Join us as Gates Cambridge Trustee Prof. Usha Goswami welcomes Dr Leor Zmigrod [2016], a political psychologist and neuroscientist, and author of The Ideological Brain.

Leor's research centers on what makes some individuals most susceptible to extreme and dogmatic ideologies. She studied at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar before winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. She has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, Harvard, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. She was listed on ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ in Science and has won numerous prizes, including the Women of the Future Science Award and the Glushko Prize. The Ideological Brain is her first book and is currently being translated into over 15 languages.

This conversation will explore why some individuals are particularly susceptible to extreme worldviews and how features of their brains and everyday thought patterns can propel people towards rigid belief systems. Through research in the new field of 'political neuroscience', Dr Leor Zmigrod will discuss evidence that there are psychological and even neurobiological differences between adherents to different ideologies, and that our brains come to reflect the ideologies we hold in real and striking ways.

The conversation will delve into why the stakes of embracing an extreme ideology are much higher than we typically assume – if our brains and bodies echo our ideologies, then extremism is not just a political issue, it is also a profoundly personal and existential problem. The conversation will also discuss why it is increasingly urgent to think deeply about the origins of ideological convictions and the consequences of adopting binary worldviews – as well as what it means to think and exist flexibly in a world determined to position us in narrow boxes.

Book talk and Q&A with Dr Leor Zmigrod, author of The Ideological Brain