It turns out that the owner of radical thought is 'not good at handling complicated cognitive tasks'
Research teams at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge have published a paper in the scientific journal
The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.0424
Extremists struggle with certain kinds of brain processing, research shows | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/extremist-psychological-traits.html
Extremist Brains Perform Poorly at Complex Mental Tasks, Study Reveals
https://www.sciencealert.com/extremist-brains-perform-poorly-at-complex-mental-tasks-experiment-reveals
In 2019, a research team led by Leor Zmigrod, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, conducted a study on the correlation between cognition and thinking. In this study, 522 subjects were asked to perform 37 cognitive tasks and 22 personality studies were conducted. A cognitive task is as simple as 'letting you answer which of the large number of dots moving to the right or left has more dots moving in which direction', and some of them change the rules of the task in the middle. In some cases, he tried to have flexibility in cognition as to whether he could respond immediately.
The new study conducted a questionnaire survey of political, social, and religious beliefs in 344 of the subjects who participated in the previous experiment, including cognitive tasks. The research team, which analyzed the correlation between ideological results and the results of cognitive tasks measured in the previous study, concludes that 'people with radical thinking tend to be unable to perform complex cognitive tasks well.'
Specifically, a person with radical thinking, such as supporting violence against a specific group in society, has a weak working memory to remember information during task execution and develops a strategy to solve the task. He is not good at doing it, and tends to be more impulsive and risk-loving.
In addition to those with radical thinking, this study also shows the characteristics of people with different ideologies.
Political conservatives said they were not good at handling strategically executed tasks, but were careful in perceptual processing and hated to take social risks. Political liberals, on the other hand, tended to perform perceptual processes quickly but not very accurately.
'People who are not good at complex cognitive processing can unknowingly be inclined to extreme ideas and be susceptible to dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies,' Zmigrod said. In addition, Zmigrod positioned the study as 'a strategy to improve people's cognitive flexibility and information processing might be a countermeasure against the development of extremists,' based on this study. In the future, he states that he will conduct research on the correlation between cognition and the environment surrounding people.
Related Posts:
in Science, Posted by log1p_kr