Leor Zmigrod on why rigid thinking makes us vulnerable to extremism

0:00Alex Chesterfield: What I've found in my research is that psychologically for the individual, when you kind of think about the world in that really rigid way across the board, that actually tends to be quite harmful for yourself. It makes you less flexible. It makes you less sensitive. It makes you less empathic towards things that are on the fringes, on the outside of your lens. And so that's why I think for each person, even if you have things that you believe about strongly cherished values, it is important to think, well, am I being dogmatic and ideological about them?

0:42Laura Osborne: Welcome to Change My Mind, the podcast where we ask leaders a time that they have changed their mind and why. I'm Alex Chesterfield, a behavioural scientist, and you've just heard from Lior Zmigrod, our guest today, and one of our favourite thinkers on polarisation and how our minds work. And Lior changed her mind on how deep the impact of our ideological brains runs. But before we get to that, I'd like to invite you to go to Open Democracy and sign up to the newsletter. So we promote this show with Open Democracy to their millions of regular monthly visitors and you can find all the back catalogue to our shows and much more information on this episode at opendemocracy.net forward slash depolarisation project.

1:26Laura Osborne: So now let's get on to today's conversation. I'm joined by my co-host Ali Goldsworthy, lecturer at Stanford and Recovering Politico. And hello, Ali. Hiya. hey and then laura our business thinker and md of wpi economics hello laura hi alex lovely to see you again like so laura and ali you had a fantastic conversation with leo that i was super gutted to miss because her work is is really out there what stayed with you from the conversation thanks

1:57Ali Goldsworthy: alex we did really miss you actually leo was great to talk to and she reminded me that these issues we discuss on the podcast rigidity of thinking strongly ideological commitments they don't just make it hard for people to change their minds or to have good conversations. Holding on to ideas and identities so tightly shapes that person's whole life. It shapes how their nervous system responds and who they encounter every day and how they feel about that. And what Leo said about the benefits of being flexible and intellectually humble for the individual really stayed with me. As we talked about it, we talk about it so much at a societal level.

2:31Ali Goldsworthy: But it was just such a good reminder that there really are strong individual benefits here too.

2:35Laura Osborne: Yeah.

2:36Ali Goldsworthy: And Ali, what about you?

2:37Leor Zmigrod: Yeah, Leo's been such an exceptionally influential thinker on me and really understanding my own limitations. And so like quite a lot of listeners, you know, I've been a tremendously passionate campaigner, often on issues that really, really matter to me. So I'm proud of getting people who were almost literally waiting on death row for organs, those transplants by changing the organ donation system. And I'm really proud even of tackling the everyday annoyances of people getting ripped off through unfair pricing, which no doesn't save their life, but my God can be annoying. And I can feel them really ignite this sense of injustice in me and become a core part of my identity and who I am and what I've achieved.

3:17Leor Zmigrod: And yes, I felt really good about making those changes happen. But Leo's really helped me understand that in turn, for me and for others, that passion and the dopamine hit that it gives me is actually quite limiting and can make me quite rigid in other areas. And she does it in such a beautiful way that I'm not even sure I totally mind being humbled by it.

3:39Laura Osborne: And on that note, we've had a huge response on this. So we are now offering our listeners more things. Can you tell us a bit more?

3:47Leor Zmigrod: Yeah, we're thrilled to say that we're now opening office hours and that's time with Laura, Alex and I to help organisations and people get their head around some of the topics on the show and how they might apply to you. If you'd like to book time with us, you can do so by visiting opendemocracy.net slash depolarization project. Right, let's go straight to the episode.

4:11Ali Goldsworthy: So, Lior, thanks for joining us. We're big fans of your work, as you know. And before we explore it in a bit more detail, I wondered if you could just first tell us a little bit more about what drew you to political neuroscience in the first place.

