Leor Zmigrod
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Leor Zmigrod completed her PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar and was subsequently awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. She has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, Harvard, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Leor Zmigrod has received recognition through the Glushko Prize by the Cognitive Science Society, the Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Women in Cognitive Science Emerging Leader Award, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, and the United Kingdom’s Women of the Future Science Award. Leor Zmigrod’s research employs experimental psychology, political theories, social neuroscience, genetics, and sensitivity to upbringing and culture, to tackle the question of what makes a mind ideologically extreme and prone to violence. She is interested in what individual factors render an individual susceptible to dogmatic ways of thinking, as well as what immersion in rigid ideologies can do to the human body.
She joins the Paris IAS in May 2024 for a one-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Political psychology; political neuroscience; ideology; extremism; cognitive science; political philosophy.
The Science of Ideological Consciousness: Building an Empirically-Informed Political Philosophy of Mind
This project is a synthesis of scientific and philosophical research on the relationship between ideological doctrines and neuropsychological processes. Until recently there has been little serious dialogue between biology and political philosophy, partly due to disciplinary balkanization and mostly because of the infancy of empirical biopolitics. I will suggest that attending to the emerging science of political neuroscience and cognition can allow us to build a stronger, more compelling, and provocative thesis on the mind-shaping consequences of immersion in ideologies than is possible with conceptual tools alone.
Drawing on the latest research in political neuroscience and political psychology, Zmigrod will evaluate research demonstrating that ideological doctrines may shape cognitive and perceptual domains which are principally asocial. The effects of ideological immersion can cascade into non-political and non-social psychological domains of basic human perception and cognition. These consequences can be observed empirically: dogmatic adherents to ideological doctrines respond to neutral perceptual stimuli and decision-making tasks in ways that are systematically different to moderate and non-ideological citizens. This suggests that it is possible to postulate a deeper and more mechanistic hypothesis about how ideologies shape the brains of followers and structure their consciousness, phenomenology, and epistemology.
Key publications
Zmigrod, L. (2022). A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(4), 1072-1092.
Zmigrod, L., Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P., Robbins, T. W., & Poldrack, R.A. (2021). A Data-Driven Analysis of the Cognitive and Perceptual Attributes of Ideological Attitudes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376: 20200424
Zmigrod, L. (2020). The Role of Cognitive Rigidity in Political Ideologies: Theory, Evidence, and Future Directions. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 34-39.
 New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series, with the participation of Leor Zmigrod Cambridge University, UK / Paris IAS Fellow |
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