What if the reason people fall down these massive ideological rabbit holes isn’t actually because they’re inherently gullible? What if it’s because they are just desperately, almost biologically, starved for a sense of agency and that very lack causes it?
What if rigid political dogma isn’t this fundamental personality trait that you’re just born with; neither it is about IQ nor about cognitive abilities which have been studied before.
What if it’s rather a temporarily outsourced defence mechanism? A defence against a world that just feels way too complex to navigate alone.
Traditionally, we usually think about political or social ideology as being a menu of philosophical options. You just sit down and logically evaluate them and pick your favourite.
But motivated social cognition argues something entirely different. First, let’s take a look at why human beings adopt these rigid belief systems in the first place and what the payoff is.
The ‘spiders study’
There has been this massive narrative in popular science arguing the exact opposite of what I think.
Specifically, there is that highly publicised study around 2008 claiming that conservatives and liberals are literally physiologically and biologically hardwired differently. That our threat sensitivity is predetermined; that it defines how we perceive threat, whether we see it as overbearing or manageable; and the bigger we see it, the more prone to ideology we are, which, according to the study, has nothing to do with the cognitive threat response style. The narrative literally was that conservatives possess a heightened biological sensitivity to threats, meaning they involuntarily sweat more when they’re shown frightening images.
So if it’s a hardwired biological reflex, then it’s not a cognitive choice to outsource, right?
It’s just our nervous system running the show. For over a decade, that specific study fuelled endless think pieces about how our political divides were essentially biological destinies. Thank goodness, it’s not that simple. Let’s take a look, though, at the Baker et al. paper, which systematically dismantles that biological determinism.
Baker and his team utilised a pre-registered replication model. It means that before a single participant even entered the lab, the researchers published their exact methodology, their hypothesis, and the precise statistical models they were going to use to analyse the data. They set out to see if the physiological claims of the 2008 study actually held up under rigorous modern scrutiny.
So they put people in a lab and monitored their physical reactions to gross or scary stuff. They bombarded these participants with a series of highly evocative images. Maggots on rotting meat, aggressive spiders, open wounds – all interspersed with neutral images, just to be sure. And after gathering this raw, involuntary physiological data, they administered these comprehensive assessments to measure the participants’ levels of social conservatism and ideological rigidity.
The correlation was zero. Statistically insignificant. There was absolutely no relationship between an individual’s involuntary physiological threat response, like how much they sweated or startled at a visceral threat, and their ideological rigidity.
Baker’s team ran the experiment in the United States and then they conducted a conceptual replication in the Netherlands just to ensure it wasn’t some American cultural artefact. The biological link completely evaporated under scrutiny.
What happened in the original study was that there was a remarkably small sample size, only 46 people. And when you analyse a sample, those small minor statistical anomalies can appear as massive trends.
Furthermore, measuring physiological baselines is notoriously difficult. Factors as simple as how much coffee a participant drank that morning can skew skin conductance.
Baker’s sample size was vastly larger, and their controls were exponentially tighter. Which makes it possible to conclude that threat sensitivity in the context of ideology is not a biological destiny. Your autonomic nervous system doesn’t dictate your voting record.
So, if the physiological machinery reacting to a physical threat is identical across the ideological spectrum, then the divergence has to happen higher up in the brain.
If not a threat sensitivity, then what?
We all know that the world is fundamentally and totally unpredictable. It’s messy, ambiguous, layered, and constantly shifting. And for a really significant portion of the population, that level of ambiguity doesn’t just register as confusing. It registers as a threat. It’s scary.
So when people adopt a highly rigid dogmatic belief system, they aren’t necessarily doing it because they’ve coldly reasoned their way to those specific policies. They’re highly motivated by this psychological imperative to just manage their own internal anxiety regarding uncertainty.
To visualise how this works, let’s just step away from politics for a second. Imagine you are dropped into the middle of a dense, totally unmapped jungle. And you have two options for survival.
