{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Leor Zmigrod on the Ideological Brain","description":" Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, The Ideological Brain. \u201cI think that from all the research that I've done,\u201d she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, \u201cI feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.\u201d And while she acknowledges there are times being unbending may be seen as an asset, \u201crigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.\u201d In this podcast, she details some of the work \u2013 both with social science experimentation and with brain imaging \u2013 that determines if people are flexible in their thinking, what are the real-life benefits of being flexible, if they can change, and how an ideological brain, i.e. a less flexible brain, affects politics and other realms of decision-making. \u201cWhen you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, you're focusing on how people are thinking, not what they're thinking,\u201d Zmigrod explains. \u201cSo it's not like you can have a curriculum of \u2018like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,\u2019 but it's about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn't so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts.\u201d Zmigrod was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University and won a winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College there. She has since held visiting fellowships at Stanford and Harvard universities, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. Amond many honors the young scholar received are the ESCAN 2020 Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science by the Cognitive Science Society, . the 2020 Women of the Future Science Award and the 2022 Women in Cognitive Science Emerging Leader Award, and the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association.  ","author_name":"Social Science Bites","author_url":"http:\/\/www.socialsciencebites.com","html":"