanism works are you giving someone levers to press and to push I think that that is already the case when you see how authoritarian leaders use rhetoric and emotion They are targeting these particular ways in which people respond Stalin talked about ideological logic and rhetoric as this irresistible force that people are really drawn to I think it would be difficult to use the science and make things worse than they are.” What would she like to see people do with this information “What I hope that people take away from this is that the stakes of adopting really narrow dogmatic ideologies are so much higher than we previously thought Because it’s not just about political debate it’s about forces happening within you and the kind of human being that you are I hope it’s a basis for people to think really critically about the ideologies that they embrace .. Maybe this is an invitation to rethink pride in having very passionate to realise what it might do to your body and how that might be reflected in your brain.” [ Obedience to authority: most of us would follow orders to do terrible thingsOpens in new window ] The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds by Dr Leor Zmigrod is published by Viking Facebook pageTwitter feed© 2025 The Irish Times DAC Leor Zmigrod received funding from the Gates Cambridge Trust University of Cambridge provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK View all partners The characteristics of peoples’ brains might offer clues about the political beliefs they hold dear. In a study of around 350 US citizens we examined the relationship between individuals’ cognitive traits – the unconscious ways in which their brains learn and process information from the environment – and their ideological worldviews We found parallels between how those with extreme views perform in brain games and the kind of political religious and dogmatic attitudes they adhere to Each participant in our study completed a large variety of personality tests and were then given neuropsychological tasks designed to tap into implicit individual differences in how we learn from the environment form decisions and react to changes or challenges All of the tasks were neutral and objective Participants were given instructions about visual stimuli moving on the screen and did not have any prior knowledge of what mental process the task was measuring In one task participants had to determine whether a group of dots was moving to the left or to the right they needed to memorise a series of visual shapes or numbers and then report the order they appeared on their screen My colleagues and I used individuals’ performance on these “brain games” to extract information about their perception learning and ability to engage in complex and strategic mental processing We found that individuals with extremist attitudes tended to perform poorly on complex mental tasks – they struggled to complete psychological tests that require intricate mental steps People who endorse violence to protect their ideological group also possess poor emotion-regulation skills – they are more impulsive and seek sensations and thrills This makes sense when we imagine the kind of individual who is willing to harm innocent others for the sake of an ideology We also examined the psychological signature of different political worldviews participants were asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible We found that some people prioritise slow and steady mental strategies while others unconsciously opt for fast and furious strategies that sacrifice accuracy but excel at speed We discovered political conservatives were more cautious in these instances; their brains opted for slower and more accurate approaches and those who believe the existing status quo should be revised were more likely to adopt faster and less precise perceptual strategies We did not come to the data with predetermined hypotheses; we wanted to let the data points “speak” for themselves psychological fingerprint – the nature of the dogmatic mind Dogmatic participants who were resistant to updating their beliefs in response to new and credible evidence were slower to process evidence in perceptual tasks So when asked to determine whether dots were moving to the left or to the right of the screen they took longer to process the information and come to a decision Dogmatic individuals also had a more impulsive personality meaning they were making premature decisions based on evidence that was imperfectly understood This means if our brain is slower to tie together the pieces of evidence in its perceptual environment we may inadvertently become more resistant to evidence and alternative perspectives Our research shows our brains hold clues – subtle metaphors, perhaps – for the ideologies we choose to live by and the beliefs we rigidly stick to There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines The idiosyncratic ways in which our brains work may reflect the ideologies we choose to adopt If our mind tends to react to stimuli with caution it may also be attracted by cautious and conservative ideologies If we struggle to process and plan complex action sequences we may be drawn to more extreme ideologies that simplify the world and our role within it These cognitive traces that our ideologies leave behind may not necessarily be fixed. Psychological research also illustrates that we have the capacity to change grow and become more open-minded and tolerant but understanding this could help us to support people vulnerable to extremism and foster social understanding across ideological divides Site developed by     Copyright © Yedioth Internet Racist sniper John Ausonius guilty of killing Blanka Zmigrod in 1992 A Swedish murderer who attacked immigrants with a laser-scoped rifle has been given an additional life sentence for the murder of a Holocaust survivor in 1992 Ausonius was dubbed the “laser man” in the Swedish press for the red laser sight he used to pinpoint his victims during a racially motivated shooting spree in 1991 and 1992 From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox Ausonius - a former soldier with an intense hatred of foreigners - shot five immigrants in Uppsala died after being shot in the head on 8 November 1991 Ausonius relocated to neighbouring Stockholm where he shot another four people in eight days Immigrant communities in both cities were gripped by fear, exacerbated by survivors’ terrifying accounts of seeing a red light hovering against their skin seconds before being shot, OZY reports Ausonius, who was also responsible for a string of bank robberies, fled to Frankfurt, Germany It was here that he clashed with Blanka Zmigrod over an electronic notebook which had allegedly disappeared from Ausonius’ coat in the restaurant cloakroom where she worked as an attendant Eyewitnesses to the argument reported Ausonius had told Zmigrod they'd would be "seeing each other again” “Thirty-six hours later she was dead,” shot in broad daylight as she left work Ausonius was caught by police after returning to Sweden and carrying out another bank robbery he was jailed for life for the murder of Ranjbar and the attempted murder of his eight other victims German police had long suspected that Ausonius was also responsible for Zmigrod’s death but the lack of witnesses to the shooting stymied prosecutors until 2014 when the case was re-opened as part of a wider investigation into unsolved hate crimes Malmo was the scene of copycat killing spree in which two migrants were shot dead and another 13 injured by racist gunman Peter Mangs who also chose his victims based on their “foreign” appearance who was said to have been fascinated by Ausonius Ausonius is also believed to have inspired Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who shot 77 people in 2011 in an attack motivated by far-right extremism A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com Home › Politics By StudyFinds United Kingdom — From destructive protests throughout 2020 to the violent events in Washington on Jan it’s clear political unrest in America is reaching a boiling point Psychologists are now asking what turns the civil discord common in partisan politics into extremist behavior Researchers from the University of Cambridge say certain personalities are more likely to lead to extremism finds these individuals to be “impulsive” and likely to seek out thrills and risks but are mentally slower with poor memory skills The findings could help identify people most prone to radicalization Zmigrod’s team showed a combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person’s ideological beliefs Researchers examined 334 men and women between 22 and 63 years-old who completed a series of surveys The questionnaires asked each person about their attitudes and strength of feelings towards various political Study authors say extremist views are fueled by a particular cocktail of traits and “unconscious cognition” — the way the brain absorbs basic information These characteristics include poorer working memory and slower perceptual strategies — the processing of changing stimuli such as shape and color These individuals also have tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking More dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence the mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of “conservative and dogmatic psychologies.” Researchers add this information could help protect people most vulnerable to radicalization across the political and religious spectrums Current techniques mainly rely on basic data such as age Zmigrod’s team believes their personality profile is four to 15 times more accurate at identifying extremist traits “I’m interested in the role that hidden cognitive functions play in sculpting ideological thinking,” the study author from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology says “Many people will know those in their communities who have become radicalized or adopted increasingly extreme political views We want to know why particular individuals are more susceptible By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way.” “Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies,” Dr Looking at demographics alone can only predict who follows these ideologies less than eight percent of the time When adding the psychological signature to that equation study authors say it boosts the predictive power to 32.5 percent Dogmatism, or the tendency to view your own principles as incontrovertibly true was linked to much greater changes in personality and thinking skills Researchers say people who display this trait show reduced speed of perceptual evidence accumulation reduced social risk-taking and agreeableness and heightened impulsivity and ethical risk-taking characteristics Those with strong religious beliefs appear to be cognitively similar to conservatives but with higher levels of agreeableness and risk perception Adding the psychological signatures to demographics increased the predictive power for dogmatism from 1.53 percent to 23.6 percent and religiosity from 2.9 percent to 23.4 percent Part of the study involved tests of “executive functions” that help humans to plan This included restacking colored disks to match guidelines and keeping a series of categorized words in mind as new ones were added results from various rapid decision-making tasks – switching between visual stimuli based on evolving instructions for example – were fed into computational models to analyze perceptual processing The examination of social and political attitudes took in a host of ideological positions including patriotism, religiosity, and levels of authoritarianism on the left and right The findings appear in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B SWNS writer Mark Waghorn contributed to this report transparent research summaries that are intended to inform the reader as well as stir civil educated debate. We do not agree nor disagree with any of the studies we post we encourage our readers to debate the veracity of the findings themselves. All articles published on StudyFinds are vetted by our editors prior to publication and include links back to the source or corresponding journal article ©2025 Study Finds. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy • Disclosure Policy • Do Not Sell My Personal Information Researchers argue that a desire for “conformity and obedience” as a result of COVID-19 could boost authoritarianism in the wake of the pandemic If COVID-19 increases the allure of authoritarian politics in addition to our physiological immune system we also have a behavioural one: an unconscious code of conduct that helps us stay disease-free including a fear and avoidance of unfamiliar – and so possibly infected – people potentially manifesting as attitudes and even voting patterns that champion conformity and reject 'foreign outgroups' – core traits of authoritarian politics the largest yet to investigate links between pathogen prevalence and ideology reveals a strong connection between infection rates and strains of authoritarianism in public attitudes While data used for the study predates COVID-19, University of Cambridge psychologists say that greater public desire for “conformity and obedience” as a result of the pandemic could ultimately see liberal politics suffer at the ballot box. The findings are published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology Researchers used infectious disease data from the United States of America in the 1990s and 2000s and responses to a psychological survey taken by over 206,000 people in the USA during 2017 and 2018 They found that the more infectious US cities and states went on to have more authoritarian-leaning citizens The US findings were replicated at an international level using survey data from over 51,000 people across 47 different countries comparing responses with national-level disease rates The most authoritarian US states had rates of infectious diseases – from HIV to measles – around four times higher than the least authoritarian states while for the most authoritarian nations it was three times higher than the least This was after scientists accounted for a range of other socioeconomic factors that influence ideology including religious beliefs and inequalities in wealth and education They also found that higher regional infection rates in the USA corresponded to more votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential Election higher rates of infectious disease correlated with more 'vertical' laws – those that disproportionately affect certain groups such as abortion control or extreme penalties for certain crimes This was not the case with 'horizontal' laws that affect everyone equally “We find a consistent relationship between prevalence of infectious diseases and a psychological preference for conformity and hierarchical power structures – pillars of authoritarian politics,” said study lead author Dr Leor Zmigrod an expert in the psychology of ideology from the University of Cambridge “Higher rates of infectious diseases predicted political attitudes and outcomes such as conservative voting and authoritarian legal structures Across multiple geographical and historical levels of analysis we see this relationship emerge again and again.” “We found that pathogen rates from over 20 years ago were still relevant to political attitudes as recently as 2016 the effects could be long-lasting,” said Zmigrod The study also tested whether the link to authoritarianism held for zoonotic diseases – those only acquired from animals – but found it related solely to human-to-human disease transmission further suggesting this is part of a “behavioural immune system” say researchers Cambridge psychologists worked with TIME Magazine to launch a two-part personality survey Part one was based on the Harry Potter novels but participants could also opt in to a second part used for scientific research which included a textbook measure of authoritarianism Participants were presented with pairs of personality traits and asked which quality was most important for a child to possess e.g Over a quarter of a million people completed this section and provided their postal – or zip – codes scientists used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from between 1993 and 2007 These included rates of pathogens such as viral hepatitis the Cambridge team calculated rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea from 2002 to 2010 an index of nine infectious diseases ranging from tuberculosis to malaria was used “These findings are a warning sign that disease-avoiding behaviors have profound implications for politics,” added Zmigrod “COVID-19 might shape people’s tendencies towards conformity and obedience and this could be converted into authoritarian political preferences “Health and politics may be more intertwined than we previously envisioned.” A protester holds a sign comparing President Trump to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini Credit: Maria Thalassinou via Unsplash indicate that people’s political identity is influenced by how they process basic information we have been taught to rely on the left-right political distinction as an essential thermometer for who is likely to think like us But political partisanship in fact has two facets: direction (whether our political beliefs and identity lean politically left or right) and extremity (how strongly and dogmatically we hold these beliefs and identities) Political psychologists who try to understand the psychological origins of our political views tend to focus on partisan direction I was interested in investigating what we can find by studying partisan extremity and whether we can actually uncover surprising psychological similarities across the political spectrum when we do A psychological domain that I’ve been particularly fascinated by is cognitive rigidity According to the neuropsychological literature an individual who is cognitively rigid tends to perceive objects and stimuli in black-and-white terms and this makes it difficult for them to switch between modes of thinking or to adapt to changing environments We reasoned that individuals with a tendency towards cognitive rigidity in how they perceive and react to the world generally might be more likely to be rigid and dogmatic about their political beliefs and identities as well regardless of the partisan direction of their ideology citizens to complete multiple objective neuropsychological tests that allow