Option A is you develop the internal capability to read the terrain. You learn what to eat and what not to by trial and error. You study the weather patterns. You learn which animals are friendly and which are not. That requires a massive amount of cognitive load, time and a really high tolerance for making mistakes – because a mistake in the jungle could be deadly.
Option B is that you just stumble upon this deeply worn, heavily paved path. You have literally no idea where the path actually leads, but it’s clear it has strict boundaries. And most importantly, someone else built it and it worked for them. I think the vast majority of people, when they’re faced with the terrifying ambiguity of that jungle, they’re going to take the paved path every single time. That is the essence of outsourcing your cognitive agency.
When the cultural or economic environment feels too threatening and an individual feels a deficit in their own internal capability to process that complexity, they outsource their security. They hand their cognitive agency over to rigid rules, to strong, definitive authorities, and to what researchers classify as a dyadic us-versus-them mentality.
Dyadic thinking is incredibly efficient from a cognitive standpoint, because it’s so simple. If you outsource your threat response to a dogma, your brain just no longer has to expend massive amounts of energy evaluating every single nuanced piece of new information. The overarching ideology just does all the sorting for you. It provides this massive immediate sense of safety.
Because the schemas used just neutralise the ambiguity of the unknown.
The tendency toward rigid ideology, therefore, is a threat response style. It is a cognitive strategy employed to manage the feeling of uncertainty in the complex social world. Faced with the same ambiguity, one person might lean on their own internal capacity to sift through the mess, while another might elect to outsource that cognitive burden to a rigid schema. And this is what I truly think happens in the political area of ideology.
The core antidote to dogmatism
So if outsourcing is the defence mechanism we use when we feel incapable of handling the unknown, what is the inverse?
What happens in the human brain when we actively want to engage with the unknown? The well-known curiosity. But not just passive curiosity. We have to look at how curiosity is inextricably linked to the psychological concept of agency.
Which brings me to the Metcalfe et al. study, which can shatter your preconceived notions about how learning actually works. The paper is delightfully titled, ‘wait, wait… don’t tell me’. And the Metcalfe paper takes direct aim at the longstanding reinforcement learning, or RL, model of curiosity.
For decades, behavioural psychology treated curiosity through a highly transactional lens. The RL model basically treats the human brain like a rat in a skinner box: push the lever, get the pellet.
Under the reinforcement learning paradigm, information is merely a reward, indistinguishable from food or money. So if you are curious about a fact, your brain is just in a state of deprivation and the answer to your question is the dopamine pellet that relieves that very deprivation.
A fundamental law of this model is temporal discounting, which is the psychological principle that a reward loses its perceived value the longer you have to wait for it. So if we apply the RL model to curiosity, if I am burning with curiosity about the answer to a riddle, I should want the answer instantly. Any delay should be incredibly frustrating. If you’re starving, you want the sandwich right now, not tomorrow, right? But our brains are not our bodies… Metcalfe’s experiment revealed that human curiosity is far more sophisticated than a rat pressing a lever for a pellet.
Let’s try a mini version of their experiment right now. Let me ask you this: What is the only letter in the English alphabet that does not appear in the name of any US state? Just take a second to think and look for the answer. Notice the sensation in your brain right now.
You’re likely mentally scanning the alphabet. You’re thinking of states with weird spellings. You might even feel a slight physical penchant. That feeling is what researchers call the ‘tip of the tongue’ state or the ‘region of proximal learning’. It’s that itch you can’t scratch.
Now, if I offered to just blurt out the answer right now, part of you might actually be annoyed. You now want to figure it out (so I’ll leave it unanswered). And that instinct is exactly what Metcalfe and the team quantified in the lab.
They brought participants in, presented them with complex trivia questions, and asked them to rate their level of curiosity for each one. Then they offered the participants a choice architecture. They could select ‘no’, which provided the answer instantly – the dopamine pellet.
