Bobby Azarian

How Trump and Biden's cognitive impairments are different — according to science

As the 2024 presidential election nears, two senior citizens are gearing up for mental marathons that will push them to their cognitive limits.

While both candidates have already earned nicknames for showing signs of mental decline, we must confront the uncomfortable question of whether either “dementia Donny” or “sleepy Joe” are fit for the job of commander-in-chief.

After all, with former President Donald Trump having just turned 78, and President Joe Biden at 81, they are the two oldest candidates to ever run for president, by far.

Were Trump to win and serve a full term, he’d be 82 years old on his final day in office — Jan. 20, 2029. In the same scenario, Biden would be 86 years old.

This question of whether either Biden or Trump are mentally up to the task of leading the free world deserves renewed interest after recent events, such as Biden’s fiery State of the Union speech, and a series of gaffes at Donald Trump rallies. The two men are scheduled to face off against each other on June 27 in a debate hosted by CNN.

And while more than a few articles have been written about the seeming cognitive decline of both candidates by well-known publications citing respectable sources, it is time to dig a little deeper, and inquire about what exact type of mental decline we are seeing in each, and to what degree.

Without medically valid, robust and transparent cognitive testing — neither Biden nor Trump have agreed to such a thing — it’s impossible to really know whether the signs of cognitive impairment we are witnessing in their public appearances are no cause for concern, or could actually have dangerous consequences due to their effects on decision making for a world leader of a superpower.

To answer these questions, we must rely on the next best thing: what experts are saying. This doesn’t mean talking heads on TV. Rather, where do professional psychologists and neuroscientists stand on the subject?

Let’s start with what we can safely say about both candidates, and that is that they are certainly experiencing cognitive decline. This is because it is natural and expected for any human who is in their 80s or nearing octogenarian status. In his article, “I’m a neuroscientist — our presidential candidates have shrinking prefrontal cortexes,” author Erik Hoel cites studies and data that shows it is clear that age-related cognitive decline typically starts in one’s 30s and essentially never stops.

At the beginning of this process of decline, it is basically impossible to see the signs without a series of specific memory tests and other mental examinations. But when you get up to the age range of our two presidential candidates, noticeable deficits such as verbal gaffes and obvious memory lapses become more frequent. While Hoel’s article does mention that there are what have been referred to as “super-agers” — individuals over 70 who show no signs of cognitive decline — it is safe to say through general observation over time that Biden and Trump don’t fall into that category.

The question of public interest: Are Biden and Trump experiencing standard cognitive decline, or are we seeing signs of dementia or some other troubling neurological disorder that would hinder a president’s ability to execute his duties? While cognitive decline is a natural part of aging, it is also a feature of dementia — a broad category of brain diseases that cause a long-term decrease in the ability to think and remember. Dementia can significantly impair a person's daily functioning.

According to Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychologist and author — and critic of Donald Trump — the ex-president’s recent gaffes show something beyond your typical age-related cognitive decline. In contrast, Gartner argued that Biden is experiencing typical age-related cognitive decline but nothing more.

Gartner doesn’t mince words when it comes to the difference between the two candidates: “Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”

Specifically, he cites Trump’s verbal behavior in his recent CPAC speech as being consistent with frontotemporal dementia with progressive aphasia. That means the physical integrity of the part of his brain associated with language is deteriorating in a way that leads to speech pathologies. What’s worse — this is not just an impairment with his ability to speak fluently and without slurs, but a sign of a deeper neurological impairment that is associated with general confusion.

Let’s review specific examples.

Gartner cites Trump’s frequent display of what is called a “phonemic paraphasia” — the substitution of a word with a nonword that preserves half of the intended word. Instead of “missiles” Trump might say “mishes,” and instead of “Christmas” Trump would similarly say “chrishis.” Essentially, Trump starts out with the correct stem of the word but is unable to complete it so he just garbles an ending. The Biden campaign has even attempted to score political points off Trump’s speech patterns, posting a video on X with the caption, “Trump slurs his words while ranting: In Mexico until [unintelligible].”

In his appearance on The David Pakman Show, Gartner tells Pakman that all of the experts he has talked to have said that nobody without brain damage commits these kinds of phonemic paraphasias.

As a neuroscientist myself, the question I’m mulling is whether Trump’s suspected brain damage is only in the area associated with speech production, known as Broca’s area, or also in the region associated with language comprehension, known as Wernicke’s area. The kind of paraphasia Trump is demonstrating, which does not involve a nonsensical pattern of words, is more likely to be a problem related to speech production, which is a less serious cognitive impairment.

The Trump-related gaffes that are much more concerning to me involve Trump confusing one person for another, in a way that is not just the result of a name slip, but an actual confusion of one person for another.

Trump’s former Republican rival Nikki Haley suggested Trump may be mentally unfit for holding office because — during a campaign speech in January — the former president seemed to repeatedly confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump accused Haley of turning down security for the U.S. Capitol offered by his administration on Jan. 6, 2021, and then destroying “all of the information, all of the evidence.”

This example is perplexing because Haley and Pelosi are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and have little in common other than being female politicians. Most notably, Haley had no official role whatsoever during the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

This isn’t the first time Trump has mixed up two women with whom he’s quite familiar.

In Trump’s deposition during his civil rape case last year, he identified the supposed victim E. Jean Carroll as his ex-wife, Marla Maples. While this made headlines, the video posted by the Wall Street Journal does not show the photo Trump was looking at, so it’s impossible to judge whether the photo was simply blurry and ambiguous, as Trump claims.

What appears more worrisome is Trump confusing Biden for former President Barack Obama over and over again in different speeches. According to New York Magazine, it has occurred on at least seven different occasions. On March 2 during a rally in Richmond, Va., Trump said “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word.”

This slip would be minor if it weren’t for the fact that Obama hasn’t been president for almost eight years. Back in September, during a speech at the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, D.C., Trump appeared to boast that he beat Obama in 2016 and will do it again.

What makes things worse is that Trump has tried to explain these confusions as sarcasm or comedy, rather than blaming it on mental fatigue or something a little more understandable. This gives the impression that he’s trying to cover up cognitive impairment that is starting to become severe enough that it can’t be hidden from the public.

The last recent gaffe worth mentioning is one where Trump’s brain appeared to flat out stop functioning. As can be seen in this video, starting around the 2:10 mark, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert capitalized on this moment, saying:

“Donald Trump had two rallies this weekend — one in Virginia and one in North Carolina — but the two speeches had one unifying theme: His brain is broke. Here he is in Greensboro talking about how the U.S. doesn’t need to import oil from petro states.”

The clip of Trump then rolls, and he says something like, “We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-pi-tu, ahhh.”

He appears to have a cognitive glitch mid-sentence. Colbert then remarks, “Not entirely sure what’s going on there, but apparently he can’t say the word Russia without climaxing.”

So, what can we conclude from all these examples of verbal slippages and downright confusion?

It is obvious to me that Trump is cognitively impaired in a way that is not typical for even people as old as he. Then again, most 78-year-old men aren’t speaking regularly on a national campaign trail. To fairly compare Trump’s mental decline to Biden’s, we would need to see footage of Biden speaking for similar periods of time under similar pressure. Of course, we will never get to see that — Biden does not speak publicly nearly as much as Trump — but the State of the Union address did give us reason to think that Biden isn’t quite as cognitively impaired as much of the nation expected.

Additionally, a House committee hearing earlier this year corrected some misinformation put forth by special counsel Robert Hur that suggested Biden had forgotten the year his son died, which was used by right-wing news to further the claim that the president is mentally compromised.

My conclusion is that both presidential candidates are showing signs of cognitive impairment that could potentially develop into dementia down the line. A recent study at Columbia University found that 35 percent of individuals over 90 have clinical dementia, so it is quite common for those who are lucky enough to live that long.

What is of interest is the differences in the type of cognitive impairment we are seeing with the two candidates. While Biden’s mental and behavioral changes are more typical of aging — a gradual slowing of mental acuity and physical dexterity — Trump’s abnormalities are more like cognitive malfunctions. That being said, Trump’s mental state and the consequences for his decision making are more unpredictable, while Biden’s just put a big question mark over whether he can continue to do his job.

Perhaps the best thing for Democrats is for Biden to gracefully step aside and let a younger politician — Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example — who is mentally healthy and prepared to battle a cognitively impaired Trump. That way, there are no charges of hypocrisy, and voters could be presented with a candidate whose mental fortitude is as solid and reliable as their policy proposals. Unfortunately for Democrats, I don’t believe any of these people have a chance of winning.

But barring an acute health crisis, Biden — who, along with Trump just clinched enough delegates to become their respective parties’ nominees — shows no signs whatsoever of backing down or stepping away, no matter his limitations.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Why Trump’s criminal trials will only strengthen his followers' support — according to science

As the United States witnesses the unprecedented criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump, it’s time to ponder how these events will affect the upcoming presidential election.

While some Americans might expect the negative publicity of the court cases to diminish Trump’s popularity, an analysis of the relevant psychological phenomena suggests that the proceedings could ultimately have the opposite effect. In fact, CNN recently reported that a new poll shows Trump ahead of President Joe Biden by 5 percent nationwide. The criminal trials against Trump — four separate ones that together feature 88 felony charges — might not only fail to deter his supporters but could potentially galvanize them by tapping into powerful and counterintuitive mental effects.

First, let’s just start with some common-sense reasoning. It is no secret that Donald Trump is not an ethical person. From being buddies with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, to the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape in which he bragged about groping women — “Grab ‘em by the pussy” being his precise words — Trump's behavior has long since been a subject of public scrutiny, and for good reason. The current Stormy Daniels hush money case and other matters are not likely to reveal anything particularly new or shocking to the public. The only way the cases are likely to hurt Trump with voters is by keeping him off the campaign trail. And of course, they’ll hurt his pockets.

But given how close the race between Trump and Biden is, we must consider the possibility that the sum total of these public trials will be to confirm Trump’s ongoing narrative: that he is an agent of change going up against a corrupt system that will do all they can to stop an outsider from gaining power.

Conspiracy theories about a “deep state” — a government made up of a secret network of power operating in pursuit of their own agenda — will be seemingly validated in the eyes of Trump supporters as the trials play out in the months before Election Day 2024.

As a result, this could trigger what is known as the "backfire effect," a psychological phenomenon that would undoubtedly bolster Trump’s support. This effect occurs when people are presented with information that directly contradicts their deeply held beliefs. Instead of updating their views to align with new evidence — in this case, that Trump may actually be a criminal who indeed committed illegal acts — people become even more entrenched in their original position. It's like a mental defense mechanism that kicks in to protect their worldview from the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance caused by conflicting information.

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Regarding Trump's legal troubles, his supporters may view the criminal charges as a direct attack on their belief in his innocence and integrity. They will perceive the prosecution as a politically motivated witch hunt orchestrated by Trump's enemies to bring him down, causing them to double down on their support for Trump.

Additionally, the shared experience of feeling under attack can create a powerful sense of unity and solidarity among Trump's supporters.

A fundamental aspect of human psychology is the tendency to form in-groups and out-groups. When Trump is prosecuted — or persecuted, as Trump argues — his supporters will perceive it as an attack on their group identity. These followers see themselves as part of a righteous movement fighting against a common enemy. This "us vs. them" mentality means that the criminal prosecution will increase hostility toward the perceived out-group, which in this case is the legal system, the Democrats, and Joe Biden.

Another psychological phenomenon that may come into play is the "underdog effect." People often root for the underdog in a competition. The same can apply to legal battles and elections. The criminal prosecution of an individual can create a perception of them as the underdog, leading to increased public support and sympathy.

In Trump's case, his supporters view him as a brave outsider fighting against a rigged system, no matter that he is a billionaire former president who lives in rarified luxury and owns his own private Boeing 757 jet. The “underdog effect” can further boost their loyalty and admiration for Trump. This will cause them to rally around their leader and intensify their commitment to his cause.

Furthermore, the criminal trials against Trump may tap into the powerful narrative of victimhood and persecution. The psychological concept known as “persecution complex” suggests that individuals who perceive themselves as victims may experience heightened feelings of loyalty and camaraderie toward their in-group. By portraying himself as a victim of politically motivated persecution, Trump can reinforce his supporters' sense of shared victimhood and strengthen their resolve to stand by him.

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It's important to note that these psychological effects are not limited to Trump's most loyal supporters. Even those who were previously on the fence or not planning to actively campaign for him may be swayed by the perception that he is being unfairly targeted. The criminal trials may serve as a rallying cry, mobilizing these individuals to become more vocal and engaged in their support for Trump.

For these reasons, as the legal proceedings unfold and the 2024 presidential election approaches, it is crucial for Democrats to carefully consider the unintended consequences of Trump’s criminal prosecutions, which follow civil court judgements that have already held Trump liable for business fraud, defamation and sexual abuse. (Trump maintains he’s innocent.) While holding Trump accountable for any alleged wrongdoing is undoubtedly important, the timing and nature of these prosecutions could inadvertently energize the campaign they seek to cripple.

Democrats must be prepared to counter the psychological effects that will very likely bolster Trump's support. This could involve developing compelling counter-narratives that resonate with voters, highlighting the importance of the rule of law and emphasizing the need for accountability regardless of political position. It will be essential to strike a delicate balance between pursuing justice and minimizing the risk of these unintended psychological consequences.

Ultimately, the Democrats may find themselves in a catch-22: either they allow Trump to evade accountability for his alleged crimes, or they risk unleashing a cascade of psychological effects that could propel him back into the White House. In this high-stakes game of political chess, the unintended consequences of their next move could determine the fate of the nation for years to come.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

How Trump and Biden's cognitive impairments are different — according to science

As the 2024 presidential election nears, two senior citizens are gearing up for mental marathons that will push them to their cognitive limits.

While both candidates have already earned nicknames for showing signs of mental decline, we must confront the uncomfortable question of whether either “dementia Donny” or “sleepy Joe” are fit for the job of commander-in-chief.

After all, with former President Donald Trump at 77 and President Joe Biden at 81, they are the two oldest candidates to ever run for president, by far.

Were Trump to win and serve a full term, he’d be 82 years old on his final day in office — Jan. 20, 2029. In the same scenario, Biden would be 86 years old.

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This question of whether either Biden or Trump are mentally up to the task of leading the free world deserves renewed interest after recent events, such as Biden’s fiery State of the Union speech, and a series of gaffes at Donald Trump rallies.

And while more than a few articles have been written about the seeming cognitive decline of both candidates by well-known publications citing respectable sources, it is time to dig a little deeper, and inquire about what exact type of mental decline we are seeing in each, and to what degree.

