This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“All we need is conviction. Conviction offers us certainty – or, at
least, the appearance of certainty when we are in fact unsure. Convictions reveal our deepest passions – or,
at least, give us things to be passionate about. Convictions bring us together with other
people through a common and dedicated purpose, creating a loving community out
of mere strangers. How joyful! If all these convictions coalesce into a
worldview that is reasonably coherent, we can triumphantly declare that we have
an ideology: a set of truths and moral principles that we live by and share
with others. It’s easy!” – Leor
Zmigrod, Prologue, Page 7
“To detect the psychological similarities across ideologies,
we need a sense of what an ideology is and what it is not. In its simplest formulation, an ideology is a
kind of narrative. A compelling story
about the world. Yet not all stories are
ideologies, and not all forms of collective storytelling are rigid and
oppressive. There is a difference between
culture and ideology. Ideologies offer
absolutist descriptions of the world and accompanying prescriptions for how we
ought to think, act, and interact with others.
Ideologies legislate what is permissible and what is forbidden. Unlike culture – which can celebrate
eccentricities and reinterpretations – in ideology, nonconformity is
intolerable and total alignment is essential.
When deviation from the rules leads to severe punishment and ostracism,
we have moved away from culture and into ideology.” – Leor Zmigrod, Chapter 1:
Ideological Possession, Page 15
“The people with the most flexible minds are the people who acknowledge that the intellectual realm can be separated from the personal realm. They do not viscerally hate their interlocuters – they may hate their opinions but they do not project that hatred onto the persons voicing them. In contrast, the most cognitively rigid individuals, those who struggle to change when rules change, tend to hold the most dogmatic attitudes. They hate disagreement and are unwilling to shift their beliefs when credible counterevidence is presented.” – Leor Zmigrod, Chapter 2: An Experiment, Page 23
Is This An Overview?
A response to uncertainty, is to have conviction. Convictions offer the appearance of
certainty, and bring strangers together.
Collective convictions that shape the world view, the thoughts and
morals of the members, is an ideology. A
method of categorizing reality for clarity and identity. Ideologies are absolute descriptions of
reality, and provide direction for how to think, act, and interact with
others. Conformity to the needs of the
ideology is a requirement, with deviation punished severely.
Rigid minded people are susceptible to ideological
situations, as they struggle to change when the rules change. Rigid minded people hold dogmatic attitudes,
and do not change their mind when confronted with evidence to alternative
methods. Alternative ideas are a threat
to rigid minded people. Alternatively,
there are flexible minded people, who can separate ideas from people. Flexible minded people learn how to improve
their views through experience and evidence, who have intellectual humility
about what they think they know. There
are many variables that shape what kind of mind a person has, such as culture
and biology.
Caveats?
The research methodology has limitations on its ability to
represent wanted information with the experiments. Even though there is support for flexible
minded people, and shares the mistakes that rigid minded people make, this book
contains an ideological bias. The bias
becomes evident by the way the author creates cultural demarcations of people. The generalizations of others, has a moral
bias.