4:23Alex Chesterfield: The reason that I was initially drawn to political neuroscience was actually because it didn't really exist. And because when I started thinking about how do we understand what happens to our brains, to our bodies, when we're immersed in ideologies, I started looking at the literature and there was this nascent field, the kind of beginning of a field, but it was still quite underdeveloped because what had happened is some political scientists thought, oh, maybe we should put people in some brain scanners and see what happens. And some neuroscientists thought, well, maybe politics matters, but there wasn't really dialogue between the two groups.

5:00Alex Chesterfield: And so I was coming into the field at a time when I felt like there was a gap, really, that we weren't making the links between those disciplines. And that was really exciting. It also coincided with a very politically tumultuous time. I was in the UK, just Brexit was about to happen, and it was just before the first Trump election. so it felt like in 2015-2016 the political tectonic plates were shifting and it felt like we were getting all these stories about the roots of our political behavior and how it was affected by our kind of social background our economic life all these really important demographic variables but I felt like the brain was missing from the picture and I really wanted to bring it back and see what would happen when we do.

5:53Alex Chesterfield: So it was really curiosity driven, in a way, in this kind of big exploration, and I had no idea where it would take me. And it's been really interesting since, yeah.

6:03Ali Goldsworthy: Well, that's great. And I know it's taken you a long way, some of which we'll come on to in a second. But thinking back a little bit, we drew on some of your earlier insights in our book on polarisation pulls apart, particularly on the exploration you've done between rigid thinking and political extremism. So before you kind of bring us up to date, I wondered if you'd tell us a little bit about that and the work that you did on it at Cambridge.

6:22Alex Chesterfield: Yeah, so during my PhD at Cambridge, I really delved into the characteristics in people's psychology and people's behaviour that might make them susceptible to extreme ideological thinking. And I was really interested in any kind of extremism or dogmatism, whether it happened on the right, whether it happened on the left, whether it was in the context of nationalism or religion in whatever ideological sphere you could be curious about, I was open to exploring it. And what I found over repeated experiments was that really we could see a link between people's cognitive style, the way in which they thought about any problem you could give them, and the people who tended to think about the world in a more rigid way tended also to be the most rigid ideological dogmatic thinkers.

7:12Alex Chesterfield: And you might initially say, well, yeah, that makes sense. Like a rigid person is a rigid person. And that's just, you know, kind of tautological. But actually, when I was studying people's cognitive rigidity, I was asking them to do things that had nothing to do with politics. These were games that looked like solitaire or Tetris, you know, Games and problem-solving challenges that had absolutely no relation to people's explicit conscious attitudes. But what I found is that when we gave people these games that measured their cognitive rigidity in an unconscious way, they didn't know that that's what I was interested in, that really ended up predicting who would be the most staunch, stubborn, rigid ideologue about whatever ideology they believed in, and who actually would be more moderate, more independent, more able to incorporate different perspectives and lines of evidence in their thinking.

8:07Alex Chesterfield: So it really started this whole journey of understanding that our brains have a huge role to play, is we're drawn to, and more importantly, how extremely we take those ideologies.

8:19Ali Goldsworthy: So interesting. So I know you think a lot about Ali.

8:21Leor Zmigrod: Yeah, I do. And I suppose, you know, a lot of our listeners are quite progressive campaigner types, both in the UK and beyond. And I suppose their response to that would be, yeah, I do hold some of these views really strongly because they're really important and they matter, you know, and they protect our democracy. Or I have had a very direct experience around, I don't know, access to abortions or around, you know, their own child being sick and being denied access to services and wanting to make sure that people don't have that experience. So that seems like a very understandable reason to have a very dogmatic view.

9:00Leor Zmigrod: And I suppose my question for you is if those people are listening, how should they respond to this? Are they actually part of the problem or when are you safeguarding things? How do you draw that balance?

9:11Alex Chesterfield: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that we can unlock it by really distinguishing between kind of rigid ideological convictions and values. right and you can have cherished values that guide your politics that guide the way in which you engage with the world things that you believe are fundamental whether that's respect tolerance whether that's feminism or like a sense of gender equality or equality of different kinds but the question is the the moment it moves to something ideological and rigid is when you start to have these really prescriptive absolutist rules that you believe everyone should obey by and everyone should live by and you allow no nuance no context really to shape your judgment of how that value is applied right so understanding and remembering that there is nuance that there is that really context can really shift how we apply different values that allows you to stay in that space of not being too rigid and ideological, not dehumanizing anyone you disagree with, but being able to see the picture in its entirety and its richness.