Without medically valid, robust and transparent cognitive testing — neither Biden nor Trump have agreed to such a thing — it’s impossible to really know whether the signs of cognitive impairment we are witnessing in their public appearances are no cause for concern, or could actually have dangerous consequences due to their effects on decision making for a world leader of a superpower.

To answer these questions, we must rely on the next best thing: what experts are saying. This doesn’t mean talking heads on TV. Rather, where do professional psychologists and neuroscientists stand on the subject?

Let’s start with what we can safely say about both candidates, and that is that they are certainly experiencing cognitive decline. This is because it is natural and expected for any human who is in their 80s or nearing octogenarian status. In his article, “I’m a neuroscientist — our presidential candidates have shrinking prefrontal cortexes,” author Erik Hoel cites studies and data that shows it is clear that age-related cognitive decline typically starts in one’s 30s and essentially never stops.

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At the beginning of this process of decline, it is basically impossible to see the signs without a series of specific memory tests and other mental examinations. But when you get up to the age range of our two presidential candidates, noticeable deficits such as verbal gaffes and obvious memory lapses become more frequent. While Hoel’s article does mention that there are what have been referred to as “super-agers” — individuals over 70 who show no signs of cognitive decline — it is safe to say through general observation over time that Biden and Trump don’t fall into that category.

The question of public interest: Are Biden and Trump experiencing standard cognitive decline, or are we seeing signs of dementia or some other troubling neurological disorder that would hinder a president’s ability to execute his duties? While cognitive decline is a natural part of aging, it is also a feature of dementia — a broad category of brain diseases that cause a long-term decrease in the ability to think and remember. Dementia can significantly impair a person's daily functioning.

According to Dr. John Gartner, a prominent psychologist and author — and critic of Donald Trump — the ex-president’s recent gaffes show something beyond your typical age-related cognitive decline. In contrast, Gartner argued that Biden is experiencing typical age-related cognitive decline but nothing more.

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Gartner doesn’t mince words when it comes to the difference between the two candidates: “Biden’s brain is aging. Trump’s brain is dementing.”

Specifically, he cites Trump’s verbal behavior in his recent CPAC speech as being consistent with frontotemporal dementia with progressive aphasia. That means the physical integrity of the part of his brain associated with language is deteriorating in a way that leads to speech pathologies. What’s worse — this is not just an impairment with his ability to speak fluently and without slurs, but a sign of a deeper neurological impairment that is associated with general confusion.

Let’s review specific examples.

Gartner cites Trump’s frequent display of what is called a “phonemic paraphasia” — the substitution of a word with a nonword that preserves half of the intended word. Instead of “missiles” Trump might say “mishes,” and instead of “Christmas” Trump would similarly say “chrishis.” Essentially, Trump starts out with the correct stem of the word but is unable to complete it so he just garbles an ending. The Biden campaign has even attempted to score political points off Trump’s speech patterns, posting a video on X with the caption, “Trump slurs his words while ranting: In Mexico until [unintelligible].”

In his appearance on The David Pakman Show, Gartner tells Pakman that all of the experts he has talked to have said that nobody without brain damage commits these kinds of phonemic paraphasias.

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As a neuroscientist myself, the question I’m mulling is whether Trump’s suspected brain damage is only in the area associated with speech production, known as Broca’s area, or also in the region associated with language comprehension, known as Wernicke’s area. The kind of paraphasia Trump is demonstrating, which does not involve a nonsensical pattern of words, is more likely to be a problem related to speech production, which is a less serious cognitive impairment.

The Trump-related gaffes that are much more concerning to me involve Trump confusing one person for another, in a way that is not just the result of a name slip, but an actual confusion of one person for another.

Trump’s Republican rival Nikki Haley suggested Trump may be mentally unfit for holding office because — during a campaign speech in January — the former president seemed to repeatedly confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump accused Haley of turning down security for the U.S. Capitol offered by his administration on Jan. 6, 2021, and then destroying “all of the information, all of the evidence.”

This example is perplexing because Haley and Pelosi are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and have little in common other than being female politicians. Most notably, Haley had no official role whatsoever during the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

This isn’t the first time Trump has mixed up two women with whom he’s quite familiar. In Trump’s deposition during his civil rape case last year, he identified the supposed victim E. Jean Carroll as his ex-wife, Marla Maples. While this made headlines, the video posted by the Wall Street Journal does not show the photo Trump was looking at, so it’s impossible to judge whether the photo was simply blurry and ambiguous, as Trump claims.

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What appears more worrisome is Trump confusing Biden for former President Barack Obama over and over again in different speeches. According to New York Magazine, it has occurred on at least seven different occasions. This month, on March 2 during a rally in Richmond, Va., Trump said “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word.”

This slip would be minor if it weren’t for the fact that Obama hasn’t been president for almost eight years. Back in September, during a speech at the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, D.C., Trump appeared to boast that he beat Obama in 2016 and will do it again. What makes things worse is that Trump has tried to explain these confusions as sarcasm or comedy, rather than blaming it on mental fatigue or something a little more understandable. This gives the impression that he’s trying to cover up cognitive impairment that is starting to become severe enough that it can’t be hidden from the public.

The last recent gaffe worth mentioning is one where Trump’s brain appeared to flat out stop functioning. As can be seen in this video, starting around the 2:10 mark, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert capitalized on this moment, saying:

“Donald Trump had two rallies this weekend — one in Virginia and one in North Carolina — but the two speeches had one unifying theme: His brain is broke. Here he is in Greensboro talking about how the U.S. doesn’t need to import oil from petro states.”

The clip of Trump then rolls, and he says something like, “We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-pi-tu, ahhh.”

He appears to have a cognitive glitch mid-sentence. Colbert then remarks, “Not entirely sure what’s going on there, but apparently he can’t say the word Russia without climaxing.”

So, what can we conclude from all these examples of verbal slippages and downright confusion?

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It is obvious to me that Trump is cognitively impaired in a way that is not typical for even people as old as him. Then again, most 77-year-olds — Trump turns 78 this spring — aren’t speaking regularly on a national campaign trail. To fairly compare Trump’s mental decline to Biden’s, we would need to see footage of Biden speaking for similar periods of time under similar pressure. Of course, we will never get to see that — Biden does not speak publicly nearly as much as Trump — but the State of the Union address did give us reason to think that Biden isn’t quite as cognitively impaired as much of the nation expected.

Additionally, a House committee hearing on Tuesday corrected some misinformation put forth by special counsel Robert Hur that suggested Biden had forgotten the year his son died, which was used by right-wing news to further the claim that the president is mentally compromised.

My conclusion is that both presidential candidates are showing signs of cognitive impairment that could potentially develop into dementia down the line. A recent study at Columbia University found that 35 percent of individuals over 90 have clinical dementia, so it is quite common for those who are lucky enough to live that long.

What is of interest is the differences in the type of cognitive impairment we are seeing with the two candidates. While Biden’s mental and behavioral changes are more typical of aging — a gradual slowing of mental acuity and physical dexterity — Trump’s abnormalities are more like cognitive malfunctions. That being said, Trump’s mental state and the consequences for his decision making are more unpredictable, while Biden’s just put a big question mark over whether he can continue to do his job.

Perhaps the best thing for Democrats is for Biden to gracefully step aside and let a younger politician — Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example — who is mentally healthy and prepared to battle a cognitively-impaired Trump. That way, there are no charges of hypocrisy, and voters could be presented with a candidate whose mental fortitude is as solid and reliable as their policy proposals. Unfortunately for Democrats, I don’t believe any of these people have a chance of winning.

But barring an acute health crisis, Biden — who along with Trump just clinched enough delegates to become their respective parties’ nominees — shows no signs whatsoever of backing down or stepping away, no matter his limitations.

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Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains how Taylor Swift hijacks your brain and what it means for Trump

If you’re reading this, it is likely that Taylor Swift has hijacked your brain.

Don’t worry — you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans have also recently had their cognitive system invaded by the same mental contagion. If you enjoy her music, this might be a pleasurable infection. If her tunes grate on your nerves, the constant activation of your Taylor Swift neurons could be a curse.

But your personal pleasure or suffering is not the only reason we should be interested in Taylor Swift’s global influence. Why? Because whether we realize it, her influence will likely play a significant role in the 2024 presidential election. America’s sweetheart, who is dating one of the biggest stars of football — a sport that commands the unwavering devotion of red America — will likely be supporting Democratic President Joe Biden rather than Republican Donald Trump.

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This undoubtedly has Trump sweating. Hours before the kickoff of Super Bowl LVIII, the former posted a message on his social media platform Truth Social, taking credit for a bill that he claims made Swift so much money and should cause her to be indebted to him. Trump also predicted there’s “no way” Swift “could endorse Crooked Joe Biden.”

Trump’s desperate plea makes it clear that Swift’s decision of who to endorse is a big deal. If Election 2024 is close, as expected, the Swifties of the United States could theoretically tip the scales.

The key to understanding Swift’s growing influence, from a scientific view, is understanding how she has become a meme, and one of unparalleled viral power.

In a world saturated with social media content and trends, the term "meme" has slipped into common vernacular, often evoking silly or clever images that have gone viral. But the original concept of a meme, as proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is a well-known scientific framework for understanding cultural phenomena, including the meteoric rise of Taylor Swift. Dawkins introduced the term in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, not to explain digital trends per se, but to describe a unit of cultural transmission.

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A meme, in its original conception, is an idea, behavior, trend or philosophy that spreads from person to person within a culture. It is the cultural counterpart to the biological gene, often defined as a replicator of cultural information. Memetics, the mental counterpart to genetics, is the academic field that studies how memes propagate, evolve and affect societies.

Cultural transmission refers to the way in which information is passed along within a community, not through genetic inheritance but through communication and imitation. Every time a Taylor Swift song gets played on the radio, an Instagram reel, or sung by someone on the subway, the Swift meme is being propagated through our society.

Virality is a meme's ability to spread rapidly and widely from one individual to another, often through the internet. Adaptation, in memetics, involves a meme's change over time to fit its cultural environment better, enhancing its survival and propagation. Every time Swift’s cultural relevance begins to wane, she reinvents herself to adapt to a changing culture — and you can be sure her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce was another way to do just that. This doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t genuine. It simply means that Swift’s decisions about her love life and her career cannot be disentangled from her role as a vehicle for cultural trends.

Lastly, social contagion is the phenomenon by which ideas and behaviors are transmitted through social networks, echoing the way diseases spread. Swift's ascent to stardom can be likened to the spread of a mental virus, an idea that found fertile ground in the hearts and minds of millions, then spreads and replicates easily.

The Swift meme thrives because it taps into universal themes — love, heartache, growth, resilience — while also embodying the specific zeitgeist of our times. For Swifties, it offers a mirror in which they see their own struggles and triumphs reflected. In this reflection, they find connection, and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. This is the essence of social contagion and why certain memes, like Swift's songs and persona, become embedded in the collective psyche.

Recently, though, the Swift meme has transcended Swifties and pierced the collective consciousness of America more generally, as can be seen by this data from Google trends that plots the popularity of her name since 2004. Notice the exponential growth that has occurred in just the last few months as she criss-crossed the world on her Eras Tour and cheered boyfriend Kelce during his months-long run to victory earlier this month in Super Bowl LVIII.

In the two weeks since the Super Bowl, a flurry of over-the-top articles have been published that demonstrate the shocking virulence of the Swift meme. In an article that appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine, an esteemed professor of literature argued that Taylor Swift should be taught alongside Shakespeare. The professor went as far as to say that attending a Swift concert had been “one of the best nights of [his] life.”

A New Yorker article called “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison” was also recently published, with teaser text that says, “Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.” What is interesting is not just the stories of grown men who have caught the Swift bug, but the media outlets that are all publishing Swift stories, which have been virtually all of them.

Of course, the article you are reading is also part of this phenomenon. I, too, have become a Swiftie, after falling in love with her most recent studio album in 2022, Midnights, which is far more mature than any of her previous releases both musically and lyrically. Though despite the fact that I’ve listened to it maybe 100 times, I still think teaching it alongside the Bard is pretty insane. That means the social contagion has only hijacked a limited region of my neural machinery. You can protect yourself against the Swift meme by simply avoiding her albums and any content about her.

But this is easier said than done.

And that brings us back to the 2024 election.

A legitimately big question for the future of the nation is, will Swift, the 2023 TIME Person of the Year, publicly endorse Biden, and if so, how much of her memetic influence will she use to see that her candidate wins? It is this question that our scientific analysis can help answer.

Since we’ve determined that her career and personal decisions are intimately intertwined, it is almost certain that she won’t endorse Trump, despite her popularity with red America and a viral video — it was a complete fabrication — of Swift supposedly holding a flag reading “Trump Won.” During the 2020 campaign, Swift was publicly critical of Trump and advocated that Americans vote him out of office.

At this point, she literally can’t without losing all her media support and becoming enemy number one of the left.

The articles from websites such as The New Yorker are memetic influences that effectively trap Taylor Swift in a blue bubble and ensure that she doesn’t flip on the powers that catalyzed her stardom.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Swift will publicly back Biden this year, even if she did in 2020. Biden's team, of course, is actively dreaming of the day Swift does.

It’ll be interesting to see just how political she dares to get as the election approaches. The safest route for the continued spread of the Swift meme is for her to lay low and not rock the political boat much. That’s the prediction that memetics makes, and this Swiftie is pretty confident that we can trust the science.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Scientist explains why Trump's supporters won't believe any evidence

When delving into the perplexing world of politics and the enigmatic figure of Donald Trump, we often encounter a peculiar phenomenon amongst his supporters: a staunch refusal to accept any criminal allegation or felony charge against him, no matter how compelling the evidence.

There are many neurological and psychological reasons for this irrational behavior. But today, we will focus on the mental phenomena I feel are most urgent to explore ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

First, a disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist — I am a cognitive neuroscientist with a research focus in clinical psychology (in particular, anxiety’s effect on attention). In fact, much of my published work has appeared in psychology journals. As a science journalist, I have been covering the psychology of Trump and his supporters since he emerged on the political scene in 2015.

Now that Trump is running for president again while facing 91 felony charges, I feel a moral responsibility to illuminate all the mental factors that are driving Americans to support a man who is a master manipulator, and incapable of telling the truth. Unfortunately, these are qualities that are too common among presidential candidates, but Trump is a particularly egregious example, and therefore we must be vigilant. This article is meant to inform but also to warn voters of what is to come.

Cognitive challenge of disbelief

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems.

Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world.

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What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?")

Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play

Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health.

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For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs.

Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions.

In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains.

