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In an ambitious (yet, regrettably, somewhat limited and underdeveloped)
study, first published a couple of years ago, researchers with an interest in Political Psychology, at the University of Cambridge, "invited 750 US citizens to complete multiple objective neuropsychological tests" designed to measure the test subjects'
individual levels of cognitive rigidity and flexibility and "found that individuals who are extremely attached to the Democratic party or to the Republican party display greater mental rigidity on these cognitive tests relative to those who are only moderately or weakly attached."
Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs, extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile.
While it is no earth-shattering news, by any means, to the field of Human Development and Applied Psychology (to wit, Keith E. Stanovitch's 2021 relatively recent book on the topic
The Bias That Divides Us) that individuals who are cognitively rigid "tend to perceive objects and stimuli in black-and-white terms" and that "this makes it difficult for them to switch between modes of thinking or to adapt to changing environments," undeniably these results prompt many questions about the relationship between minds and politics:
Like, for instance:
- Which came first, the egg of indoctrination, or the dogmatic chicken?
That is, does exposure to a rigid dogmatic ideology lead to mental rigidity? Or does cognitive inflexibility foster a proclivity towards ideological dogmatism? The study doesn't say.
- Or, why does the dogmatic chicken cross the road?
- Or, more to the point, does partisan politics cause brain shrinkage?
That last question is the domain of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. (One day, perhaps, some neurological study shall confirm what everybody knows.)
More relevant to the current era of cancel culture and economic warfare, Social Psychology might be more pertinent.
The Milgram Shock Experiment, one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology, comes to mind.
While Milgram's approach does not address the phenomenon of mob psychology per se, there are parallels to be drawn in the way citizens of a nation-state (e.g. the United States of America) are debriefed in a fashion that is intended to persuade the latter individuals that being willing to depress the equivalent of the experiment's toggle switches that those individuals believe will harm other people (like, in this instance, say, economic sanctions) is quite "normal" and that it is perfectly "normal" for the one conducting the experiment to permit this to happen and that it is perfectly "normal" for the organizational framework within which this all transpires to permit that kind of pathology to continue.
Milgram's approach, however, doesn't quite entirely provide a fully adequate explanation of the hate driven behavior such as the kind that one can see barely disguised in social medias and cancel culture mob driven practices, which are not by far the doing of paid political trolls alone.
Paraphrasing (
mutatis mutandis) Theodor Adorno 's criticism of the belief in a spontaneity of the masses:
Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Russians are the devil, do they completely believe in their leader's narrative. They do not really identify themselves with it but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leaders' narrative. ... It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own "group psychology" which makes such crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.
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