us to measure their individual levels of cognitive rigidity and flexibility We found that individuals who are extremely attached to the Democratic Party or to the Republican Party display greater mental rigidity on these cognitive tests relative to those who are only moderately or weakly attached Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile This suggests that partisan extremity is psychologically significant – the intensity with which we attach ourselves to political doctrines may reflect and shape the way our mind works even at the basic levels of perception and cognition these findings would have remained hidden if we only considered whether participants were politically left- or right-wing One of the most fascinating questions that this research illuminates is that of causality: does mental rigidity make it more likely that we identify with the political extreme Or does active engagement with politically extreme groups make us more cognitively inflexible The answer is likely to be – as for most complex phenomena – an interaction of both we would need longitudinal studies that track people over long periods of time to determine cause and effect the aim of this research is not to draw false equivalences between different but rather to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities It may also help us develop antidotes to radicalization (If readers want access to the research they can get it with the following link: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/a64c5e_d74504da38e04b428f632aaeb64fcd61.pdf) Dr. Leor Zmigrod is Gates Scholar and Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology at University of Cambridge The study, “The partisan mind: Is extreme political partisanship related to cognitive inflexibility?“, was authored by Leor Zmigrod, Peter Jason Rentfrow, and Trevor W. Robbins. A new study using a specially designed attention task finds that disturbing background images reliably disrupt focus and slow response times. These emotionally negative distractions also heighten negative feelings and are remembered more vividly, suggesting they hijack both attention and memory. An online survey of adults in the U.K. found that frequent earworms were linked to a broad range of mental and motor habits. These findings hint that earworms might be mental echoes of a habit-prone brain. New research suggests that the shift from handwriting to digital tools in early education may come at a cost. In an experiment with 5-year-olds, those who practiced writing by hand showed better letter naming, spelling, and word reading than those who used keyboards. Taller students tend to score slightly higher on standardized tests than their shorter classmates, according to a new study of New York City public schools. A new study finds preschoolers’ brains respond differently when hearing a story read aloud versus hearing it from a screen, highlighting how live reading engages social brain networks more strongly than solitary screen time. A major study suggests that widely used medications like paracetamol and ibuprofen may influence cognitive performance in subtle ways. The research introduces a “cognitive footprint” model to estimate how small effects scale across populations. Scientists have discovered that moving to a beat may prepare your brain to hear speech more clearly in chaotic environments. Please enter your username or email address to reset your password. either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content A Swedish far-right terrorist who targeted 11 people with immigrant backgrounds in a shooting spree in the early 90s is to stand trial in Germany for the unsolved murder of an Auschwitz survivor John Ausonius was nicknamed the "Laser Man" for his use of laser sights in the shootings he committed in Stockholm and Uppsala areas between August 1991 and January 1992 The attacks left an Iranian student dead and several other victims severely disabled Ausonius has told interviewers he targeted immigrants to scare them out of the country and discourage others from entering The shootings are believed to have inspired other far-right extremsits to embark on solo killing sprees—including Norwegian Anders Breivik who murdered 77 people in bombing and shooting attacks on July 22 Ausonius is already serving a life sentence for the shooting but on Wednesday is set to stand trial again for the unsolved murder of an Auschwitz survivor in Frankfurt in 1992 The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Ausonius was in a restaurant in Frankfurt while on the run and returned two weeks later to accuse cloakroom attendant Blanka Zmigrod of stealing an electronic device from his pocket An argument erupted and the following night Zmigrod was shot dead by a cyclist as she walked home Zmigrod survived internment at four concentration camps during World War II Ausonius admits possessing the same type of Browning pistol used in the killing but denies any connection to Zmigriod's murder A Swedish police officer said in a documentary that when questioned in 1993 Ausonius appeared happy when told about Zmigrod's Jewish background The Zmigrod case was reopened recently by the German police who suspect that the Ausonius shootings may have inspired a string of killings committed in the early 2000s by a neo-Nazi terror cell called the National Socialist Underground The killings were initially blamed on migrant gangs Ausonius' connection to Zmigrod came to light Ausonis is believed to have been the first far-right "lone wolf" —planning and committing his crimes alone During a court appearance lone wolf terrorist Breivik said that multiculturalism had "created me and Laserman in Sweden," though it is not known whether he was referring to Ausonius or to Swedish copycat killer Peter Mangs who shot 15 people of immigrant background in Malmo between 2009 and 2010 Ausonius is scheduled to appear several times in court in Frankfurt before returning to prison in Sweden in January Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground Newsletters in your inbox See all HuebnerAdvertisementJohn Ausonius — the Swedish convicted killer dubbed "the laser man" and suspected white supremacist — has received another life sentence for the murder of a Jewish woman more than 25 years ago A Frankfurt court on Wednesday found Ausonius guilty of shooting dead Blanka Zmigrod as though he already knew what was coming.  