They could select skip to bypass the question entirely. Or they could select ‘wait’, which forced them to sit through a programme time delay before the answer was finally revealed.
If the RL model were correct, every single highly curious person would smash the ‘no’ button to get their pellet. But they didn’t. The data showed that when participants rated themselves as highly curious, they overwhelmingly chose to wait. They voluntarily delayed the reward. The reinforcement learning model simply cannot account for this behaviour.
When participants experienced that tip-of-the-tongue state, their dopamine systems were indeed activating, but not in anticipation of a passive handout. The dopamine was fuelling an internal motivational drive to expend cognitive effort. They wanted to maintain cognitive ownership of the discovery.
But the study goes even deeper into this concept of ownership. Medcalf gave participants the option to ask for hints instead of the full answer. Again, if it’s just about relieving the deprivation of not knowing, a hint would be terribly inefficient here; it would not offer the relief. But the highly curious people actively requested the hints. They were utilising the hints as cognitive scaffolding. They recognised a gap in their current capability, but rather than outsourcing the entire problem to the researchers to just hand them the answer, they requested just enough raw material to build the bridge themselves.
And this is where agency and dogmatic outsourcing start to look like they are inversely correlated. When an individual cultivates internal agency, they actively reject the rigid paved path (i.e., the answer handed on a plate). They don’t want a dogmatic authority offering them a prepackaged schema. Because accepting the schema robs them of their cognitive autonomy.
But what if it works both directions? What if, if you increase a person’s sense of internal agency, it ignites this intrinsic curiosity? And can that internal shift actually change the way a person behaves in the real world when they’re confronted with complex information?
The mechanics of time and ambiguity.
According to Onraet et al., the outsourcing mind is driven by a psychological imperative known as the need for closure. It is an intense desire for a definitive answer to a question. Any definitive answer. Because the alternative is the agonising discomfort of confusion. So to achieve rapid closure, this cognitive style seeks out a single, highly authoritative source that aligns with their pre-existing biases, accepts the verdict, and just shuts down further inquiry. The threat of ambiguity is neutralised quickly. The immediate problem is solved, but the capacity to stay with the not knowing does not grow.
However, when an individual engages in agentic curiosity, they are essentially undertaking voluntary exposure therapy for ambiguity.
Intolerance of uncertainty is the root engine of rigid dogmatic thinking. But by deliberately seeking out multiple perspectives and holding conflicting pieces of information in your mind simultaneously without panicking, you build stamina. So every time you endure the discomfort of a complex issue without rushing to a premature, outsourced conclusion, you reinforce your ambivalence buffer, so when solving the next problem, you can spend more time in it. You aren’t refusing to make a decision. You are building the emotional regulation required to ensure your ultimate decision is informed by reality rather than dictated by fear.
That framing is very empowering, isn’t it. It frames critical thinking not merely as a function of raw intelligence but as a practice of emotional regulation. You are training your nervous system to sit in the murky waters of complexity without hitting the panic button. And what’s fascinating is that researchers have actually found a way to quantify this capacity with a Likert scale, so you can check yourself over time.
Let’s take a look at the intellectual curiosity scale, or the ICS, developed by Blumke and the team. The researchers wanted to know if this specific type of agentic intellectual curiosity exists universally. So they tested their scale across drastically different linguistic and cultural landscapes. The US, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, and Japan. And they managed to distil this massive psychological concept down to just six declarative items. It’s very elegant.
Let’s take a look at some of those from the language perspective:
- I like to get to the bottom of difficult things.
- I like to figure out how different ideas fit together.
- If I don’t understand something, I look for additional information to make it clear.
The linguistic structure of those items is the key here. Notice the active propulsive verbs: ‘get to the bottom’, ‘figure out’, ‘look for’. These aren’t statements about passively enjoying learning. They are declarations of cognitive agency. They represent a fundamental willingness to engage with friction. And a total rejection of outsourced closure.