Imagine these neural pathways as trails in a forest. The more one traverses the path of unquestioning belief, the clearer and more entrenched it becomes. The path of skepticism, however, grows over with doubts and becomes difficult to navigate. This cognitive reshaping primes individuals to accept, and even defend, far-fetched statements and suggestions presented by manipulative politicians.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

This cognitive bias occurs when individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their capability. Translated to the context of understanding complex legal matters, some Trumpists might believe they have a superior grasp of the former president’s predicament and dismiss expert opinions, thinking they're immune to being misled.

The Dunning-Kruger effect becomes especially concerning in the context of polarizing issues, such as climate change. A research study from the University of New Hampshire in 2017, for example, revealed that a mere 25 percent of those identifying as Trump supporters acknowledged the role of human actions in climate change. This is in stark contrast to the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists on the issue.

This troublesome cognitive bias could be making it easier for Trump to deliver unchallenged falsehoods to his more uneducated followers. In some cases, not only are these individuals uninformed, they are unlikely to seek new information on their own. In their minds, they have nothing to learn because Trump and his acolytes have already told them what they need to know.

Reevaluating our cognitive reflexes

It is important to state that these phenomena are not exclusive to Trump supporters or any particular political group; this article serves as a broader reflection on the cognitive shortcuts that our brains favor.

If we aspire to build a society less susceptible to misinformation, we must embark on a paradigm shift. Our educational approach should pivot from passive acceptance of supposed “facts” to the exhilarating pursuit of questioning authority and healthy skepticism (as too much skepticism can also lead to irrational thinking). Recognizing that belief, in many ways, is the brain's default mode rather than a conscious choice, can serve as the first step in this cerebral revolution.

In conclusion, the unwavering belief in Trump, despite the felony charges against him, is not solely a political matter but, for some, a manifestation of our brain's intrinsic tendencies. Understanding this cognitive dynamic is pivotal in addressing the challenges posed by misinformation and fostering a more critical and discerning society.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

Your guide to surviving the holidays with Trump-loving relatives — according to science

As the holiday season approaches, family gatherings are set to transform homes into microcosms of the national political landscape. In these reunions, conversations can quickly turn from benign banter about sports to the divisive topic of politics. With an election cycle upon us the name “Trump” can be as contentious as it is inescapable, turning a festive gathering of lights and eggnog into an ideological battleground.

This is the challenge many of us face this Christmas: How do we, armed with our morals and convictions, navigate the treacherous terrain of political discourse with those we love — without the feast turning into a fracas?

If you are a lone liberal leaf in a staunchly conservative family tree, you may be dreading the holiday. If you are not alone, and the family is more-or-less divided on political topics, it can be even worse — all holy hell can break loose. It is not an exaggeration to say that families can be — and sometimes are — torn apart in the highly polarized political climate we find ourselves in.

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The solution to this problem lies in developing strategies based on an understanding of neuroscience and psychology that can calm the storm within, ensuring that our physiological responses do not commandeer our interactions.

But what if I told you that an understanding of the relevant concepts holds the key to not just surviving these encounters, but potentially bridging family divides? The goal isn't to convert but to converse, and to plant seeds of thought that might, in time, bear fruit.

Let this article serve as a guide to navigating political discussions with grace and the subtle powers of persuasion.

The first thing we need to know is that two distinct yet interdependent cognitive systems govern our decision-making processes.

System 1, the intuitive and automatic pilot, reacts without conscious deliberation, guided by emotions and entrenched biases. It’s the system that flares up at the mention of Trump, fueling heated debates with reactionary zeal.

Supporters wait in line outside of the the Kellogg Arena to see U.S. President Donald Trump speak at his "Merry Christmas" rally being held at the Kellogg Arena on December 18, 2019 in Battle Creek, Mich. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Contrast this with System 2, the reflective and analytical mind, which involves active engagement with conscious reasoning and rational thought, akin to a chess player contemplating the board. It’s this system that allows for nuanced discussion, helping you dissect the layers of Trump's policies and rhetoric without devolving into tribalistic fervor.

By learning how to stay in a System 2 state of mind, and how to induce the same state in our conversation partners, we equip ourselves with a powerful tool for fostering more constructive dialogues.

Now, let’s imagine a generic Christmas family gathering. This will help you prepare to turn a contentious situation into a constructive conversation.

The turkey is carved, the casserole is cooked and the spiked eggnog is being poured around the table as the annual ritual of family gathering unfolds.

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Yet, beneath the festive veneer, a familiar tension simmers, threatening to boil over as Uncle Bob, with a glint in his eye, extols the virtues of Donald Trump. As your patience wears thin, the conversation turns darker and angrier, until everyone at the table who is not a Trump supporter feels uneasy. You love Uncle Bob, and he loves you, but the burly conservative has been liberal with the whiskey and you can predict where the conversation is headed, if someone doesn’t do something to shift gears.

Before you can figure out how to do that, something is said that triggers you. Your body reacts instinctively, preparing itself for what it perceives as a threat. This is politics engaging our stress response. Our autonomic nervous system, the conductor of our body's stress orchestra, readies its instruments. The heart rate accelerates. Muscles tense. Breaths become fast and shallow. It's the famous “fight or flight” response, a survival mechanism that served our ancestors well when faced with physical danger.

But at a family dinner, it doesn't have any adaptive function.

These are the physiological consequences of the activation of the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of neurons in the brain's temporal lobe that functions as a "threat detector." When exposed to stimuli perceived as threats — be it an angry expression or a disparaging remark — the amygdala rapidly processes this information and ushers us into a defensive mode, marked by heightened tribalism and strict adherence to familiar worldviews.

The activation of the amygdala can instantly shift someone’s cognitive operating mode from System 2 to System 1. When this happens, it can be very hard for System 2 to get back in the driver’s seat. This reaction has been called "amygdala hijack,” capturing the essence of how our brain’s response to threat can momentarily commandeer our behavioral control.

If you get pulled into this confrontational mode and it is detected by your conversation partner, it will likely trigger the same mode in them. When this happens, both sides will start perceiving any attempts to be persuaded as an attack on their worldview. Once this happens, a polarization cycle emerges — a process in which individuals or groups with conflicting ideologies move progressively further apart in their beliefs and attitudes as a result of interacting.

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This cycle is self-reinforcing, with each instance of disagreement widening the divide: one party adopts a more extreme stance, then the opposing party responds by also adopting a more extreme stance, until both sides have doubled-down to the point that they are in complete opposition.

We must avoid polarization cycles whenever possible. This means we must escape amygdala hijack, and get back into a reflective rather than a reactive mindset.

So how do we activate System 2 in ourselves and others?

The first strategy is self-awareness. Practicing mindfulness can serve as a calming prelude to political discussions, grounding us and engaging the cognitive processes of System 2. This entails becoming conscious of the need to be mentally resilient to potential triggers. Like a captain who knows the sea, understand your emotional currents, and take steps to stay in control. For example, be aware of your emotional state, and as anger or frustration emerges, allow the feelings to pass rather than letting them control you.

In addition, simply becoming aware of your breathing to ensure it is deep and sufficiently slow can help regulate your body's stress response, bringing you back to a state of calm. Imagine each breath as a gust of wind, filling the sails of your composure and propelling you forward with intention and mental clarity. It's a technique that can be quietly employed, even mid-conversation, to maintain your equilibrium.

A hat tops off a Christmas tree at a "Merry Christmas" rally hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump at the Kellogg Arena on December 18, 2019 in Battle Creek, Mich. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

If the conversation does escalate, don't be afraid to take a break — just excuse yourself and step away. Use this time to regroup and calm your nervous system. When you return, you'll be better equipped to navigate the dialogue with poise.

Now that you know how to preemptively self-regulate, let’s focus on your interaction with your ideologically-dissimilar family member.

When you do reengage in the discussion, practice “active listening.” This involves focused attention and conscious processing of what the other person is saying, rather than mentally preparing your counterargument.) Repeat back what they've said, in a subtly different form, if possible, to show them you are paying full attention. This doesn't signify agreement; it simply shows that you’re open to learning new things and that you’re deeply considering their points. Use this opportunity to really understand why that person has that perspective as a result of their worldview, knowledge base and lived experience.

Remember that beneath every opinion lies a complex interplay of beliefs, biases and emotions. Understanding how these factors determine each individual’s unique point of view will give you a more accurate mental model of that person, which will help you see opportunities for alignment.

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This is practicing what is known as “cognitive empathy.” This type of empathy invites us to step into the shoes of another, to understand their web of beliefs and emotional landscape. Practicing cognitive empathy can turn a fiery debate into a constructive dialogue, enabling us to appreciate the reasons behind a family member's support for Trump, even if we don’t agree.

The practice of cognitive empathy is important, but equally important is the act of sharing your perspectives when they can help steer our collective future toward greater good. However, doing so can very easily trigger amygdala hijack and a polarization cycle. If each impassioned plea for reason seems to ricochet off an invisible ideological shield, then you can assume your conversation partner is locked in a System 1 state of mind, and you must engineer a System 2 state if you want to get through to them or, at least, emerge from the conversation relatively unscathed.

Our words have great influence when used strategically, with the power to either bridge divides or widen them. Careful selection of language can pivot a disagreement from adversarial to collaborative. Effective persuasion leverages the subtleties of language, the psychology of the audience, and narrative.

Consider a scenario where two people are engaged in a discussion that turns into a debate and one of them feels compelled to point out a flaw in another's understanding.

A direct approach might be to say, “What you don’t understand is… (e.g., the issue is more complex than you realize).” Such framing, especially with the use of "you," can inadvertently feel confrontational, suggesting a challenge to the listener's intelligence or worldview.

A more psychologically sensitive approach could be to shift from the individual-specific "you" to the more inclusive "people" or "we."

For instance, “What many people might not see is…” or “What we often overlook is...” Instead of insinuating a personal deficiency or oversight, it proposes a broader human tendency. Framing things this way positions the perspective not as a critique but as a shared revelation. It hints at a collective journey of discovery, inviting collaboration and co-creation.

By transforming the narrative in this way, you are no longer the ideological enemy, but a friend wanting to show them something interesting that enlightened your perspective, which used to be something like theirs in the past. Such linguistic choices, subtle yet affecting, can pave the way for resolution.

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Highlight areas of agreement, no matter how small. This creates a foundation from which you can both build. When Uncle Bob goes on about Hunter Biden and how he’s a criminal, acknowledge the truth of those statements. This will make them far more likely to concede to truths about Trump’s corruption.

Using open-ended questions that don't have a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer can help move someone into a more contemplative state. For instance, "What led you to that conclusion?" invites reflection and dialogue and fosters a System 2 state.

Lastly, know when to let go. Not every conversation needs to reach the shore of agreement. Sometimes, it's enough to sail alongside each other, even if your destinations differ. Accept that some political discussions, like oceans, are vast and deep, and it's okay to navigate them without seeking conquest.

Incorporating these strategies into your holiday interactions can help transform political discourse from a source of stress to an opportunity for growth. As you sit around the table this holiday season, remember that beneath the cacophony of clashing opinions lies the quiet hum of your shared humanity. With the right approach, discussing politics with your family, even about figures as divisive as Trump, can be a journey of connection rather than a voyage into the eye of the storm.

After all, isn't the holiday spirit about coming together? What could be better than the warmth of shared laughter, the rich tapestry of family history and the nuanced dance of a conversation that's both kind, candid and constructive.

After all, this is the season of miracles.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

How Donald Trump exploits the minds of conspiracy theorists — according to science

According to recent 2024 presidential polls, Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden, meaning the former president could indeed become the president of the United States once again.

If that thought terrifies you, you are not alone. So, the question is, what can we do to stop the nation from racing toward an authoritarian regime ruled by a pathological narcissist? If we can understand the psychological factors underlying Trump’s enduring appeal, then we may be able to see a way to exploit that scientific knowledge.

Doing so is more than an academic exercise — the future of our nation may depend on it.

While the left often focuses on Trump’s right wing stances and xenophobic rhetoric, one of the main reasons he remains popular is that he is perceived to be the anti-establishment candidate. This phenomenon is a facet of a broader populist wave that has been gaining momentum worldwide — one that is not exclusive to any single nation or political ideology. In the United States, both Trump and left-wing figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders have tapped into a deep-seated frustration with what is perceived as a self-serving system composed of powerful corporations and politicians.

It is within this backdrop of disillusionment that fertile ground for conspiracy theories and authoritarian fantasies has emerged. The knowledge of corruption breeds speculation, giving rise to movements such as QAnon as manifestations of this anti-establishment sentiment.

The question then arises: What draws individuals toward this nexus of anti-establishment fervor and conspiratorial thinking? This article seeks to unravel this enigma through the lens of cognitive neuroscience. We will explore how our brains process the complexities of corruption and conspiracy, and why, in a time of uncertainty, the allure of political fiction and imagined enemies becomes increasingly potent.

The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis, the current leading neuroscientific theory of how the brain works, provides a compelling framework for this exploration, especially in the context of political discourse and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.

This hypothesis proposes that the human brain operates much like a scientist in a laboratory: it is a prediction machine that continuously generates, tests and updates theories about the world. These theories are part of a “world model” constructed by the mind – a rich, internal representation of reality, formed by a lifetime of learning. This model informs our understanding of how things are and predicts how they will be. It is a dynamic construct, continuously refined by the influx of new data coming in from the senses, much like a scientist revising a theory in light of new experimental data.

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The process is “Bayesian” — named for English mathematician Thomas Bayes — meaning it is statistical at its heart. Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference that uses a mathematical formula, known as Bayes' theorem, to update the probability that a theory is true as more evidence or information becomes available. Neuroscientists now believe that the brain uses a very basic form of this general statistical method to calculate the likelihood of different possible outcomes. This allows the brain to make educated guesses about the future based on past experiences. The brain assesses the probability of an event by taking into account the prior evidence (what we know) and the new evidence (the incoming information).

When new information aligns with the brain's predictions, it reinforces the current “world model,” increasing a person’s confidence in their beliefs.

However, when incoming data contradicts the model's predictions, the brain experiences a mismatch, known as prediction error. It is at this juncture that cognitive dissonance arises – the mental discomfort experienced when holding two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values.

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When this happens, the brain has a choice: either revise one’s world model to accommodate the new information (thereby reducing the prediction error), or increase the model's resistance to change by discounting or ignoring the contradictory data.

This Bayesian Brain framework is particularly illuminating when considering the allure and persistence of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories often arise in the context of events or information that starkly contradict a person's established narrative or world model.

When individuals encounter such anomalies, their brains are compelled to reduce the resulting prediction error either by assimilating the new facts (which may involve elaborate rationalizations) or by adopting a new model that accounts for these facts (which may involve turning to conspiracy theories).