10:27Alex Chesterfield: But when you start to be extremely dogmatic, you stop being able to see that. And so I think there are people who are motivated by causes that they think are incredibly ethical, incredibly noble, incredibly urgent and important, some of those are really kind of doing it in a value-based, flexible, humble way. And some might be doing it in that rigid, very dogmatic way. And, you know, I'm not here to make a judgment necessarily on what is the right way to do things, or what is the effective way of doing things. But what I found in my research is that psychologically for the individual, when you kind of think about the world in that really rigid way across the board, that actually tends to be quite harmful for yourself.

11:16Alex Chesterfield: It makes you less flexible, it makes you less sensitive, it makes you less empathic towards things that are on the fringes, on the outside of your lens. And so that's why I think for each person, even if you have things that you believe about strongly cherished values, it is important to think, well, am I being dogmatic and ideological about them? Or am I able to find that balance where I believe in it passionately, I want to see change happening in that direction, but I can still humanize myself and others and the whole context around it.

11:50Leor Zmigrod: I mean, I totally get that. Personally, I have a good deal of sympathy for that position. I'm just going to read you quickly a quick like half-line excerpt that comes from a book called Rules for Radicals that you might have come across from Saul Alinsky that a lot of campaigners use, which is pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it. Right. And that's the biggest rule people will be told, go and follow that. And I just wondered what your response to that would be in terms of the consequences for some of the individuals doing it. We can have maybe in our separate breakout, like a discussion about how likely that is to influence success.

12:26Leor Zmigrod: But that is what many, many people are told is an effective way to bring about change. if you decide you're radical, which quite a lot of people enjoy describing themselves as. Radical or not.

12:39Alex Chesterfield: I think psychologically it can be an effective way, right? The human brain really responds to that kind of binary, we're going to separate something into black and white, and that's a way to rally people, to engage people, both in good and bad directions. the question is when you're doing that what kind of mindset are you trying to create in either the people who you want as followers or participants and in yourself and I think that ultimately that kind of black and white strategy is damaging to the individual and to our societies you could say okay from a campaigner's perspective or an activist perspective it's effective but maybe that's also a bit of a short-term lens on it right like okay we can rally and get people voting on this particular issue but actually there are long-term consequences to making people think in that black and white binary rigid way when you're encouraging that over time you're creating a population that then is susceptible and really habituated to think in that way and is that however progressive you think your cause is, is that the kind of society, the kind of citizens you want to create, you know?

13:58Leor Zmigrod: And also, do you make it harder for yourself down the line, right? Because are you encouraging rigidity in your opposition, as well as in people that you are with?

14:06Alex Chesterfield: Exactly. And one of the things that I think people sometimes forget is, because often people are so focused on the left versus right kind of political spectrum, as I know you guys know very well. but that can sometimes be a false binary because actually extremism on both sides looks very very similar and that's also something i found in my research right that actually extreme leftists and extreme rightists end up having a really similar psychological profile on both ends you could see that cognitive rigidity whereas those who are more moderate more kind of suspicious of those really really tight partisan identities they were able to be more flexible so actually the extremes can be psychologically very similar and the reason this matters for these kinds of strategies is because once you start pushing people towards that rigid mindset even if you think you're doing it on the side of progress whichever side you think that is you're actually also making them susceptible to switching to swinging to a different kind of rigid ideology and we see that happening often that people have been radicalized towards one ideology, even when they get disillusioned, then they jump and become extremely radical towards the total opposite.

15:21And so you need to think about what kind of psychological, yeah, what kind of psychological tendencies you're creating

15:31Alex Chesterfield: or eliciting in people and the fact that that can work against you. Yeah.