The fact that these six items maintain their statistical validity and reliability across six entirely distinct cultures proves that this agentic drive is a foundational human capacity. We all possess the hardware to be curious. It’s just a matter of whether we choose to use it or let fear drive us toward the rigid path. That’s the choice.
The social lens zoom out
Human beings are inherently social creatures, even though each of us is an individual and on the individual level, our agency and ambiguity tolerance make the difference. On a macro scale, though, we organise into massive complex structures. We build democracies. So what happens when we scale these psychological mechanisms up to the level of an entire country?
To understand this, let’s integrate the philosophical frameworks of Marianne Papastephanou regarding curiosity and democracy alongside the sociological data from Pippa Noris on the mechanics of cancel culture. The unifying thesis here is that a functional resilient democracy requires the exact opposite of ideological outsourcing.
If you look at a totalitarian regime, it functions optimally when its citizens possess zero agency or the agency is limited to a specific predefined frame. The state provides the rigid schema.
The state strictly categorises who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. And the citizens are expected to accept the immediate closure provided by the ruling authority. It’s almost a vicious cycle where the very antidote to the idea that something is a threat, i.e., curiosity, becomes the threat itself and often ends up being punished by the regime.
But a democracy operates on a fundamentally different engine. Democracy thrives on what Papastephanou terms ‘uncomfortable curiosity’. It is a system built on the assumption that citizens possess the ambivalence buffer necessary to tolerate competing viewpoints. It requires a populace willing to expend the time and cognitive effort to understand the perspective of their neighbour, rather than forcefully organising society into artificial dogmatic binaries. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
If we look at the modern cultural landscape, though, it feels like that capacity for uncomfortable curiosity is seriously eroding. Which brings me directly to Pippa Noris’ research on cancel culture, specifically within academia. And Norris doesn’t just look at high-profile firings. She examines the insidious phenomenon of self-censorship.
To explain the mechanics of why intelligent people suddenly silence themselves, she resurrects a socio-psychological theory from the 1970s by Elizabeth Noel Neumann – the spiral of silence.
Noel Neumann developed the spiral of silence theory while observing the 1972 West German federal elections, where she noticed a bizarre phenomenon. The actual polling data between the two major political factions was dead even – 50/50. Yet one side suddenly appeared culturally dominant simply because their supporters were more willing to publicly wear political badges and voice their opinions. So she designed the famous train test experiment.
She asked subjects to imagine they were sitting in a train compartment for five hours with a stranger who was wearing a political button supporting a controversial view. Would they engage the stranger in debate or would they stay silent?
Her findings reveal that humans possess a quasi-statistical sense. We are constantly unconsciously scanning our social environment to gauge the prevalent moral climate and the main circulating point of view. If an individual calculates that their authentic views place them in the minority, they will suppress those views.
What is the actual mechanism driving the suppression? Fear of social isolation. And what is known from the modern neuroscience is that social isolation isn’t just an abstract fear. The human brain processes social rejection, utilising the exact same neural pathways that process physical pain. Being ostracised from your community literally hurts. So to avoid that pain, the dissenting individual stays silent. And here’s where the spiral takes effect.
As the minority group self-censors to avoid pain, the vocal majority appears exponentially more dominant and unanimous than the raw numbers suggest. This artificial illusion of absolute consensus makes the remaining silent individuals even more terrified to speak up. The dominant values basically suffocate any alternative thought. And Norris’s data applies this mechanism directly to what she terms heterodox scholars in modern universities. To the academics whose research or personal views deviate from the culturally dominant liberal orthodoxies prevalent on campuses.
Her work demonstrates that these heterodox scholars are drastically more likely to engage in self-censorship. The spiral of silence isn’t just a sociological quirk; it acts as a massive apparatus of epistemic restraint. It murders curiosity at a cultural level – the very curiosity we need to avoid dogmatism.