born Wolfgang Alexander Zaugg, is already serving one life sentence in Sweden. In 1995 he was convicted for the murder of Jimmy Ranjbar and attempted murder of nine other immigrants in Stockholm and Uppsala coupled with a series of bank robberies spanning from August 1991 to February 1992 Ausonius was given the nickname "laser man" by the Swedish press because he used a rifle equipped with a laser sight to carry out the shootings 'Not the slightest doubt' Ausonius is guilty Although the prosecution was unable to provide tangible proof that Ausonius committed the murder prosecutor Nadja Böttinger told the court during Tuesday's plea hearing that the evidence at hand was far too abundant to be considered mere coincidence saying the court did not have "the slightest doubt" that Ausonius had murdered Zmigrod Life sentences in Germany typically involve no more than 15 years of jail time and the court on Wednesday could not demonstrate the "particular severity of guilt" on behalf of the defendant required under German law to make a longer period of incarceration possible the court also ordered that Ausonius be placed in preventative detention once his jail time was up Bärbel said Ausonius showed a "high tolerance for cold bloodedness" and that he committed the crimes "rationally and carefully." The court also heard that Ausonius had repeatedly shown a propensity for violence during the first 10 years of his incarceration in Sweden There would a "high risk of further delinquent acts" if he were released Ausonius is slated to return to prison in Sweden albeit only after the defense's appeal is considered That is expected to take some eight to 10 weeks Read more: Sweden's 'laser man' goes to trial for murder in Frankfurt Ausonius likely to serve sentence in Sweden Ausonius will likely serve the sentence handed to him by the German court in parallel with his life sentence in Sweden Swedish authorities will then have to consider the German court's ruling the next time Ausonius makes a case for release.  While the defense recognized that this means Ausonius will likely stay in prison the Frankfurt court's decision to place him in preventative detention following his prison sentence suggests there is a slight chance 64-year-old will at some point be allowed to leave prison.  Böttinger admitted she was left wanting by the court's final decision "(Ausonius) is a killer who deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison," she said Defense attorney Joachim Bremer expressed his displeasure at the court's decision to tie Ausonius to Zmigrod's murder simply because he was in Frankfurt the day before and Zmigrod was killed in much the same manner as Ausonius' victims in Sweden Ausonius and his defense team had pleaded his innocence until the very last It was during his time on the run from Swedish authorities in 1992 that Ausonius fled to Germany holing himself up in Dresden and then Frankfurt It was in Germany where he acquired a fake passport which he later used to travel out to Johannesburg The prosecution accused Ausonius of killing Zmigrod in February 1992 following an argument the pair had the day before the incident at a "Mövenpick" restaurant in central Frankfurt where Zmigrod worked as a cloakroom attendant Ausonius reportedly accused Zmigrod of stealing an electronic notebook on which he had stored important contacts and necessary information needed to pull off his escape to South Africa When Ausonius was told to leave the restaurant he reportedly told Zmigrod they'd be "seeing each other again." Thirty-six hours later she was dead when Ausonius was ordered to stand trial in Germany an investigation by a Swedish newspaper found that Zmigrod had survived several Nazi death camps during World War II the judge said that Zmigrod had "survived multiple concentration camps, but not the meeting with the defendant."  German authorities knew that Ausonius was in Frankfurt at the time of Zmigrod's death and even began investigating him in connection with the murder back in 1993 before eventually closing the case in 1996 in 2014, federal authorities began looking into old cases that could be connected to the murders committed by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) Frankfurt prosecutor Nadja Böttinger told German weekly Stern that when Zmigrod's file landed on her desk and she began looking into the evidence against Ausonius. "I simply couldn't live with the fact that the investigation had been closed," she said She then traveled to Sweden to question Ausonius about Zmigrod but as soon as it concerned something relevant to the case since the trial started in December last year the court struggled with weighing up whatever little evidence there was that pointed to Ausonius however, proved to be Ausonius' encounter with Zmigrod the day before as well as the ammunition that was used her killing which matched the type "the laser man" used for the shootings in Sweden While Ausonius admitted to having previously owned such a gun he maintains that he sold the weapon shortly before the day Zmigrod was murdered While the ideological motive behind Ausonius crimes remains unproven the similarities between Ausinius and other racially motivated killers such as the NSU and Anders Breivik in Norway Ausonius maintained during his trial in Sweden that he only shot at the first people who came within his range in order to create a diversion for his bank robberies The fact that they were all immigrants was simply a coincidense the Swede accused the prosecution of making him a "scapegoat" for the NSU murders saying he was "not neccessarily an ideological killer but one who displayed the behavior of a psychopath.  Ausonius’ shooting spree in Sweden has been described as the first racially motivated “lone wolf” attack who murdered 77 people in Oslo and the Norwegian island of Utoya 2011 directly cited the "laser man" as an inspiration during his trial This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.