15:36Leor Zmigrod: And I think that there's something quite awkward there for a lot of people who probably don't want to be associated as saying like oh well I've got a lot in common with these other people but it doesn't make sense right like if you're passionate about something you're more likely to become rigid about it and also more likely to drive change and encourage other people to do so and I just wanted to extend that slightly because whilst we're on awkward conversations about predispositions to violence actually so are rigid people more likely to endorse violence and particularly political violence?

16:07Alex Chesterfield: Yes that's something that we found consistently across these experiments is that the most cognitively rigid minds are also the ones who are willing to support harming, hurting people who believe differently, people who seem to threaten their own group. They're more willing to engage in violence quickly. And they're actually even willing to commit violence against themselves. They're willing to say, you know what, I'll sacrifice my life, I'll hurt my life in order to protect this bigger ideological cause. And that's why that cognitive rigidity can translate into real world actions and real world political violence that we need to be really wary of.

16:43Leor Zmigrod: And I think, and I'll come back to how people can begin to understand how rigid they are. Like, I think one of the concepts how we've often extended your work is you don't just get tied to a political ideology in this way. You can get fused to like a group identity. You can get fused to, I don't know, supporting a football team to a particular political cause or issue. So people shouldn't sort of sit there and think, well, well, I'm not fused to a particular party. This doesn't apply to me. In fact, if you're thinking that way, it probably quite likely it still does.

17:13Alex Chesterfield: Yeah, what we're seeing is that people who are more cognitively rigid and more like emotionally impulsive, they tend to fuse really quickly to different kinds of identity groups. So that can be a political party. It can be a different kind of social party or social grouping. We see that there's that tendency to find a collective and try to merge and fuse yourself with it, which can feel really satisfying for people, can feel wonderful and you feel a sense of belonging, you feel like you have a clear identity, a place in the world. But, and that's where there's this big but, there are those big consequences for your psychology and for your vulnerabilities as a result.

17:54Leor Zmigrod: So, and I just want to extend that before I pass back to Laura, I know it's going to link you back to one of our previous guests, which is, if people are listening to this and thinking, oh, I'm not one of those rigid thinkers, or I wonder if I am, you know, like what's, is there a quick sort of litmus test thing that you experiment that you can do that you could describe that they could think about doing?

18:13Alex Chesterfield: Yeah. So one of the funniest things I've discovered in my research is that the people who think they're the most flexible people who tell me I'm the most adaptable nuanced person end up scoring the most rigid in my experiments and vice versa. Sometimes people who actually don't think that they're that flexible end up being a lot more flexible than they think. So that's why I've turned to these more unconscious cognitive tests and experiments rather than just asking people to self-report how flexible they think they are because we're just terrible at knowing ourselves. And there are different kinds of experiments that I've done, different ways to measure a person's cognitive rigidity or flexibility.

18:55Alex Chesterfield: One kind of game that's quite easy to do, and not that I'm saying try this at home, because again, you're going to be both the subject and the assessor. So you're a bit biased, but is really to do these kinds of creativity games. And one kind of test is called the alternative uses test, which is really a kind of game where you give a person an everyday object. It can be a newspaper, a paperclip, a glass mug. And you say, okay, well, spend two, three, four minutes telling me, writing down or saying out loud all the different uses you can imagine for this everyday object. So sometimes I show participants an image of a brick, just a normal everyday brick, and I say, okay, give me all the possible uses you can imagine.

19:42Alex Chesterfield: And one person might say, you can build a house with this brick, or you can build a school, or you can build a fence or you can build a castle. And they'll spend the two minutes or five minutes just listing all the things you could build with a brick, which is taking the brick in its most literal, conventional use as a building block and just building things with it. And so this person could be very intelligent. They could list 50 things you could build with bricks. But as you can see, their minds are kind of staying, sticking to one approach. They're staying on one lane and they're just iterating on the same idea again and again.

