Have you ever told anyone, “I’m a remainer”? Or said “Oh, they’re a leaver” when discussing somebody else? Felt an instinctive response to seeing someone engrossed in the Daily Mail or sharing a story from openDemocracy? If you are reading this, then the odds are you have. Uncomfortably, as we touch on this latest episode of Changed My Mind, featuring political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, that means the likelihood of you condoning political violence rises. But you probably don’t see it that way.
Political violence – that is, violence committed to challenge, attain or retain political power – is on the rise in democracies. In the UK, politicians, especially women and those of colour, report avoiding events for fears over harassment and safety amid a stark rise in the number of alleged crimes against MPs and an increase in spending to protect politicians. The threats don’t stop when they leave office either: last month, former Conservative cabinet minister Penny Moudant said there hasn’t been a day in the two years since she lost her parliamentary seat when there has not been a live police investigation or an ongoing court case relating to her safety.
There are many reasons for this rise in harassment. But our responses to it are shaped by our identities and the world around us.
The identity triggers
Once you go from perceiving “I believe” to “I am”, it triggers a different, more intuitive set of brain responses. You favour people who agree with you, and disfavour those who don’t, even when you operate in completely unrelated fields.
As Leor says, when identity is something they treasure dogmatically, extreme leftists and extreme rightists end up having a really similar psychological profile.
And in the right environments, such as those of stress or uncertainty, Leor has found that dogmatists possess “the most cognitively rigid minds and are also the ones who are willing to support harming and hurting people who believe differently. People who seem to threaten their own group are more willing to engage in violence.”
The dogmatist individual is unlikely to view an endorsement of violence that way. Instead, the lens is one of self-defence, and there is a growing body of work that shows these rigid personalities are more likely to engage in self-harm, too, to protect a group, leader or ideology that they are fused with.
Identity can ebb and flow. Some identities can be strengthened during events such as the Olympics, especially if you are winning a lot of gold medals or defeating old enemies. Others are more enduring and potent; often because people really care about an issue, and have seen or experienced a deep injustice, such as racism or sexism.
But isn’t it just authoritarians?
Historically, it was thought that authoritarians had a bigger disposition to support political violence, an idea shaped by researchers such as Else Frenkel-Brunswik.
Like many social psychologists of the 1940s and 50s, Frenkel-Brunswik had fled the Nazis and was desperate to understand how millions of people had condoned or turned a blind eye to genocide. Delving into childhood, she asked what traits predispose children to authoritarian regimes, concluding that those who tend towards right-wing authoritarianism were more cognitively rigid thinkers. They see the world in more binary black-and-white ways and struggle to adapt to nuance and shades of grey, she thought, believing this made them more likely to justify violence.
But there was a flaw in this work. It considered the cause to be authoritarianism. Not the rigidity and dogmatism of the brain, a concept that can be found in people who hold on to identities strongly. Wherever they are on the political spectrum. Political science and political psychology have uncovered many differences and similarities in how conservatives, liberals and others think in the decades since Frenkel-Brunswik’s research. But on support for political violence, it only told a partial story.
What can we do about it?
The answer isn’t to stop campaigning for progress. But it does demand recognising that if you are a progressive activist, you may not be the right messenger. When political violence occurs, condemn it publicly. Enforce rules evenly, and protect the independence of those enforcers.
On a personal level, we can also practice making our brains more malleable. If they can become more dogmatic, they can become more flexible, too. That demands asking yourself about a time you changed your mind and why – a question at the root of the podcast series we have produced with openDemocracy for the past seven years.