If the existing, accepted narrative – be it from media, authorities or common wisdom – is perceived as unreliable or deceptive, the brain may lean towards alternative explanations to restore coherence to its worldview, even if those explanations previously seemed implausible. These alternative theories may take the form of conspiracy theories — veritable fuel for Trump’s political ambitions — especially if it offers an easy explanation of a perceived deception and aligns with one's underlying suspicions or mistrust of the establishment.

Take, for example, the case of the opioid crisis, caused in part by irresponsible practices of pharmaceutical companies. This crisis was not a mere corporate scandal; it represented a fundamental breach of public trust. The pharmaceutical industry, once regarded by most as a bastion of scientific advancement and health, was exposed for prioritizing profit over public well-being, leading to widespread addiction and loss of life.

The stark contrast between the pharmaceutical industry's professed commitment to health and the grim reality of the opioid crisis created a significant discrepancy in the public’s mental model of the healthcare sector, leaving a palpable dissonance in the public's perception of healthcare.

Amid this climate of distrust, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic presented a fresh wave of prediction errors for the global population's collective “world model.” The rapid spread of the deadly virus globally — something difficult to comprehend since we’ve never experienced it before in our lives — coupled with changing guidelines and advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, created a fertile environment for misinformation.

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As the pharmaceutical industry raced to develop vaccines, many individuals, already disillusioned by the opioid crisis and similar revelations, viewed these efforts through a lens of suspicion. The lack of a cohesive and transparent response from health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry, especially in light of their historical silence on past misdeeds, did little to satisfy public concerns.

In the Bayesian brain's attempt to minimize prediction errors and make sense of the unfolding crisis, some segments of the population turned to alternative narratives that seemingly offered clarity and certainty. The brain's natural quest for coherence, combined with a deep-seated distrust in health institutions, led some Americans to find more sinister theories about the pandemic's origin and the vaccines' purpose — like the notion of an Illuminati-led population control plan — surprisingly believable.

All the while, Trump, as president, exploited the situation for his perceived political gain, personally and publicly contradicting his medical advisers and public health officials, and often just plain common sense.

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In this environment of skepticism, Bayesian reasoning leads some people to question mainstream sources and seek alternative explanations. However, the brain's tendency to "connect the dots" can lead to incorrect inferences. The brain's predictive model can become so skewed by distrust that even the most bizarre theories can seem plausible.

This phenomenon is not just about misinformation or lack of knowledge; it's about a crisis of meaning and trust. We live in what some have termed a “post-truth era,” where the traditional bastions of factual information — schools, mainstream media organizations and government experts — are doubted, and subjective belief often overrides objective evidence. While a certain amount of skepticism is absolutely necessary given the corruption and media bias that actually exists, doubting everything leads to a mindset that is more irrational than blindly believing everything.

In this landscape, outlandish theories — like those peddled by deceptive sources such as Q and Alex Jones — can gain traction. This is not necessarily because they are believed in their entirety, but because they offer a simpler narrative in a world where the “official story” is viewed with suspicion.

The rise of conspiracy theories in the context of Trump's presidency can be seen through this lens. Trump’s often confrontational and contradictory statements further muddled the waters of public discourse. He challenged established narratives and institutions with strongman confidence. For many, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric resonated not because it offered factual clarity or even approached something resembling truth. It resonated because it echoed their disillusionment with a system they perceived as fundamentally deceptive.

Of course, the existence of corruption in Washington is not a myth; instances of political scandals, lobbying influence and ethical breaches are well-documented and systemic. These realities, albeit often less dramatic than portrayed in conspiracy theories, provide the seeds from which such theories sprout. When these issues are not addressed transparently and proactively by political leaders and institutions, they leave room for speculation and exaggeration.

Taking the nation beyond the post-truth era — a post-post-truth era, if you will — requires more than debunking individual theories; it calls for a systematic approach to rebuild trust.

All political and corporate entities must recognize the role they play in either exacerbating or alleviating this crisis of trust. This involves not only future transparency from institutions but also acknowledgement of past deceptions. This has not happened so far — we have not seen a high-profile public apology from the pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid crisis, and government agencies such as the CDC have not acknowledged how poorly executed the response to COVID really was (even if Trump and his administration was to blame for much of it).

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Admission of past wrongdoings or incompetency combined with promises of future transparency and open dialogue are necessary for rebuilding trust.

This, however, is only part of the solution. There must also be a concerted effort to educate the public on critical thinking and how our cognitive processes can lead us astray. Education in critical thinking and media literacy becomes paramount in empowering individuals to navigate this complex information landscape. By understanding the workings of our own minds, we can be better equipped to discern truth from fiction and make informed choices in our lives and in our politics.

The brain's attempt to make sense of a world full of contradictory information can lead to the acceptance of implausible theories, particularly in an environment where official narratives are viewed with skepticism. Addressing this challenge requires a multifaceted approach, including institutional transparency, educational initiatives in critical thinking, and a deeper public understanding of our cognitive processes.

Failure to address these issues risks a further descent into a world where unfounded speculation reigns and figures such as Trump, who will continue to exploit these divisions for as long as he’s in the public arena, can thrive.

If we don't confront these challenges, we risk spiraling further into a realm dominated by baseless conjecture and disinformation. In this environment, figures such as Trump, who hide authoritarian tendencies under an anti-establishment facade, are poised to succeed by exploiting these divisions as long as they remain in the public eye.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Evolution offers a solution for Palestine and Israel: neuroscientist

It is rational to be deeply concerned at this moment in history. The divisive conflict between Israelis and Palestinians ultimately represents a battle between two of the world’s major religions.

At its worst, this war could pit the Judeo-Christian world against the Islamic world, bringing about a kind of global spiritual war. In fact, we are already seeing signs of that — the militant Islamic group Hezbollah in Lebanon is now launching airstrikes over Israel’s border, while U.S. and Iranian proxy forces are attacking each other inside Syria and Iraq. These events are quickly dividing the public, with most feeling like they have to choose one side or the other.

The highly interconnected nature of human civilization means that regional disputes are amplified through the global network of communications and alliances. This interconnectivity can transform localized strife into a series of international incidents, creating a domino effect that risks drawing multiple superpowers into a broader conflict.

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Beyond Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine remain at war, while tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan’s autonomy remain high. It is unnerving to acknowledge, but War III is not just some fantasy in a movie script or post-apocalyptic novel. It’s a very real possibility.

Our fate, however, is hardly set in stone, thanks to our intelligence and ability to engage in reflective thinking. To prevent this nightmarish outcome, we must understand the biological, psychological and sociological forces at play, and we must use this knowledge to discover a solution. If we can see where we are headed as a world system of nations and cultures, then in theory we should be able to use our collective agency to steer civilization toward a more peaceful outcome.

Let’s begin our ambitious task by getting an understanding of why such conflicts emerge in the first place, from an evolutionary perspective.

The principle of competitive exclusion

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion is a well-established concept in ecology which says that two distinct species occupying the same niche and competing for the same resources cannot stably coexist. The ongoing conflict will eventually lead to one group’s extinction or removal from the niche.

This principle is an expression of the harsh reality of natural selection, and if the agents involved in such a conflict don’t have the ability to understand this dynamic, they will not be able to avoid falling into it.

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion can also be applied to hominids, the family of primates that includes modern humans, our ancestors and other human species, such as Neanderthals. Evidence from paleoanthropology suggests that this dynamic played a significant role in our own evolutionary history; the competition for niches is believed to have been a contributing factor to the extinction of other hominid species as Homo sapiens became more dominant.

Flash forward to the present day. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as a contemporary reflection of the Competitive Exclusion Principle, with two groups competing for resources and self-determination in a shared geographical space. The main difference between this example and the ones given in ecology is that the two groups are members of the same species. So why are these agents at war when they could be integrating into a diverse yet harmonious whole?

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In his 2002 book The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, complexity theorist Harold Morowitz explained the reason for the conflict:

“In spite of the close biological affinity of all humans — according to mitochondrial DNA studies we all have a common ancestor within the last 200,000 years — humans constantly erect cultural barriers to interbreeding, where no biological barriers exist … In a number of contemporary societies two or more groups live in the same country and exist in almost complete reproductive isolation because of religion, race, language, ideology, or other nonbiological barriers. As a result an analog to sympatric species is artificially produced. We designate these noninterbreeding groups as pseudospecies.”

The concept of pseudospecies — socially and culturally defined groups that act as though separated by biological differences — allows us to understand the Principle of Competitive Exclusion within the human domain. When two groups of humans possess different worldviews, and those worldviews create a clear distinction between in-group and out-group members, those groups become akin to two distinct organisms locked in a competitive struggle.

Worldviews simultaneously unite and divide

Examples of worldviews include religions, political ideologies and national identities. These belief systems give us a sense of purpose and meaning, and attempt to make sense of a confusing and often chaotic reality.

In evolutionary terms, a worldview is a strategy for collective survival. That is, it provides a blueprint for a stable society, in much the same way that a genome encodes a blueprint for a stable organism, and a strategy for individual survival.

Worldviews are an important part of the evolutionary process because they facilitate the emergence of a society by aligning the interests of interacting agents and harmonizing their activities.

Religions, for example, gave humans a collective purpose and ethical system that produced social order from behavioral chaos. In this way, worldviews entrain groups of humans into a unified whole, bringing about the creation of a social organism — an intelligent organism made of many intelligent organisms. When a social organism forms, the members of that larger adaptive network gain an enhanced layer of defense against the unforgiving elements of the natural world, such as environmental dangers and threats from competitors.

Cultural worldviews serve as powerful social adhesives that bond the members of each group internally, fostering a strong collective identity. However, these same worldviews also act as dividers, erecting psychological and emotional barriers that separate us from those who do not share our perspective. Because the religions of the world are all different, to one degree or another, they have the effect of dividing us into tribes with conflicting visions about how the world is, and how it should be.

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Organisms with sufficiently different genomes will typically be in conflict unless they develop symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationships. Social organisms with different worldviews will often be at odds with one another — or even war — until they find a way to align interests. The "us versus them" mentality perpetuates a cycle of bias and conflict, mirroring the competition for survival seen in the animal world.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we see two groups in conflict, each vying for the same niche, with no desire to co-exist peacefully.

The Hamas chant “from the river to the sea” makes that crystal clear, and Israel’s government has been trying to systematically push Palestinians out of the territory for most of a century, in accordance with a Zionist philosophy. The Principle of Competitive Exclusion is clearly at work in the human world thanks to rigid worldviews that create pseudospecies. Though maybe it’s more accurate to place the blame on the bureaucrats than the religions themselves, because it is the leaders and military bodies who choose to not come to a peaceful and fair solution, not the Israeli and Palestinian civilians, who are trapped in a cruel game they never agreed to play.

Fortunately, humanity's unique cognitive abilities offer a pathway beyond the seemingly inevitable conclusion of competitive exclusion. Humans possess a profound capacity for reflection, for conscious deliberation and for transcendence beyond instinctual reactions. This higher level of consciousness, a product of a more developed prefrontal cortex, allows us to recognize the artificial nature of these pseudospecies barriers and the shared lineage that unites us. It is this cognitive trait that offers a path beyond the zero-sum game of competitive exclusion, because it gives us the ability to alter our worldview when it becomes clear that it needs updating.

A unifying worldview: human civilization as a ‘superorganism’

To move forward as a single species, the relevant science suggests that we must consciously embrace a new universal worldview.

This worldview, inspired by evolutionary theory and an approach to problem solving called “systems thinking,” would recognize the interconnectedness of all human beings, not merely as a moral ideal, but as a practical reality. It would be rooted in the understanding that we are all part of an emerging global superorganism, an integrated network of lives and destinies that are inextricably linked.

We know that our civilization is now an interdependent system because if there is a crisis in one crucial region then the whole global network suffers. We saw how a local problem can quickly wreak global havoc with the 2008 financial collapse.

We endured an even more extreme version in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This tells us that coming together to create a new level of global coordination despite our ideological differences is not a luxury, but a necessity. Our common existential challenges will require the full computational power of the “global brain” that is human civilization. That means we must cooperate and collaborate in a directed way to prevent calamities that could consume us all — WWIII, weaponized A.I., the spread of authoritarianism, income inequality, pandemics and climate change. These are things that threaten the entire human race, and in that way, they bind us together.

When we adopt this universal perspective, which is at once scientific and spiritual (in the sense that it unifies us under a larger purpose), we begin to see how the wellbeing of one is tied to the wellbeing of all. Envisioning humanity as a global superorganism allows for a reimagining of individual and collective identity. The suffering of any one part is a wound to the collective whole. The deaths of civilians in conflict zones becomes not just a local tragedy but a global one, necessitating a response from the collective human superorganism.

In this light, the Principle of Competitive Exclusion is transformed from a rule of conflict to a challenge of integration. It urges us to find ways to coexist not by eliminating the other but by expanding our sense of self to include the other. This is the essence of the superorganism worldview — one that sees not a battleground of competing tribes but a tapestry of human endeavor, rich with the potential for synthesis and harmony while preserving its unique variety of cultures and customs. It calls for a new kind of global cooperation, one that transcends tribalistic divisions and unites us in the common pursuit of a world that is sustainable, just and flourishing.

While the articulation of a unifying worldview is the first step, it is only through actionable solutions that such a vision can materialize.

A new global ethos

An ethos is the characteristic spirit of a culture, era or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations. The establishment of a new global ethos based on the human superorganism perspective requires a fundamental shift in how we envision international cooperation. Systems thinking is an analytical approach that views complex problems through the lens of the whole system rather than isolated parts. It focuses on designing resilient and adaptive systems capable of withstanding and evolving through challenges, with an understanding that changes in one part of a system can significantly impact the entire system.

Systems thinking naturally leads to thinking on a global scale. To build a global ethos of unity and peace, we need a more inclusive and participatory approach that values the contribution of all the individuals working to maintain a stable whole. Current global governance structures, like the United Nations, often rely on top-down mechanisms that may not fully represent or address grassroots concerns. The new approach should leverage local initiatives and voices, integrating them into the fabric of international policymaking and conflict resolution. The transformation of international organizations to reflect a more bottom-up approach would empower individuals and communities to participate in the global decision-making process.

In his 2022 book The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan offers a vision for connecting people around the globe by proposing a decentralized, internet-based state that leverages digital platforms to unite individuals with shared goals across borders. This model of a network state reimagines governance and community, where decentralized systems enable direct, global participation in decision-making, challenging the conventional boundaries of geopolitical entities. This is just one blueprint for global coordination without centralized powers calling all the shots.

The systems-thinking approach would encourage educational reform to instill a mindset of global citizenship, economic policies that promote equitable resource distribution and diplomatic efforts that prioritize peace and mutual reciprocity.