20:22Alex Chesterfield: So they're being kind of narrow in their thinking. But a different person who might be doing this game will say, yes, I'll build a school with these bricks or I'll build a fence, but I could also use it as a paperweight or I could use it as a doorstop. Or one person once said, I'll feed it to a brick-eating monster. and so people can give me again the same number of ideas it's these ideas are going through a much more diverse array of thoughts you know you can see that the person as they're spending those five minutes they're switching between modes of thinking they're taking the object and turning it on its head you know they're not just sticking to its conventional appearance they are thinking about crumbling up it up about stacking it up about using in different and novel creative ways and so that's one way to say you know it's not about your intelligence these two people could have given me the same number of ideas but it's about the kind of ideas you generate are you more narrow and rigid and staying with one approach or does your mind and switch and give us a kind of array of diverse ideas so that's one way to test people's flexibility or rigidity and we really lie on the spectrum.

21:38Alex Chesterfield: Some people are very rigid, others very flexible, but most of us lie somewhere in between. And it's important for us to realise our position because it also affects how we respond to the political world, to the social world, whether we end up taking on evidence and different ideas, or whether we actually tend towards more authoritarian ideologies in whatever forms they come. Thank you.

22:00Ali Goldsworthy: Thank you. I think we'll be trying to think of what else we could do with a break for a while now but I wanted to ask you a slightly different question Leo which is more about what you were saying before about getting into political neuroscience in the first place we talked to one of our other guests Emma Wymel about the challenge of becoming a more visible woman in scientific debate and I wonder as you've got more and more well known how's that affected

22:21Alex Chesterfield: you has that been much of an issue I think the way in which it's affected the most is is that's actually a great question it's actually quite a deep question I mean I've been lucky in that I've been able to talk about the ideas in lots of different spaces and with lots of different people in different positions of power and influence both in the realm of policy and ideas and so I've been lucky to have had the platform that I do I think that when you present as a younger woman, you have to, what happens is you end up surprising people. And because people have preconceptions, because you come on the stage and people are surprised that you're there.

23:11Alex Chesterfield: But then you start speaking and then people are surprised that they're learning new things and that they're being challenged. And so really, the feeling I've seen the most is surprise, which is good, because what surprise is, is you are changing your mind about something like the title of this podcast. And that's in addition to the ideas as well. So yes, it plays a role. It plays a role in people's reception of you initially. But actually, people change their mind pretty quickly when they hear that you've got something interesting in you to say.

23:46Ali Goldsworthy: That's good to hear. I know Emma was reflecting, it's quite difficult to think about which areas of science to encourage women in because there's more or less space made available in some disciplines than others but that's really good to hear that you've had a positive experience of that now Ali I think you're going to ask that I was going to say I was just going to comment on the

24:04Leor Zmigrod: power of being underestimated as a woman um oh yeah something we've all experienced clearly Leo question that we ask everybody who comes on the podcast which is could you tell us about a time that you've changed your mind on something that was substantial and why I was reflecting

24:19Alex Chesterfield: I knew you were going to ask me this question. And so I was reflecting on that. And I was thinking about how sometimes we think about changing your mind as kind of going from one opinion to its opposite to its like antithesis, a kind of either awakening, a kind of shift of reversal of some kind. I think the kind of change that has been most profound for me has maybe been a slightly different kind, which has been when you have an intuition or a theory about how the world works, and then you get evidence that deepens the consequences of that theory, or it like gives you a more nuanced sense. And I think that has come from the kind of the research and ideas around the ideological brain.

25:10Alex Chesterfield: Because I think when I first came to it, as a scientist, you come with hypothesis like okay well maybe there is a link between people's brains and the ideologies they believe in but the way in which my mind has changed has been that now i understand it goes so much deeper and so much further than i initially thought because through writing the book the ideological brain and doing this research i've actually discovered that it's not just that there is some link between your brain and the ideology that you hold, it's actually that your whole brain and body, your whole nervous system can be affected by whether you live this really rigid ideological life or whether you find a more anti-ideological way to live, a more flexible, intellectually humble way to think and to be and relate to others.

