Ideology is a narrative about how the world works and how it should work.
Ideologies satisfy the need to understand the world, connect with others, and belong to a community.
Exploring the world is cognitively expensive, and exploiting known patterns and rules can be more efficient.
Highly ideological individuals tend to resist change and nuance, and may process information differently.
They may be less reliable narrators, prone to confirming their biases and inventing fictions to support them.
Their brains tend to have differences in dopamine distribution, reward circuitry, and physical structure, particularly in brain networks responsible for emotions, memory, and error monitoring.
The size of the amygdala, a key structure in emotion processing, is linked to conservative ideologies.
The relationship between brain structure and ideology is still unclear, and whether our brains determine our politics or ideologies change our brains is unknown.
Individuals have agency to choose how passionately they adopt ideologies, and flexibility can be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.
Change may be harder for those with genetic or biological vulnerabilities, but it is not impossible.
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