Of course, these are long-term solutions for a global restructuring of human civilization to be more robust and democratic. What solutions does this new paradigm propose for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

A solution for peace in the Middle East

In light of the insights gleaned from systems thinking and the unifying concept of humanity as a global superorganism, it's time to reexamine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with fresh eyes. Of course, for decades world leaders have tried to bring a durable peace to the Middle East and failed. Hope for lasting harmony is not something in abundance. Although the road to peace is fraught with challenges and a history of deep-rooted resistance to compromise, applying a systems-oriented perspective illuminates potential paths to resolution that, while complex, are indeed attainable. First, it instantly eliminates solutions that would involve a competitive exclusion-style outcome, where one ethnic group pushes the other out of the region entirely. After these options are eliminated, we reconsider the remaining solutions that have been proposed, which would be updated with adaptive design principles and more evolved ethical considerations.

A “two-state solution” is the most widely supported international framework, and it envisions an independent State of Israel and an independent State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security. Some propose a confederation between Israel and Palestine, where two sovereign states are linked together with shared economic and security structures but retain their separate governments. The more economic interdependence the better, because then war becomes even more costly to both parties, incentivizing peace. Areas of significant contention, particularly Jerusalem, could be placed under international administration to guarantee equal access to holy sites and shared resources.

Even more integrative would be a “one-state solution” that doesn’t entail the dark consequences of the Competitive Exclusion Principle. This resolution would create a single state that includes Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, where all inhabitants have equal rights. It could be a “bi-national state,” a single democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal representation and protections under the law, maintaining their distinct national identities. Or, it could be a one-state solution where the state is secular, with no official religion or national identity, ensuring equal rights for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Either option would be a giant step up from the current situation. While the two-state solution is more realistic, it could serve as a potential transition state to the more integrated single state in the not-too-distant future. Of course, the success of any plan would depend on the willingness of the populations to reconcile and live together in peace. For this, the unifying worldview of human civilization as a coherent superorganism is needed. Ideally, this unifying worldview — in the form of a precise scientific framework that offers systems-based solutions — would be presented alongside peace negotiations, and communicated to the global public by scientists, journalists, and educators.

In conclusion, while the Principle of Competitive Exclusion explains much of the biological world and our ancestral history, it need not dictate our future. By recognizing our shared identity and common goals, we can override the primitive instincts that drive us apart. We can choose to foster a world where cultural and ideological diversity enriches rather than divides, where cooperation and mutual understanding prevail. It is through this enlightened approach that humanity can move past the archaic boundaries of pseudospecies and toward a unified, peaceful coexistence.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why some Republicans torpedoed Jim Jordan and are defying Trump

Right now, there is an internal war raging inside the Republican Party that is an ideological battle for its heart and soul.

Progressives should be optimistic about this internal strife, and not just because it signifies a divided right-wing going into the coming presidential election. The failure of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — a man known as a “hardline conservative agitator” and a Trump loyalist — to claim the House speaker position was the result of a Republican resistance to Jordan’s MAGA philosophy. The moderate wing of the party took a principled stance that risked their careers, and they emerged victorious.

While swaths of the world from Ukraine to Israel and Gaza are in utter chaos, our legislative branch is completely dysfunctional. All that aside, this scenario does offer progressives a glimmer of hope, and also raises a question: Why the sudden backbone from these Republicans? What is the psychology underlying their defiance, and how can we capitalize on this effort to curb ring-wing extremism and limit Trump’s political influence?

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The social psychology theory known as Terror Management Theory (TMT) has an answer to that. According to this theory, humans have an awareness of their own mortality that creates deep existential terror. We deal with this persistent fear by adopting cultural worldviews — religions, national identities, political ideologies — which infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. By becoming part of an idea and a movement that is larger than oneself, that will outlive the individual, we manage our existential terror.

If this is true, things that remind us of our mortality or create existential terror will cause people to cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews. When this happens, they will also tend to side with those who share their worldview and more fiercely oppose those that appear against it.

If we do indeed adopt cultural worldviews to curb a fear of death — as Terror Management Theory posits — then perceived threats to our worldview should also prompt us to strengthen faith in our worldviews and become more tribal.

An interesting experiment from 1998, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, illustrates this phenomenon. The experimenters asked participants to write about either their own death or a control topic and then presented them with a target person who either disparaged their political views or did not. Afterward, they gave them the opportunity to choose the amount of hot sauce the offender must consume. As predicted, participants who were made fearful by the writing exercise allocated significantly more hot sauce to the worldview-threatening target.

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So, how does Terror Management Theory shed light on the resistance within the Republican party against figures such as Jordan and Trump?

The nomination of the previous House speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, who is known as more of a pragmatic legislator than an ideologue, showed where the majority stood. However, a rebellion led by hardline conservatives and Trump loyalists ousted McCarthy, seeking a more extreme replacement. With the headline, “McCarthy became the latest victim of Trump’s GOP revolution,” a CNN journalist wrote:

Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media during a break in his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on October 24, 2023 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“A party that once defined conservatism as preserving a traditional sense of steadiness and strength has evolved over the last three decades into a haven for chaos agents, stunt politics and a perpetual ideological revolution that keeps driving it to new extremes.”

Jordan’s alignment with Trump and Trump’s 2020 election denial, as well as his hardline conservative stances and unwillingness to compromise, epitomizes the radical transformation of the Republican Party.

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Veteran Republicans have long championed a distinct conservative worldview that emphasizes traditional American principles and practicality. For enough U.S. House members within the party, the politics and posturing of figures such as Trump and Jordan appeared to be a sharp departure from these deeply-held convictions, at least within the context of the House speaker’s saga. This opposition isn’t merely political or strategic — it's fundamentally about the preservation of the core values and principles that have been central to the Republican identity for decades.

The perceived existential threat to their traditional worldview posed by the radical movement, coupled with the very real threat to their political careers, triggered the worldview-defense response described by Terror Management Theory.

By opposing Jordan, these Republicans were reinforcing their worldview, their protective buffer against existential threats. When the worldview defense was triggered, the dynamics of group behavior and tribalism described by Terror Management Theory also emerged. Actions threatening a group’s core beliefs will prompt members of that group to bind together and remain true to their ideals.

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After voting against Jordan, the members of the resistance received threats from Jordan supporters, who were almost all certainly Trump supporters, which increased the intensity of the overall perceived threat, further strengthening the worldview-threat response. Articles report that these Republicans "dug in their heels" after facing aggression, as Terror Management Theory would predict.

So, the story of Jim Jordan’s failed bid for speaker of the House teaches us a lot about the psychological and neural factors that at certain times can drive individuals to put the more traditional principles of their party and personal convictions above personal gain. This intriguing dynamic of values against vested interests offers valuable insights into how extremist political movements emerge and are then countered by a wave of resistance that maintains a balanced equilibrium.

This war going on within the Republican Party may symbolize a change in direction of the party, but only time will tell. Nine new speaker candidates emerged last weekend, with only two of them having voted to certify the 2020 presidential election. House Minority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) tried to win the gavel first and flamed out before even standing for an official vote.

In the meantime, progressives should be reminded of the old adage "The enemy of your enemy is your friend." Maybe progressives can find common ground with moderate Republicans on shared values and principles, bridging divides that have polarized the nation and building a coalition against Trump for the 2024 election.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America

It may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of “collective intelligence,” but there is also “collective stupidity,” and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.

Although the term "stupidity" may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but rather a failure to use one's cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be “smart” while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that “you can’t fix stupid,” but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.

To demonstrate that stupidity does not mean having a low IQ, consider the case of Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines, who is one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Branson has said that he was seen as the dumbest person in school, and has admitted to having dyslexia, a learning disability that affects one’s ability to read and correctly interpret written language. But it wasn’t just reading comprehension that was the problem — “Math just didn’t make sense to me,” Branson has said. “I would certainly have failed an IQ test.”

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So, what is responsible for his enormous success, both financially and in terms of being a prolific innovator? Branson attributes his success to surrounding himself with highly knowledgeable and extremely competent people. Branson’s smarts come from his ability to recognize his own limitations, and to know when to defer to others on topics or tasks where he lacks sufficient knowledge or skill.

This means you don’t have to be traditionally intelligent or particularly knowledgeable to be successful in life, make good decisions, have good judgment, and be a positive influence on the world. Stupidity is a consequence of a failure to be aware of one’s own limitations, and this type of cognitive failure has a scientific name: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. The effect has been widely written about, and investigated empirically, with hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals confirming and analyzing the phenomenon, particularly in relation to the dangers it poses in certain contexts.

It is easy to think of examples in which failing to recognize one’s own ignorance can become dangerous. Take for example when people with no medical training try to provide medical advice. It doesn’t take much Internet searching to find some nutritionist from the “alternative medicine” world who is claiming that some herbal ingredient has the power to cure cancer. Some of these people are scam artists, but many of them truly believe that they have a superior understanding of health and physiology. There are many people who trust these self-proclaimed experts, and there is no doubt that some have paid with their lives for it.

What’s particularly disturbing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people are attracted to confident leaders, so politicians are incentivized to be overconfident in their beliefs and opinions, and to overstate their expertise. For example, Donald Trump — despite not having any real understanding of what causes cancer — suggested that the noise from wind turbines is causing cancer (a claim that is not supported by any empirical studies). It is well documented that on topics ranging from pandemics to climate change, Trump routinely dismissed the opinions of the professionals who have dedicated their lives to understanding those phenomena, because he thought that he knew better. It’s bad enough that politicians like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t recognize their own ignorance and fail to exercise the appropriate amount of caution when making claims that can affect public health and safety — but what is really disturbing is that they are being celebrated for their overconfidence (i.e., stupidity).

It is less surprising that politicians who regularly exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect are being elected to office when one realizes that they are being voted in by people who also display the Dunning-Kruger effect. A 2008 study by the political scientist Ian Anson surveyed over 2000 Americans in an attempt to see whether or not the effect was playing a role in one’s ability to overestimate their political knowledge. The results clearly showed that the people who scored lowest on political knowledge were the very same people who were the most likely to overestimate their performance. While this is shocking, it also makes perfect sense: the less we know about something, the less of an ability we have to assess how much we don’t know. It is only when we try to become an expert on some complex topic that we truly realize how complicated it is, and how much more there is to learn about it.

This new theory of stupidity I have proposed here — that stupidity is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but a lack of awareness of the limits of one’s intelligence or knowledge — is more important right now than ever before, and I’ll tell you why. The same study by Anson mentioned above showed, that when cues were given to make the participants “engage in partisan thought,” the Dunning-Kruger effect became more pronounced. In other words, if someone is reminded of the Republican-Democrat divide, they become even more overconfident in their uninformed positions. This finding suggests, that in today’s unprecedently divided political climate, we are all more likely to have an inflated sense of confidence in our unsupported beliefs. What’s more, those who actually have the greatest ignorance will assume they have the least!

What we are dealing with here is an epidemic of stupidity that will only get worse as divisions continue to increase. This should motivate all of us to do what we can to ease the political division. When we can clearly see the social factors that are causing people to become increasingly stupid, our anger and hatred toward them should dissipate. We do not have much control over our level of intelligence or ignorance, or our ignorance of our ignorance.

But this does not mean that we should accept stupidity as the result of deterministic forces that are beyond our control. After gaining a deeper awareness of our own cognitive limitations and limited knowledge base, we should do what we can to instill this higher awareness in others. We must not just educate the public and our youth; we must teach them to become aware of their own ignorance, and give them the skills they need to search for more knowledge and to detect when they or others are overestimating their knowledge or competency.

We have good reason to be optimistic that this is possible. A 2009 study showed that incompetent students increased their ability to estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. This suggests that we can learn a type of “meta-awareness” that gives us the power to more accurately assess ourselves and our own limitations. Once we can do that, then we can know when we need to do more research on a given topic, or to defer to experts. We can also get better at distinguishing between true experts and those who only claim to be experts (but are really just demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect).

We are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives. While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely. That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity, and a healthy amount of skepticism. By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves, and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

The scientific reason why Trump's supporters won't believe any evidence

When delving into the perplexing world of politics and the enigmatic figure of Donald Trump, we often encounter a peculiar phenomenon amongst his supporters: a staunch refusal to accept any criminal allegation or felony charge against him, no matter how compelling the evidence.

There are many neurological and psychological reasons for this irrational behavior. But today, we will focus on the mental phenomena I feel are most urgent to explore ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

First, a disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist — I am a cognitive neuroscientist with a research focus in clinical psychology (in particular, anxiety’s effect on attention). In fact, much of my published work has appeared in psychology journals. As a science journalist, I have been covering the psychology of Trump and his supporters since he emerged on the political scene in 2015.

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Now that Trump is running for president again while facing 91 felony charges, I feel a moral responsibility to illuminate all the mental factors that are driving Americans to support a man who is a master manipulator, and incapable of telling the truth. Unfortunately, these are qualities that are too common among presidential candidates, but Trump is a particularly egregious example, and therefore we must be vigilant. This article is meant to inform but also to warn voters of what is to come.

Cognitive challenge of disbelief

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems.

Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world.

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What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?")

Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play

Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health.

ALSO READ: Trump is embracing five ‘fake news’ outlets he supposedly hates

For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs.

Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions.

A supporter of former President Donald Trump gather outside of the Fulton County Jail ahead of Trump's surrender on Aug. 24, 2023 in Atlanta, Ga. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains.

Imagine these neural pathways as trails in a forest. The more one traverses the path of unquestioning belief, the clearer and more entrenched it becomes. The path of skepticism, however, grows over with doubts and becomes difficult to navigate. This cognitive reshaping primes individuals to accept, and even defend, far-fetched statements and suggestions presented by manipulative politicians.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

This cognitive bias occurs when individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their capability. Translated to the context of understanding complex legal matters, some Trumpists might believe they have a superior grasp of the former president’s predicament and dismiss expert opinions, thinking they're immune to being misled.

The Dunning-Kruger effect becomes especially concerning in the context of polarizing issues, such as climate change. A research study from the University of New Hampshire in 2017, for example, revealed that a mere 25 percent of those identifying as Trump supporters acknowledged the role of human actions in climate change. This is in stark contrast to the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists on the issue.

This troublesome cognitive bias could be making it easier for Trump to deliver unchallenged falsehoods to his more uneducated followers. In some cases, not only are these individuals uninformed, they are unlikely to seek new information on their own. In their minds, they have nothing to learn because Trump and his acolytes have already told them what they need to know.

Reevaluating our cognitive reflexes

It is important to state that these phenomena are not exclusive to Trump supporters or any particular political group; this article serves as a broader reflection on the cognitive shortcuts that our brains favor.

