In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.
Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.
In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.
For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.
We don’t choose our ideologies in any meaningful sense - we gravitate toward them based on how our minds are wired. So no, it’s not really about what you think, but how you think. That’s why I don’t moralize people for their beliefs, even when I strongly disagree. I don’t believe they could think otherwise.
A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.
That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.
True. Also, core beliefs are all equally unbased and irrational. The desire for growing trees and saving lives is equal in this way to the desire to nuke humanity away. There’s no rational foundational ground to either of these things, we just evolved to care for ourselves and our surroundings because it ensures our survival and passage of the genes. That’s how the concept of good won, not because it’s any more rational than evil.
Personally, my core belief is that all people are fundamentally good and should be treated equally with love, care, respect and dignity. Thereby, I adopt ideologies that promote full economic and social equality, namely socialism/communism.
A good tool/exercise for analyzing your (and other’s) beliefs is logic trees, with the goal of taking any complex belief and determined what your core axioms are, being on the lookout for tautologies (God is real -> because the Bible says so -> because God is real…) and axioms that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
If you do the exercise correctly then you should find that most of those “beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven” have belief dependencies that can be objectively (and often easily) proven/disproven.