Consider the psychological mechanics described above. If a culture determines that asking a specific question is morally taboo – if enquiring about a certain topic threatens your livelihood, your reputation, or your social standing – you stop asking. Your agency is actively crushed by the social environment. And when citizens lose the agency to ask questions, what is their default psychological reaction? They regress instantly back to the baseline threat response, as the environment itself feels threatening.
If the open terrain of enquiry becomes socially lethal, they run right back to the paved path. They find a rigid, dogmatic faction that promises to protect them. They retreat into that bunker. And they adopt the group’s extreme schema because it is literally the only place they feel secure. That is the tragic irony of epistemic restraint. By attempting to enforce moral purity by silencing questions, a culture actually accelerates dogmatism. Or fuels other ways of thinking…
The conspiracy theories
Papastephanou examines ancient Greek philosophy. She points out that not all curiosity is inherently virtuous and not all restraint is inherently evil. She contrasts ‘polypragmosine’ with ‘opragmosine’.
‘Polypragmosine’ translates roughly to a kind of intrusive, meddling, almost colonial curiosity. In ancient Athens, it described a restless desire to involve oneself in other people’s affairs, to conquer and control under the guise of discovering truths. So it’s an aggressive extract of curiosity.
Against that, the Greeks valued a pragmosyne, which is the virtue of respectful restraint, minding one’s own business and allowing others their autonomy. So the Greeks understood that barging into someone’s life demanding answers isn’t intellectual bravery. It’s just obnoxious. The danger arises in modern democratic structures when dominant institutions or cultural elites weaponise these concepts to protect their own power.
Borrowing from Christophe Gallou’s sociological framework, consider a working-class demographic that begins asking persistent questions about the impacts of rapid economic globalisation or cultural shifts. These are rational enquiries based on lived friction.
But if the dominant cultural elite finds those questions inconvenient, they label the inquiry as ‘polypragmosine’. They brand the curiosity itself as reactionary, ignorant, or inherently prejudiced. They impose a forced epistemic restraint. They dictate from a position of authority. The questions become morally invalid.
And this brings me to quite a shift in how we view the modern political landscape. When you tell a massive segment of the population that they are forbidden from exercising their cognitive agency to understand their own economic or cultural anxiety, you alienate them from institutional transparency. And that alienation is the true birthplace of conspiracy theories.
Think about conspiracy theorising through the lens of everything written above. When official narratives become opaque or when institutions use moral taboos to silence legitimate public inquiry, the human need for agency does not simply evaporate. It mutates.
They still want the hint from the Metcalfe’s study. They still want to experience the satisfaction of building the truth themselves. But because the legitimate avenues of information are either locked down or hostile, they take their internal drive and go digging in the darkest, most unverified corners of the internet. It is a tragic realisation. Conspiracy theorising is not an absence of curiosity. It is a desperately warped manifestation of agentic curiosity.
Take a look back at the intellectual curiosity scale, item two. ‘I like to figure out how different ideas fit together.’ The conspiracy theorist is actively trying to connect the dots. But they are doing so in an environment starved of legitimate data, driven by the intense psychological threat of being silenced and marginalised. Conspiracy theories are the dark shadow cast by a society that has failed to tolerate uncomfortable curiosity. That completely upends the way we dismiss people we disagree with.
If you view someone who holds bizarre or extreme views simply as stupid or irrational, you respond with condescension. But if you view them through this framework as an individual desperately attempting to exercise their cognitive agency in a threat landscape where their ambivalence buffer has been totally overwhelmed, it demands a radically different response. It demands true empathy.
So, if a democratic society cannot stomach the awkward, the heterodox, or the uncomfortable question, it becomes a society rapidly losing its immune system. When we trade the messy, frustrating, time-consuming process of collective agency for the quiet, brittle order of an enforced dogmatic consensus, we also lose capacity to self-correct.