If we aspire to build a society less susceptible to misinformation, we must embark on a paradigm shift. Our educational approach should pivot from passive acceptance of supposed “facts” to the exhilarating pursuit of questioning authority and healthy skepticism (as too much skepticism can also lead to irrational thinking). Recognizing that belief, in many ways, is the brain's default mode rather than a conscious choice, can serve as the first step in this cerebral revolution.

In conclusion, the unwavering belief in Trump, despite the felony charges against him, is not solely a political matter but, for some, a manifestation of our brain's intrinsic tendencies. Understanding this cognitive dynamic is pivotal in addressing the challenges posed by misinformation and fostering a more critical and discerning society.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why loyalty to Donald Trump is often unbreakable

In the fiery theater of modern politics, few phenomena are as bewildering — and electrifying — as the ironclad loyalty of Donald Trump's followers.

Despite numerous political, legal and personal controversies, Trump is almost as popular as ever. On Thursday, he was hit with a 37-count indictment, which follows a Manhattan indictment, a federal indictment and a court branding him liable for sexual abuse, another federal investigation and separate Fulton County, Ga., probe.

And yet, Trump’s faithful fan base does not waver.

So, the psychological puzzle is, why hasn’t any of this hurt him? Not only has his popularity not been diminished, it seems that these events may have even strengthened his support.

Remember this classic Trump quote from 2016? “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters,” the then-presidential candidate said. Chillingly, this bold proclamation seems to be truer than not, and that should disturb all of us, because that kind of blind loyalty poses a real threat to our democratic values and signals a trend toward authoritarianism.

To get to the heart of this enigma, let's put on our Sherlock Holmes hat and step into the world of psychology and neuroscience. A popular theory from social psychology known as terror management theory will shed some light on this puzzling human behavior.

Terror management theory is more relevant than ever because it provides an explanation for tribalism, which is really at the core of this mystery. The theory suggests that existential terror — which can be triggered by anything that is perceived to pose a threat to one’s existence — is the reason we adopt cultural worldviews, such as our religions, national identities or political ideologies. In an attempt to mitigate our fears, we latch onto philosophies that give our lives meaning and direction in a chaotic world.

But how does this explain tribalism, exactly?

When we're fearful or threatened, we rally around those who share our worldviews. We become aggressive toward those who don't. More alarmingly, perceived threats or existential fear — immigrants, transgender persons, gun grabbing, government conspiracies, humiliation at the hands of "liberal elites" — can stir up nationalism and sway voting habits toward presidential candidates with authoritarian personalities. For example, a study found that when primed to think about their death, American students who self-identified as conservatives showed increased support for drastic military interventions that could lead to mass civilian casualties overseas. Another study found that after the 9/11 terror attack, support for then-President George W. Bush spiked, ultimately resulting in his re-election.

In 2016, an experiment was carried out specifically to see whether existential fear was fueling support for Donald Trump, and that’s precisely what was found.

Then-President Donald Trump gestures to supporters following a campaign rally on October 28, 2020 in Bullhead City, Ariz. Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

One-hundred fifty-two students at the College of Staten Island were divided into two groups. The experimental group was given a series of exercises designed to trigger thoughts about mortality, such as, “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” The control group was given similar exercises that related to pain and not death.

Later, all participants were given a series of questions designed to assess their support for Donald Trump and willingness to vote for him in the upcoming election. The results show that the people who wrote about death showed increased support for Trump compared to those in the control group, regardless of their political leanings. These findings support Terror Management Theory's prediction that thoughts about mortality shift voters to the right politically, and cause people to favor patriotic leaders with nationalist, xenophobic messages.

Now we can start to make sense of Trump's political invincibility. Viewing Trump as an invincible champion of their worldview, his fans are more than willing to overlook his missteps, especially when the world feels as chaotic as it does right now. In a time of increasing polarization and division, the desire to feel safe can eclipse any number of legal or moral blunders. Seeing him as an unbeatable guardian of their worldviews and identities allows many of his fans to turn a blind eye to his flaws. Not only that, the more he is attacked by those deemed the enemy, the more they will bolster their support for him, even if he stands credibly accused of lying, cheating and threatening national security.

This spells trouble for our democracy. When a leader is viewed as infallible, the very tenets of a fair society — accountability, transparency and checks and balances — risk being undermined. It's essential, then, to try and understand what is happening from a psychological perspective. There may be nothing we can do to drive a wedge between Trump supporters and their political messiah, but we may be able to educate those who haven’t already been radicalized, so that future generations of voters are not susceptible to the same kind of manipulation by politicians looking to exploit our fears. It is only through learning that we ensure the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated. And electing Trump as the president of the United States of America is one mistake we can’t afford to repeat.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why RFK Jr. has cast a spell upon millions

Get ready America, because things are about to reach a whole new level of crazy. The nation is more ideologically divided than it has ever been in modern times, and no matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, it is practically guaranteed that half of the country is going to feel like the world is about to end.

And just when it seemed modern presidential politics couldn’t possibly move further into the realm of the surreal, an unexpected player has emerged: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A registered Democrat, this new contender is something of a paradox: a left-wing conspiracy theorist. On one end, Kennedy is a high-profile climate change activist, supports abortion rights and wants to “ensure the civil liberties of minorities and the poor.” On the other, he’s a notable anti-vaxxer and espouses several fringe theories about pharmaceuticals, transgender children and Wi-Fi’s effects on the brain.

This is a combination you don’t see often, but that’s precisely why he is getting so much attention right now from the media and leaders of both major political parties.

We can expect RFK Jr.’s popularity to grow in the coming months, in a way that is certain to change the dynamics of the election. RFK Jr. nevertheless introduces a new wildcard element into an already unpredictable political arena. Incumbent President Joe Biden won't enjoy an unchallenged path to re-election and won’t be able to ignore him — as he’s done so far — forever.

Along the way, Kennedy has the potential to siphon off a chunk of Biden’s of his support. And while the odds of Kennedy capturing the Democratic nomination are minuscule, it’s quite possible RFK Jr. could win at least a couple of states during the Democratic primary. The resulting splintering of the electorate could further weaken an already struggling Biden entering the general election. This is concerning given that one possible outcome is that Donald Trump becomes president again. For this reason alone, we must all be closely watching what is happening with RFK Jr.

In today's increasingly polarized political landscape, few figures have the potential to attract the degree of cross-party interest that Kennedy does. A member of a political dynasty entrenched in progressive politics — RFK Jr. is the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy — his name alone wields considerable influence over liberals. His credentials go beyond his surname, however, as his persistent advocacy for environmental conservation and climate change activism has, in the past, earned him respect with progressives. Media outlets like CNN have previously praised Kennedy for heavily criticizing president Trump for his disbelief in global warming.

Additionally, his skepticism of big pharma resonates with independents, particularly libertarians, and anti-establishment progressives, such as those who supported Bernie Sanders’ insurgent Democratic presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. Sanders was at times more popular among Democrat voters than Biden during the 2020 presidential primary, though Biden beat him in part because Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race and gave Biden his support at a key moment — just before the South Carolina primary that Biden would go on to win.

President Joe Biden, pictured here leaving 10 Downing Street following a meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on July 10, 2023 in London, remains the overwhelming favorite to win the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. Leon Neal/Getty Images

It’s now clear we are seeing an anti-establishment, populist movement cresting in America, on both sides of the political spectrum. And since Sanders won’t be running in the coming election, RFK Jr. may fill the void that he left, especially since the campaign of a third Democrat in the 2024 race — 2020 also-ran Marianne Williamson — appears to be running out of steam.

But Kennedy appeals to the alt-right, as well, due to his anti-establishment leanings and promotion of conspiracy theories, including the idea that certain vaccines may have caused autism, or that the novel coronavirus could have been a manufactured bioweapon. To be fair, Kennedy did not say that vaccines themselves caused autism, but instead attributed it to a mercury-based preservative named thimerosal, which was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001 as a “cautionary measure” by vaccine manufacturers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Additionally, his claim that COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus that disproportionately affects Black and white people has been interpreted as suggesting that it is a bioweapon that was designed to target those races specifically, while sparing Asians and Ashkenazi Jews.

While the first part of that statement may be true — peer-reviewed literature in credible journals reveal that viruses commonly affect certain genetic profiles differently than others — it is a dangerous leap to go from that to suggesting that the novel coronavirus is a weapon engineered for ethnic cleansing. Kennedy is always careful to state that he is not explicitly claiming that the virus was made for that purpose, but he is also not clearly saying that it wasn’t. Look at his double-talk in this tweet — and the clarification tweet that followed it:

First: “The U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races. The furin cleave docking site is most compatible with blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons.”

Then: “I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”

This was enough to make him internal enemy No. 1 to the Democratic Party and its allies. The New York Society for Ethical Culture canceled an event where RFK Jr. was scheduled to speak with a rabbi. While it is unknown whether the Democratic National Committee played any role in this cancellation, RFK Jr. certainly believes they did, as explained in this Newsweek article titled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accuses Democrats of sabotaging event.”

Many might believe that RFK Jr. killed whatever chance he had to threaten Biden when he made that wildly speculative statement — and it probably should have.

But I’m not so sure.

It is quite possible that his controversial stances, rather than undermining his credibility among Democratic voters, might actually bolster his appeal. This counterintuitive dynamic became evident when Donald Trump ran for president and the mainstream media's constant coverage and non-stop attacks ironically served to boost his popularity. As left-wing news takes aim at RFK Jr., the echoes of Trump's journey suggest a potential repetition of this pattern. Kennedy could easily use these attacks to his advantage the way Trump did, which he already seems to be doing as evidenced by this Politico article titled “RFK Jr.: The media is hitting me harder than Trump.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears at the World Values Network's Presidential candidate series at the Glasshouse on July 25, 2023, in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Kennedy's candidacy also highlights the curious relationship between conspiracy theories and public interest.

Sometimes, when dialogue around conspiracy theories is suppressed, their allure only intensifies. Dismissing them out of hand can inadvertently make them more appealing to those who distrust authority or feel disaffected by mainstream narratives. Paradoxically, Kennedy's association with such theories, then, could work to his advantage. His position appeals to liberals intrigued by conspiracy theories — who exist in greater numbers than most Americans realize. In fact, a 2017 study has shown that restricting communication in an attempt to enforce political correctness actually has the effect of increasing support for Donald Trump, and I imagine the same effect could be occurring right now and working in Kennedy’s favor.

It is also worth noting that most Americans are now aware of many of the real conspiracies from U.S. history that have been acknowledged by the government, such as MK-Ultra, a 20-year CIA project that illegally experimented on humans with drugs such as LSD and inhumane psychological methods.

Or COINTELPRO, another CIA program that used illegal methods to surveil, discredit and disrupt domestic American political organizations, such as the Black Panther movement.

Or the infamous Tuskegee experiment, where Black men infected with syphilis were deceived and made to believe they were getting medical treatment when they were actually getting placebos — even though treatment was available. As a result, many of these people died completely unnecessarily, and knowledge of this is undoubtedly part of the cause for the current distrust of government and vaccines among the black community, and understandably so.

At least as great as the current distrust of government is the distrust of pharmaceutical companies, especially since shows like Netflix’s Painkiller have brought the story of the opioid crisis to millions of Americans, who now understand the role that these corporations played in it out of pure greed. One could argue that it is rational to not trust the companies profiting massively from vaccines when they are the same ones who played a role in killing tens of thousands of people. It is puzzling that the government agencies in charge of educating the public about vaccines have done essentially nothing to address this issue and regain trust with citizens who have reason to be suspicious of motives based on history.

The implication here is far from straightforward: While most “conspiracy theories” are obviously false and potentially harmful, a blanket dismissal of all theories about conspiracies is obviously not the answer, and can lead to the opposite of the intended effect.

Instead, an open dialogue that acknowledges the existence of genuine conspiracies will be necessary to counteract the spread of dangerous misinformation about fact-free conspiracy theories. That’s what re-establishing trust will require, and we will have to embrace this messy subject and devise new educational solutions. Of course, this is easier said than done, because how is one supposed to determine which theories are bogus and which ones could be legitimate?

Just last week, a U.S. House committee conducted a hearing on UFOs where a former Department of Defense official testified that the government has found non-human “biologics” on crashed vehicles of unknown origins — and has worked to cover it up. With such stories coming out, whether they are true or not, the American public is undoubtedly very confused about what to believe, and how to appropriately apply skepticism when one simply can’t be sure of the truth. If one is not skeptical enough, they can become vulnerable to bogus theories. But if one is too skeptical, they can also become vulnerable to bogus theories, because of their extreme levels of doubt toward mainstream narratives.

What we need is a systematic approach to determining truth, and that can be provided by a method known to scientists and statisticians as Bayesian reasoning. The term sounds complex on the surface, but it can be applied in a simple form by anyone. This may be necessary, as studies have shown that the human brain tends to believe things as a default because it simply takes more mental effort and cognitive resources to reject something as untrue compared to just accepting it.

Looking ahead, it seems that RFK Jr. is here to stay, at least for the immediate future. His anti-establishment stance, coupled with a generally progressive worldview, provides an attractive option for voters disenchanted with mainstream politicians — including Biden — but reluctant to support Trump over his xenophobia, pathological lying and malignant narcissism.

As RFK Jr. carves his path through presidential politics, his journey serves as a testament to the unpredictability of the American electorate and the nuanced ways in which media narratives can shape public sentiment.

As the upcoming presidential race unfolds, Kennedy's campaign is likely to continue attracting interest and stirring dialogue around the themes of anti-establishment sentiment, conspiracy theories and media bias. We must confront these topics head on. If we don’t, the cancer that is unchecked misinformation will only continue to metastasize, undermining the very foundations of our democracy.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

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A neuroscientist explains why Joe Biden’s cognitive health could hand Donald Trump the White House

With age comes wisdom, experience, and unfortunately, cognitive decline. That’s a fact that no American can ignore as we move closer to the next presidential election.

The two main contenders, a sitting president and an ex-president, will be 82 and 78 next year, respectively. When Biden won the election in 2020, he became the oldest sitting president ever, and if Donald Trump wins again — a terrifying but very real possibility — he will be the same age as Biden was when he was sworn in. So, no matter who wins, we are going to have a commander-in-chief who is so old that age-related cognitive decline will be a real concern. This is not an opinion, but a scientific fact of life, and one that will affect all of us who are lucky enough to make it to that age.

While it is clear that age does not necessarily equate to cognitive impairment, science tells us that cognitive decline is an inevitable part of aging. Studies show a slow but steady decrease in cognitive abilities, including memory and processing speed, typically starting around the age of 60, though it may occur earlier in life for some (unless you are lucky enough to be a “super-ager”).