26:06Alex Chesterfield: And I think for me, I've changed my mind on deep the consequences are because whereas I used to think that okay you know our politics are related to our psychology in some way that's interesting now I feel like our ideologies sculpt who we are as human beings and that at the most foundational level what kind of human being you are every moment of every day in your life how you perceive how you act, how you behave to your family, to your friends, to your co-workers, to strangers. It's this really profound, all-encompassing situation that can happen to you. And so the stakes are so personal, I feel.

26:52Alex Chesterfield: Like, whereas I used to think it was just interesting, now I feel like, wow, this change that whether you have a rigid ideology or not changes what kind of human being you are and how you are about to live your life and affect others in it and so it's so much more personal and in that way so much more important because the macro scale becomes infused with weight because it's not just that it affects our societies it affects each individual within that society and so and so i feel the weight of this and the the the kind of penetration of how far it goes into our human condition.

27:33Leor Zmigrod: And was there a moment when you sat there and thought, I guess, kind of, oh shit, like this is really like a lot bigger. And I appreciate it's a drip, drip, drip, but there can be a point when it becomes consciously penetrating. Was there a moment when that happened?

27:48Alex Chesterfield: Yeah, I think for me, and actually there was a really kind of visual sense in which it happened in the way that you describe, which is I remember sitting when I was doing these experiments and I was I was in Cambridge, but I was running them in the US. So I was staying late overnight as like they were running on as the experiments were running online. And I was seeing participants kind of doing the study and the results coming in and you see, OK, the 60 year old from Texas and now this like 21 year old from California and now the 70 year old woman from Maine. And you kind of see like individual results coming in over hundreds and thousands of people over time and I'm sitting there over these nights in Cambridge watching the data drip in and then there's the moment when you put it on the kind of map on on the kind of all the data points together and I remember that moment when the data was so clear and so strong and I was like oh my this is on a different level to what I thought yeah and and has that changed so now you go just a quick one has that changed where

28:57Ali Goldsworthy: you want to take your research now you know having found out it's so fundamental does it make you want to deepen it into other areas like what does that inspired you to do next I think

29:05Alex Chesterfield: it's inspired me to really focus on freedom and what freedom from ideologies looks like because once you realize like okay these rigid ideologies can really be shackles like that affect your perception and your body your nervous system your your health in many ways it makes me think a lot now about well yeah what are the ways in which a person can become more free from those ideologies and stay free right because you can free yourself from one kind of radical ideology but how do you then not become seduced by another one and so now my writing and research is really interested in freedom and and not just in the abstract sense but what does freedom look like for us in the age not just now of social media but of ai and the kinds of radicalizations are going to happen through those technologies how do we sustain that at the individual level i'm not an activist or a campaigner but i care about what the science and the ideas can help us understand about ourselves and how we choose to lead our lives and each person can choose and that's that that's their their freedom but do you choose freedom or do you not and yeah I think it's inspired me to look at it from that angle now.

30:24Leor Zmigrod: Risk of eating ourselves is that an ideology of its own? You see

30:28Alex Chesterfield: that's what I've been thinking about a lot right like how do you not accidentally create an ideology of like flexibility and so I've reflected on that a lot and I think that for me what makes something ideological is when you start giving people really narrow rules for how they should think and how they should act and what it means to be good or bad or moral or immoral once you have those really strict rules that's when you're really like in the throes of an ideology and so there are no rules for how to be and stay flexible and kind of mentally free. I think you can have guidelines or you can have like questions that you ask yourself.