Let’s summarise it all
First thing to do is to radically redefine ideology. Rigid dogmatism is not an uncontrollable biological reflex, nor is it a purely philosophical menu option. It is a threat response style. When the world is complex, individuals who perceive a deficit in their own internal capabilities will outsource their security to strict schemas, trading their cognitive autonomy for the safety of ‘us versus them’ and other schematic certainty.
And the antidote to that outsourcing is the cultivation of internal agency. When we empower the human mind to seek out hints, when we encourage the friction of the region of proximal learning, rather than just dispensing instant dopamine, we ignite an intrinsic, resilient curiosity.
That agentic curiosity fundamentally alters our relationship with time and information. Rather than rushing to premature closure, the curious mind slows down. It actively engages with conflicting data, deliberately building an ambivalence buffer that allows it to process uncertainty without devolving into panic.
And finally, when we scale that individual ambivalence buffer up to the level of society, it forms the bedrock of a functioning democracy. To survive, a democratic culture must resist the suffocating gravity of the spiral of silence. It must embrace back the core of itself, i.e., the uncomfortable curiosity, and refuse to weaponise moral outrage as a tool of restraint.
So much for what others need to do, but the core of it lies truly here: ultimately, the utility of this entire framework rests with you. The psychological mechanics dissected here aren’t just abstract theories occurring in a vacuum. They are operating in your mind every time you open a news app or step into a voting booth. You hold an immense amount of autonomy over how you process the ambiguity of the world. In those micro-moments of uncertainty, you face a fundamental choice. You can succumb to the need for immediate closure and let a pre-packaged schema do your thinking for you. Or you can choose to pause.
You can actively request a hint, subject yourself to the discomfort of contradictory evidence, and exercise the agency to construct your own understanding. We all desire a map that perfectly charts the chaos. We all crave a definitive, jagged line that neatly separates the righteous from the wicked, the correct policy from the disaster. The paved path is incredibly seductive, because it promises that you never have to be confused again.
But I want to leave you with a final provocation to carry with you. The next time you feel that urgent visceral compulsion to categorise a group of people as irredeemable… The next time you find yourself desperate to adopt a simple binary explanation for a deeply layered global conflict… I want you to stop and interrogate your own internal machinery. Are you genuinely evaluating a concrete threat? Or are you simply overwhelmed by the complexity of the jungle and opting to outsource your agency to the loudest authority?
What would happen if, just for a moment, you refused the paved path? What if you deliberately stepped into the underbrush, embraced the terrifying, beautiful friction of ambivalence, and chose to be the author of your own curiosity?
Sources:
Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., Gothreau, C., & Arceneaux, K. (2020). Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(6), 613–621.
Bluemke, M., Engel, L., Grüning, D. J., & Lechner, C. M. (2024). Measuring intellectual curiosity across cultures: Validity and comparability of a new scale in six languages. Journal of Personality Assessment, 106(2), 156–173.
Metcalfe, J., Kennedy-Pyers, T., & Vuorre, M. (2021). Curiosity and the desire for agency: Wait, wait … don’t tell me! Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6(69).
Norris, P. (2023). Cancel culture: Heterodox self-censorship or the curious case of the dog-which-didn’t-bark (RWP23-020). Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series.
Onraet, E., Van Hiel, A., De Keersmaecker, J., & Fontaine, J. R. J. (2017). The relationship of trait emotional intelligence with right-wing attitudes and subtle racial prejudice. Personality and Individual Differences, 110, 27–30.
Onraet, E., Van Hiel, A., Dhont, K., Hodson, G., Schittekatte, M., & De Pauw, S. (2015). The association of cognitive ability with right-wing ideological attitudes and prejudice: A meta-analytic review. European Journal of Personality, 29, 599–621.
Papastephanou, M. (2023). Curiosity and democracy: A neglected connection. Philosophies, 8(4), 59.
Stankov, L. (2009). Conservatism and cognitive ability. Intelligence, 37, 294–304.