Leor Zmigrod, who has written a book called The Ideological Brain, has spent years measuring something that on the face of it has nothing to do with politics: cognitive rigidity. She measures it with lab experiments like asking people to sort cards according to certain rules… and then, without warning, the rules change.
In these experiments there are those who notice the change, shrug, and go looking for the new rule. And there are those who hate it, cling to the old rule, insist the world shouldn't have moved. None of these experiments is about immigration, or taxes, or religion. And yet what Zmigrod finds again and again is that rigidity in that game predicts ideological rigidity.
Whoever clings to the rules that have already changed tends to be a person who holds their beliefs with more fervor, who experiences someone else's doubt as a personal attack, and who rejects evidence that makes them uncomfortable. And this happens on the left and the right alike, because it's not so much what you believe as how you believe it.
It isn't hard to guess which group I'd placed myself in. The flexible one, of course. The one of openness and pluralism. Nobody reads something like this and puts themselves on the side of fear. But then two things dawned on me. The first is that the same experiments show people are terrible at locating themselves on the spectrum. The second is the feeling of satisfaction and calm that reading this piece had given me: the thought that people could be neatly sorted into two groups… and that this explained the world.
Food for thought, as they say.