31:10Alex Chesterfield: So we're keeping it open because questions are open, but answers can be and rules can be closed. So by giving and thinking about what are the questions that you can ask yourself constantly to stay flexible and open in the face of stress, in the face of all kinds of rigid, different that's now really what I'm interested in and I suppose one if I was thinking about

31:34Leor Zmigrod: this on this which obviously I'm asking you them so I am is is there a certain vulnerability that comes with being cognitively flexible and I mean that in the face of dealing with let's call them dickheads right which can exist across the political spectrum let's be clear on this but people who are bad actors or who don't share a common interest in trying to get things done and are ruthlessly focused on their own success right like how do you square that vulnerability that comes about through exactly the examples that you've just said in the face of that and particularly given that the environment we're in is much more likely to make people be dickheadish

32:13Alex Chesterfield: yeah I think that the first thing is really to reassess what flexibility looks like sometimes people think oh it means that you're being wishy-washy or you're being like persuadable by anything or that you have no backbone or you have no beliefs but actually with flexibility it's not about just being a pushover by any actor that comes along it's about you still have a sense of the world but you're receptive to evidence you're receptive to different perspectives doesn't mean you have to change your mind by any new input but it means that you incorporate it rather than shut it out and that you are constantly contextually sensitive right so that you don't apply something blindly mindlessly regardless of context and so I think in that sense flexibility can actually be a strength it doesn't have to be a weakness like there are ways in which you it can create vulnerabilities but I think it can also create a lot of strengths because it can be a solid position it can be a position where it's not that you don't know what you think but it's that you still have a humble open attitude towards the world and people and evidence but you're and you're not just going to be pushed over by any new ideological entrepreneur who is just really there to try to personally benefit whether in terms of money or power from from maneuvers of other people uh so i think i think that there's there's a way to make flexibility cool again.

33:49Alex Chesterfield: No, strong again. No, but not in an authoritarian way. But actually, because I think when we look at the leaders that we value now, it's become very fashionable to value leaders who are rigid, who won't change their minds, who have strong convictions, who will never incorporate something new. And I think that that's a problem, right? When we create a a theory of leadership that's about we value rigid leaders we're creating big societal problems

34:19Leor Zmigrod: and that really reminds me of laura i'll pass over to you in a second question but are you familiar with the work of archie brown at oxford on like the myth of the strong leader like actually what we think is strong and what we think is a successful leader is not often borne out in practice by what happens with sort of really radical moments and he brings in some great examples from sprain and with aldolfo suarez and things like that that can be hugely useful and i think there's probably something for all of us to reflect on on like our leaders who are really successful do they just depict themselves as strong whereas actually they're taking advice and soundings from a far broader range of places and that sort of dissonance tends to happen now he's obviously looking back in history right rather than looking forwards and i'm not sure it will continue to happen in the same way it has but I'm so struck by it in the context of what you're saying I'll stick some stuff in the show notes for people to be able to pick up yeah totally

35:17Alex Chesterfield: because there often is a difference between the presentation and what happens backstage and that's why when we're looking at okay what makes a successful leader it is also about what does success mean to us? Like by what are the metrics by which we measure them? And so I think if we change our attitude, you know, the value of rigidity or flexibility, that will also translate into changes in, okay, who do we elect or how do we understand the behavior of leaders and how do they explain their own behavior, right? Because I think there isn't a language, a vocabulary for leaders to explain. I've taken on this evidence and these different perspectives and here's how I have changed my mind or made a position happen.

36:03Alex Chesterfield: It's all along these kinds of like, are you following your past promises? Or are you following trends?

36:11Ali Goldsworthy: Yeah, so interesting. Just one last question, Leah, if we may, which is if we were to invite anyone else onto this podcast that you would really like to hear talk about how they've changed their mind, who would that be?

36:21Alex Chesterfield: Oh, what a great question. Do they have to be alive?

36:25Ali Goldsworthy: yeah I guess so I don't know I mean you can have a hypothetical it's like the ideal dinner you know we don't have to invite them I mean sometimes we do invite them so you're probably

36:36Leor Zmigrod: ruling out actually getting an answer but it's fine you can have someone to answer in the style

36:41Alex Chesterfield: of whoever you can have one of each if you like you know what I actually someone I met along the book tour of the ideological brain this year was Malala and she is such an interesting figure who's also been around for so long I hope you can get her for the podcast but I think because she is a person who followed a really strong important value like and conviction and also suffered huge consequences for it but I think is also one is a person who is looking to the future and so I'm curious whether and what she's changed her mind on.