Biden, despite his general physical health, is not immune to these biological realities. Over the past few years, we have seen instances that have raised eyebrows, even among his staunchest supporters. Biden's frequent stumbling over words, forgetting names, or losing his train of thought mid-sentence – they may seem innocuous, chalked up to the stress and exhaustion of the job. But they do raise questions about his cognitive health, especially since Biden isn’t getting any younger.

For example, in a recent speech, Biden made some perplexing statements that were quickly exploited by his critics and ideological enemies, such as, “We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian ocean … I could go on but I’m not; I’m going off script, I’m going to get in trouble.”

This example may seem not worth mentioning, but it is just one of many gaffes that collectively indicate that there may be a reason for concern. Even if there’s no reason to believe the confusion or difficulty articulating policy or current events is affecting his ability to lead, it could certainly affect his ability to debate the eventual Republican presidential nominee., If Biden displays the kind of word salad that has become routine for him over the last couple of years, it could very well hand the presidency to Trump. (Or, say, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.)

Former President Donald Trump is currently leading all polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and hurtling toward a general election rematch with President Joe Biden. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

I know those words are painful to hear right now, but they are a lot less painful than watching Trump get re-elected because no one wanted to say the obvious out of fear of upsetting the tribe.

Whether Biden really suffers from cognitive impairment, it is clear that Americans are paying attention and are concerned. A new poll conducted by ABC and The Washington Post reveals that people’s opinions have been influenced by the media coverage of Biden’s behavior. It showed that 54 percent of respondents believe Trump possesses the mental acuity necessary to perform efficiently as president, while only 32 percent felt Biden displayed the same trait.

Of course, it is completely impossible to know the extent of Biden’s cognitive problems without a detailed clinical assessment — the president has released a summary, but not full details from his 2023 medical check-up — and for that reason you will read opinion pieces with wildly different perspectives on the topic.

An article titled “Let’s Fact Check Biden’s So-Called Mental Decline” was published at The Independent this week arguing that the accusations of mental decline are politically motivated and unjustified. While there is no doubt that the attacks on Biden coming from the right are politically motivated, it is not true that all of the criticisms are unwarranted. If we pretend that nothing is out of the ordinary with Biden simply because he is on our political team, then we are no better than the conservatives who ignore Trump’s pathological lying and narcissism.

Despite the potential problems with Biden’s cognition, I can say with reasonable certainty that he would still make a significantly more competent president than Trump.

In January 2016, almost a year before Trump won the election, I wrote an article for Raw Story called "Trump has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader,” which was followed by many similar articles over the course of his presidency. From my research and analysis, it is clear to me that Biden’s predictable and tempered leadership style is a far safer bet than Trump's divisive rhetoric, malignant narcissism and erratic unpredictability. A Business Insider article titled “350 health professionals sign letter to Congress claiming Trump’s mental health is deteriorating dangerously amid impeachment proceedings” shows that many medical practitioners agree.

However, the question is not whether Biden is better than Trump, but whether Biden is the best presidential candidate the Democrats have to offer. We must think long and hard about a difficult dilemma, because a failure to do so could lead to a catastrophic mistake.

At this moment, there is simply not enough information about Biden’s cognitive health to be able to accurately assess his vulnerability in the upcoming election. But I can tell you this — if Biden fumbles his way through the 2024 campaign, gets destroyed in the presidential debates and loses as a result, everyone is going to ask, “How did this happen? Who thought it was wise to place the burden of warding off autocracy on an octogenarian grappling with cognitive decline? ? Who is to blame for handing the presidency to Donald Trump?”

Perhaps there’s still time to consider another Democratic candidate. It won’t be the first time a sitting president didn’t run for a second term. There are six presidents who chose not to seek re-election, including Lyndon B. Johnson, who publicly cited health issues as the main reason for the choice. Although Biden says he’s in the race to win, there is absolutely no shame in reversing such a decision, and depending on how the next few months go for Biden, it may be the only responsible thing to do.

To be clear, I am not saying stepping aside is the right thing for Biden to do, because I know I lack the information needed to determine that with any confidence.

But I am saying that it could be, and if we simply ignore the issue, we could be risking everything.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Why Trump extremists will grow violent as 2024 election approaches: neuroscientist

As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, we can expect tensions between the political left and right to intensify.

That being said, it's essential to understand the psychological forces at play that may predict a rise not just in disagreement, but in violence. The social psychology theory known as terror management theory offers a powerful lens through which to view the growing polarity and potential hostility, and how that could manifest as violence depending on what happens with Donald Trump — legally and politically — in the coming year.

Terror management theory explains how existential terror — the fear provoked by anything seen as a threat to one's existence — motivates us to adopt cultural worldviews. Examples of cultural worldviews are religions, national identities and political ideologies. To keep our fear in check, we often cling to philosophies that make us feel safe and give us a sense of purpose amid chaos and uncertainty.

Terror management theory is particularly relevant to current political events because it provides a scientific explanation for tribalism. The theory suggests that in the face of threat or fear, we bolster our worldviews, and become more ideological. We also become more tribal, which will strengthen our support for like-minded others, while at the same time making us more prone to aggression toward those who are not like us, and who do not share our worldview.

This is precisely what studies have shown.

A particularly amusing experiment demonstrated this by weaponizing hot sauce. Scientists divided students into two groups and tasked them with writing an essay — either about their own death or a neutral, non-threatening topic.

The students were then introduced to someone who either disparaged or respected their political views, and then asked to choose the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce this person would have to consume. Consistent with the hypothesis of terror management theory, participants induced with existential terror wanted to punish those with an opposing worldview with more hot sauce. The control group did not. While this study was designed to be completely safe, the results suggest that, in real life, the same psychological effect could lead to actual violence, and likely does all the time.

A more disturbing terror management theory study conducted with Iranian and U.S. college students found similar results. One group was instructed to ponder their physical death and describe the ensuing emotions, while the control group was given analogous questions related to dental pain.

The results were revealing: Iranian students contemplating death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the U.S., while those in the control group opposed them. Similarly, existential fear led U.S. conservative students to endorse severe military attacks on foreign nations that would kill large numbers of civilians.

Through these studies, one can clearly see how fear and polarization can strengthen nationalism, exacerbate bias against other groups and fuel hostile behavior.

Not only does existential fear increase tribalism and aggression, we also know that it can directly increase support for Trump, who is again seeking the Republican presidential nomination after losing the presidency in 2020.

Then-President Donald Trump rallies with attendees at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C. Photo: Gage Skidmore

In a study at the College of Staten Island, 152 students were split into two groups. Similar to the previous example, one group was exposed to exercises triggering thoughts about death, while the other underwent similar exercises about pain. Afterward, both groups were questioned about their support for Trump and their likelihood of voting for him in the coming election. The results were telling: the group primed with death-related thoughts showed increased support for Trump, irrespective of their initial political leanings.

This suggests that an atmosphere of existential fear would simultaneously promote aggression while strengthening support for Trump, who regularly projects a “strongman” image and suggests violence as a remedy to political matters.

This is a very scary combination of psychological effects. For this reason we must be aware of this problem, which will become increasingly salient as the 2024 presidential election begins to heat up.

How do we know that the threat is real — that this is not just more fear-mongering? I would argue that we have already seen the dynamic that terror management theory describes in action. Heather Heyer, a counter-protester protesting the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville in 2018, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. In 2020, a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. And on the day of the Capitol riot — a collective display of Trump-inspired aggression — a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. Earlier this month, purported Ku Klux Klan members threatened LGBTQ activists with guns at a peaceful rally in Kentucky.

Now that the election is on the horizon, we can expect similar events to transpire.

For example, what will the response from Trump supporters be if their political messiah is found guilty on a charge that warrants prison time? What if Democrats attempt to ban Trump from running for president over his legal issues? What if he is allowed to run again but loses? What might we expect if Trump rallies his loyal troops and commands them to retaliate? Is another Jan. 6 attack inevitable? Is one that’s even more destructive possible?

It’s not just the cult of Trump we have to worry about, though. The left is not immune to the effects of existential fear, and there is no doubt that we are seeing increased tribalistic behavior among liberals, too. This means that conscious effort must be taken to keep cool, calm and collected as our fear centers are activated and we inevitably become prone to aggression, be it written, verbal or physical.

To use Newton’s third law as a metaphor — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since aggression from one side provokes fear and aggression among the other side, a dangerous feedback loop gets created, which will continue to divide the nation to such a degree that something like a civil war emerges. It may be a “cold civil war,” but such a development would almost assuredly result in violence, destruction and death.

As we stride toward an uncertain future, it's crucial that we understand and educate the public about the psychological dynamics at play at both the individual and collective level. A keen awareness of the cognitive factors contributing to our emotional and tribal responses can cultivate more conscious decision-making and potentially diffuse the threat of aggression and violence.

So, we must be empathetic during these times, but we must also be vigilant. If we stay on the current trajectory of increasing polarization, we can almost be certain that a whole new level of unrest is headed our way. Now the question is whether we have the ability to use this knowledge to avert the coming train wreck. But I’m an optimist, and I think if we can predict something ahead of time, we can figure out how to prevent it. That is precisely why science has been such a powerful force for human civilization, and it’s time we start applying that knowledge to solving the existential threat that is the culture war in America.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why Tucker Carlson could become a bigger threat than Donald Trump

To the bewilderment of many conservatives, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson from the network last month without any warning, despite hosting its most successful show.

Some have speculated that he was canned for racism and misogyny, but let’s be real — those are the kinds of things that you get promotions for at Fox News. It certainly provides a great excuse for Fox, though. While no one will likely ever know the true reason for the decision — though here are some possible explanations — the big question now is: what is next for Tucker Carlson?

Only time will tell, but more than a few outlets and experts are speculating that Carlson could run for president next year, meaning he would be challenging Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. Among the major media outlets that published articles on this possibility are The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Politico, The Hill and Insider, just to name a few.

Following the news of Carlson parting ways with Fox, ex-Republican strategist Rick Wilson said that Carlson would be a bigger threat to Trump compared to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is still the most popular, if flagging, Trump alternative. His tweet read:

"What if he runs? He's rich enough. He'd instantly have an online fundraising juggernaut second only to Trump, and perhaps surpassing him. He's polarizing, terrible, and utterly amoral…in short, better than Ron DeSantis for the base.”

Speaking to Newsweek, another Republican strategist and columnist for The Hill, John Feehery, made the same claim, arguing that: "If Tucker decided to run for president, he would be an immediate threat to Trump and to the rest of the field."

Carlson’s own words may offer the deepest insight into his willingness to seize opportunity and challenge Trump.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson reportedly texted about Trump after the 2020 election.

“Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters,” Carlson similarly texted his producer after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Some might say Carlson-for-president speculation is premature. But if we do not take this possibility seriously, we might regret it later. I say this from experience: For a whole year prior to Trump winning the presidency in 2016, I was writing articles that explained why he was a genuine threat, though at the time most “experts” believed that it was infinitely unlikely that the businessman and reality show star could win the Republican nomination, much less beat Hillary Clinton.

In January 2016, I wrote an essay titled “Donald Trump has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader” that warned about the dangers of his narcissistic personality. Then in July 2016, I published another article titled “A neuroscientist explains why Trump is winning,” yet the media remained certain that there was no chance in hell he’d win the general election. Had CNN and MSNBC realized that Trump was a real threat earlier on, they might not have broadcast footage of him around the clock for an entire year — which likely helped him far more than it hurt him. I believe Trump could’ve been stopped if his opponents were more prepared.

We can’t make that mistake again.

Trump came from entertainment, and that was his secret weapon. He didn’t know how to speak like a politician, so he instead relied on his showmanship and knack for knowing what people want to hear, which he learned from his experience in television. Carlson knows how to entertain, boost ratings and leverage the digital world far better than Trump did when he started his political career, and for that reason, he has the ability to ascend in the political world just as quickly, particularly given our tribalistic presidential primary system that often platforms provocative candidates.

Carlson is also extremely popular — far more popular among Americans on the right than Trump was when he first entered the race. A recent poll found that 16 percent of Americans would be “significantly likely” to watch any new show that Carlson hosts online or on independent media, with another 20 percent saying they’d “likely” watch it. In the week after he left Fox News, the network’s ratings fell by more than 50 percent during his old timeslot, and the general viewership fell by almost that much overall.

If we were to find ourselves in a Carlson presidency, we'd be faced with some serious media manipulation. As a seasoned TV personality for the network that has mastered fear-mongering, Carlson knows precisely how to get the right outraged and afraid. With those skills, he could stoke a new level of xenophobic, racist, bigoted sentiment in America. This would lead to increasing division in a country that is already broken due to polarization.

But crippling division and a new nationalist surge isn’t all we’d have to worry about if Carlson was a prominent political leader — his misinformation and expert ability to spin the truth to support his ideological agenda could be equally dangerous for the nation. Being critical of the government’s response to COVID-19 is one thing — there’s no denying that some massive mistakes were made not just by Trump but by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies and government officials. But Carlson went far beyond this and routinely featured guests who claimed that vaccines present a general danger to people and that they’d be better off without them. If a new virus emerged under a Carlson presidency, the results could be disastrous

Speaking of misinformation, our nation’s taste for conspiracy theories would also be amplified to new levels if Carlson acquires a more powerful and influential position, as he has a proven track record of intentionally misleading the public.

The recent Dominion voting lawsuit, which cost Fox News almost $800 million, was over the network’s insistence that the 2020 election was rigged and that large-scale voter fraud occurred — a stance that Carlson supported and advocated for over and over to millions of views (even though behind the scenes he admitted the claim was bogus).

Whether it’s denying climate change, the existence of white supremacy or the election results, it is clear that Carlson will lie to the nation without hesitation to advance his ideological agenda. If he were to acquire a position of great power, the facts-be-damned, post-truth society that America almost became under Trump could again become a reality.

If that weren’t scary enough, it seems Carlson has the support of Russia, and we know what lengths Russia and Putin will go to in order to help their political and media allies. Following Carlson's departure from Fox News, Russian TV host and Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov encouraged Carlson to run for president, telling him “You are welcome in Russia and Moscow.” Carlson’s anti-Ukraine and pro-Russian rhetoric has undoubtedly gained him support with a fascist regime that knows how to use digital warfare and disinformation campaigns to achieve political goals.

While it is uncertain what Tucker Carlson will decide to do next, we can bet that he will seek a position of greater influence and power. We should take seriously the possibility he’ll run for office because — should he decide to throw his hat in the ring — we as an electorate must be ready for a more intelligent, articulate and media-savvy version of Donald Trump.