37:17Ali Goldsworthy: Yeah that would be a great conversation and because I can't help now because you mentioned it before if you were going to have invited someone from the past and who was possibly dead onto the podcast who would they have been right now I think

37:27Alex Chesterfield: it would be Hannah Arendt I think you know I've thought about her for so long I think she would look at the last few years with both horror and resignation but I think you know she had this theory of like the banality of evil and the mindlessness that creates kind of ideological monsters and in my book I actually argue with her against her in all kinds of ways but I'm curious whether looking at 2026 she would change her mind about some of those theories. I think she'd certainly have a lot.

38:02Ali Goldsworthy: Exactly I agree. Thank you and thanks so much for joining us this afternoon we really appreciate it.

38:08Alex Chesterfield: Thank you so much it's been a pleasure.

38:14Laura Osborne: thank you so much for your time Lior we really appreciate it so now we've heard the full interview Laura Ali's anything you wanted to reflect on yeah I was really struck by what

38:23Ali Goldsworthy: Lior said about her experience as a younger woman in this field and the assumptions people might make before they meet her you know and how there's an element of proving yourself competent every time you speak at something and you know while Lior's experience has been mostly positive it did make me think back to Emma Wynall's point on women in science and how this is still very much not a given that women who are experts in their field will just be taken seriously so I mean to throw in a pop culture reference I watched Ladies First on Netflix the other week a film I have some issues with you know not least because it assumes that if women run the world they'd just be exactly the same as powerful men at their worst can be but putting that to one side it bears out how that kind of implicit question about women's experience or their right to be in the room is still so prevalent in workplaces of all kinds.

39:08Ali Goldsworthy: And, you know, while that might make funny TV, as it does here, when you flip that scenario and put a man in that place, you know, it just shows how it's not really right or fair that that still applies so often.

39:19Leor Zmigrod: Yeah, yeah. And I think, gosh, one of the things that comes out for me from that is that actually, your brains can be malleable, like, Leo seems to have an enormous faith, almost to me, sometimes too much faith, maybe I am in itself a product of middle age now but that you can update and you can change some of the ways that your brain works and you know neuroplasticity is a thing and I shouldn't give up on that and feel that I'm set in my ways just because you know my prefrontal cortex is fully developed and I'm not

39:54Laura Osborne: 25 any longer yeah for me it was her point about how we have collectively decided to valorize you you know, kind of rigid leaders. Obviously, we don't think of them as rigid, but basically people who have never changed their minds, who never incorporate new evidence. And that's almost become a definition of strength. And what's frustrating is that from a behavioural science perspective, you would say that's exactly backwards. And actually the most adaptive, effective thinkers are the ones who do update their beliefs. But we've just built a culture that punishes them for it.

40:28Leor Zmigrod: And I just wondered, like Alex and Nora, How much is it that we actually the stories we tell about our leaders or what we choose to remember about them are those, you know, strong, rigid moments when actually in practice, they might be a bit better at updating their beliefs in private. Do you think that that might be an accurate way to explain that dissonance?

40:50Laura Osborne: Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think it's the guy in the book. No, it's like public truths, public lies. Oh, Timur Koran. Sumer Quran, yeah. Often the idea that we have what we hold privately, we keep private because we know it will be punished and or not rewarded if we say those things out loud. So we learn very quickly.

41:11Leor Zmigrod: I suppose what's particularly interesting is how that interacts with leadership, right? So that maybe even leaders feel that there's too much of a cost for them to speak out loud for the things that they'd like to say, and maybe even a higher cost than for other people. On that note, I should say it's all from us today. And thank you so much for listening to this episode of Change My Mind. If you liked what you heard, and we really hope you did, then don't forget, we've got a full back catalogue of fascinating interviews with leaders from all walks of life. You can find them all by searching Change My Mind in your podcast app.

41:41Leor Zmigrod: We'll be back next week with another leader to hear what they've changed their mind about. Thank you to Open Democracy for their support of the show and to Kevin MacLeod, whose Dreams Become Real is our theme music.