Another possibility is that Carlson doesn’t run for president, but Trump asks him to be his vice presidential running mate. Even though text leaks indicated Carlson’s disdain for Trump, Carlson was quick to walk that back and say that he “loves Trump,” and conversely, Trump was quick to say nice things about Carlson after he was fired by Fox.

A Trump/Carlson ticket may be even more likely than Carlson challenging Trump. In fact, the British betting firm Betfair is offering 6/1 odds that Trump chooses Carlson as his vice president, which is far better than the odds they give Carlson for winning the presidential election (80/1).

I can’t think of many things that are more terrifying than a Trump/Carlson presidency. Hopefully, Carlson will disappear into the obscure world of independent right-wing media — Newsmax has effectively invited Carlson to run its operations and One America News Network has made similar come-ons — or change professions completely. Better yet, Carlson could have some kind of spiritual awakening that alters his toxic ideology, but unless someone slips LSD in his coffee, we shouldn’t hold our breath.

But all of those things are less statistically likely than him finding a position of greater influence and power. After all, he was the most popular host at the most popular news network. If there is even a small chance of a complete disaster happening, the best strategy is to be vigilant and prepared. That means thinking about the possibility that Carlson follows a path similar to Trump, and what to do about it. Doing so earlier rather than later could be what prevents it.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

A neuroscientist explains why Donald Trump’s narcissism is now a major threat

On March 18, former president Donald Trump said he believes that he will likely be arrested on charges relating to hush money paid to a porn star.

He is already calling on his supporters to protest his arrest, and while that is not exactly surprising, it is something we should be deeply concerned about. Trump embodies the qualities of a textbook narcissist, and when narcissists feel threatened, they frequently experience what is called narcissistic rage, and become aggressive and obsessed with revenge. Given the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol, which Trump helped incite, we should be vigilant to ensure that history does not repeat itself.

It is no secret that Trump has a narcissistic personality. I doubt the man himself would deny his narcissism — if he were speaking honestly and in private.

In a Vanity Fair article published before Trump became president, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University called Trump “remarkably narcissistic,” and clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis called Trump a classic case of “textbook narcissistic personality disorder.” The article cites more than a few mental health professionals who believe Trump fits all the criteria for having pathological narcissism, and over the years many similar articles would follow, such as this 2016 article in The Atlantic by Northwestern psychology professor Dan McAdams, and this New York Times article by Jennifer Senior, titled “We Are All at the Mercy of the Narcissist-in-Chief.”

Even some Republicans have come out and attested to Trump’s narcissism. For example, this CNN article claims that “Paul Ryan was convinced Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder,” and Ty Cobb, a lawyer who was a member of the Trump administration legal team, described the ex-president as a “deeply wounded narcissist.”

We are all familiar with narcissism — a term derived from Greek mythological figure Narcissus, who fell in love with himself after he saw his own image as reflected in a pool of water. Most of us have known a narcissist at some point in our lives. But what characteristics does a narcissist have exactly? Dan McAdams writes:

“People with strong narcissistic needs want to love themselves, and they desperately want others to love them too — or at least admire them, see them as brilliant and powerful and beautiful, even just see them, period. The fundamental life goal is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see.”

When Trump was president, his narcissism was constantly on display for the whole world to see. He bragged about his crowd sizes. He called himself a genius. He’s since embraced the idea that he’s second only to Jesus Christ.

It should, however, be emphasized that Trump is likely a special kind of narcissist, one psychologists call a “vulnerable narcissist” — a person who tells himself he is superior but, deep down, is extremely insecure. These narcissists have low self-esteem and crave affirmation.

While this insight explains a lot about Trump’s character and previous behavior, it is relevant to the present moment because narcissists who experience a “fall from grace” experience narcissistic injury, which can lead to them lashing out and trying to inflict damage on those they feel did them wrong.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines narcissistic injury as “vulnerability in self-esteem which makes narcissistic people very sensitive to injury from criticism or defeat.” The manual goes on to say, “Although they may not show it outwardly, criticism may haunt these individuals and may leave them feeling humiliated, degraded, hollow, and empty.”

Narcissistic injury can prompt narcissistic rage, which manifests as intense anger, outbursts and extreme aggressiveness. If Trump is arrested, it will almost surely send him into an episode of narcissistic rage. We should be concerned about this possibility, because the last time there was an event that could’ve triggered narcissistic rage — when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden — he refused to concede the 2020 election, fought to retain power and directed his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to march to the Capitol building, which they later attacked. Many politicians’ lives were put in jeopardy, including his own vice president, Mike Pence. We all are familiar with all the destruction caused on that day, but the damage could conceivably be a lot worse if Trump loyalists with a proclivity toward violence believe their political messiah is facing incarceration.

But that’s not all we have to worry about. Trump is running for president again and is actively campaigning for the Republican nomination in 2024. So far, his only semi-serious GOP challenger is Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations. As wild as it sounds, Trump is still about as popular as ever with the American right.

Trump getting elected a second time is a terrifying thought, but if he loses, the result could be just as dangerous. A second loss would almost certainly end his presidential ambitions. The demise of Trump’s political career, with little hope for reclamation, could prompt the world’s most notable narcissist to become further unhinged. Jan. 6, 2021, could be superseded in history booked by another, even darker date. Home-grown terrorism isn’t implausible.

We must remember that just a couple of years ago, the notion of Americans storming the Capitol building, injuring scores of police officers and attempting to hunt down members of Congress and the vice president would have sounded absolutely bonkers. Hardly anyone would’ve taken it seriously — except, perhaps, for those who were familiar with Trump’s narcissistic personality and his vulnerability to be sent into a fit of narcissistic rage.

As a neuroscientist and psychology researcher, I saw the potential for such a thing long before Trump got elected into office. In January 2016, I wrote an article for Raw Story titled “Trump has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader,” which was explicitly about the dangers of his narcissism.

Then, in 2018, I wrote another opinion piece called “Trump’s destruction: A Neuroscientist explains what happens when a narcissist begins to lose power,” focusing on the potential for him to exhibit narcissistic rage. My prediction wouldn’t come true until about two years later.

Based on Trump’s patterns of behavior and the events that are likely to transpire in the near future, I believe it is likely that history will repeat itself, but this is one time I don’t want to be right.

We must be vigilant so that another violent and destructive event, or series of events, does not happen. At the moment, it is unclear exactly how to prevent such a thing, but by cultivating an awareness of the potential disaster, we can begin to plan for it. If we do not, we can expect to be victims of Murphy’s Law, which says “What can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Let’s do what we can to make sure America gets it right this time.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

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Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America

It may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of “collective intelligence,” but there is also “collective stupidity,” and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.

Although the term "stupidity" may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but rather a failure to use one's cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be “smart” while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that “you can’t fix stupid,” but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.

To demonstrate that stupidity does not mean having a low IQ, consider the case of Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines, who is one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Branson has said that he was seen as the dumbest person in school, and has admitted to having dyslexia, a learning disability that affects one’s ability to read and correctly interpret written language. But it wasn’t just reading comprehension that was the problem — “Math just didn’t make sense to me,” Branson has said. “I would certainly have failed an IQ test.”

So, what is responsible for his enormous success, both financially and in terms of being a prolific innovator? Branson attributes his success to surrounding himself with highly knowledgeable and extremely competent people. Branson’s smarts come from his ability to recognize his own limitations, and to know when to defer to others on topics or tasks where he lacks sufficient knowledge or skill.

This means you don’t have to be traditionally intelligent or particularly knowledgeable to be successful in life, make good decisions, have good judgment, and be a positive influence on the world. Stupidity is a consequence of a failure to be aware of one’s own limitations, and this type of cognitive failure has a scientific name: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger
effect is a well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. The effect has been widely written about, and investigated empirically, with hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals confirming and analyzing the phenomenon, particularly in relation to the dangers it poses in certain contexts.

It is easy to think of examples in which failing to recognize one’s own ignorance can become dangerous. Take for example when people with no medical training try to provide medical advice. It doesn’t take much Internet searching to find some nutritionist from the “alternative medicine” world who is claiming that some herbal ingredient has the power to cure cancer. Some of these people are scam artists, but many of them truly believe that they have a superior understanding of health and physiology. There are many people who trust these self-proclaimed experts, and there is no doubt that some have paid their lives for it.

What’s particularly disturbing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people are attracted to confident leaders, so politicians are incentivized to be overconfident in their beliefs and opinions, and to overstate their expertise. For example, Donald Trump — despite not having any real understanding of what causes cancer — suggested that the noise from wind turbines is causing cancer (a claim that is not supported by any empirical studies). It is well documented that on topics ranging from pandemics to climate change, Trump routinely dismissed the opinions of the professionals who have dedicated their lives to understanding those phenomena, because he thought that he knew better. It’s bad enough that politicians like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t recognize their own ignorance and fail to exercise the appropriate amount of caution when making claims that can affect public health and safety — but what is really disturbing is that they are being celebrated for their over-confidence (i.e., stupidity).

It is less surprising that politicians who regularly exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect are being elected to office when one realizes that they are being voted in by people who also display the Dunning-Kruger effect. A 2008 study by the political scientist Ian Anson surveyed over 2000 Americans in an attempt to see whether or not the effect was playing a role in one’s ability to overestimate their political knowledge. The results clearly showed that the people who scored lowest on political knowledge were the very same people who were the most likely to overestimate their performance. While this is shocking, it also makes perfect sense: the less we know about something, the less of an ability we have to assess how much we don’t know. It is only when we try to become an expert on some complex topic that we truly realize how complicated it is, and how much more there is to learn about it.

This new theory of stupidity I have proposed here — that stupidity is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but a lack of awareness of the limits of one’s intelligence or knowledge — is more important right now than ever before, and I’ll tell you why. The same study by Anson mentioned above showed that when cues were given to make the participants “engage in partisan thought,” the Dunning-Kruger effect became more pronounced. In other words, if someone is reminded of the Republican-Democrat divide, they become even more overconfident in their uninformed positions. This finding suggests that in today’s unprecedently divided political climate, we are all more likely to have an inflated sense of confidence in our unsupported beliefs. What’s more, those who actually have the greatest ignorance will assume they have the least!

What we are dealing with here is an epidemic of stupidity that will only get worse as divisions continue to increase. This should motivate all of us to do what we can to ease the political division. When we can clearly see the social factors that are causing people to become increasingly stupid, our anger and hatred toward them should dissipate. We do not have much control over our level of intelligence or ignorance, or our ignorance of our ignorance.

But this does not mean that we should accept stupidity as the result of deterministic forces that are beyond our control. After gaining a deeper awareness of our own cognitive limitations and limited knowledge base, we should do what we can to instill this higher awareness in others. We must not just educate the public and our youth; we must teach them to become aware of their own ignorance, and give them the skills they need to search for more knowledge, and to detect when they or others are overestimating their knowledge or competency.

We have good reason to be optimistic that this is possible. A 2009 study showed that incompetent students increased their ability to estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. This suggests that we can learn a type of “meta-awareness” that gives us the power to more accurately assess ourselves and our own limitations. Once we can do that, then we can know when we need to do more research on a given topic, or to defer to experts. We can also get better at distinguishing between true experts and those who only claim to be experts (but are really just demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect).

We are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives. While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely. That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity, and a healthy amount of skepticism. By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves, and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

Why the deeply psychological war with Donald Trump has only just begun: neuroscientist

Most of us are sick and tired of hearing about Donald Trump. We want him to go away, forever. But the unfortunate truth is that just isn’t happening—not any time soon, at least. Trump’s influence over the Republican party is as great as ever, and if we ignore that, it is like ignoring an infection. It will fester and spread and eat away at the flesh of America unless it is dealt with. But what is the antibiotic that stops the cultural disease that is Donald Trump?

First, we must realize that we are engaged in something like a game of chess. To defeat our opponent, we must be thinking many steps ahead, and we must try to anticipate what they are going to do. We must rely on our rational mind and our reactions must be mindful and strategic, rather than reflexive and impulsive. That may sound like obvious advice, but so far, the Left has been responding predictably, without foresight or strategy, and playing right into Trump’s hand as a result. The more CNN and MSNBC attack Trump and say he is the anti-Christ, the more he is loved by the Right. They think, “If he’s pissed them off that much, he must be doing something right!”

It’s time to acknowledge a failed strategy and try something new. If we don’t, nothing will change, and Trump will keep his influence over almost half the country. He may even get re-elected, as absurd as that sounds in light of the events that transpired on January 6th of last year. But if he does not—whether it’s because he loses or is not allowed to run—there will still be half of the nation following Trump and that influence will be felt in Congress and on the streets. So how can we start playing the game differently?

The intention of this warning is not to prepare us for war, but to avoid it. To prevent the outbreak of a physical war, we may have to engage in a psychological war. It’s the kind of war where no one dies, and our weapon is simply convincing content. But before we entertain some potential solutions and strategies, we should have a sense of how Trump is going to play the game, based on what we know about his psychology. In theory, if we can predict him, we can disarm him.

There’s Nothing More Dangerous Than a Man with Nothing to Lose

My first article about Donald Trump, published in January of 2016, described his narcissistic personality disorder and why it made him a dangerous world leader. According to Raw Story, it was their most popular article ever, receiving an estimated 30 million views over the years. I was not alone in this assessment—more than a few clinical psychologists have identified Trump as a “textbook narcissist.” Two years into his presidency, I wrote a similar piece that explored how Trump might respond to “narcissistic injury,” which occurs when a narcissist loses power and gets disgraced.

When Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden, he became filled with rage and obsessed with revenge. The first thing he tried to do was overturn the election using an angry mob. Ever since his “fall from grace” (though technically there was no ‘grace’ to begin with), he has nothing to lose, and this makes him more dangerous than ever. His narcissistic injury has created narcissistic rage, and this rage means he will try to destroy all those he has a vendetta against. To achieve his goal, he will play dirty, gaslight, and intimidate at a level that would seem extreme even for him. Right now, he is doing everything in his power to systematically fill the Republican party with loyalists and sycophants who will do his bidding with no regard for laws or fairness. The question is, is there anything that can be done about it?

As long as Trump is the most popular figure with right-wing America, Republican politicians will be forced to fall in line. It would seem that what must be done is changing how Trump is perceived by his followers. To do that, we must understand the worldview of his supporters, and why they see Trump as their savior. If we can socially engineer a “fall from grace” with the majority of his supporters, then Republican politicians and Fox News pundits will all begin jumping ship. It briefly looked like that was going to happen when the Capitol Building was being stormed, but Trump cleverly strong-armed them all back into submission.

We are in a War of Worldviews

As a cognitive neuroscientist who has been analyzing Donald Trump and his supporters over the last six years—in dozens of articles for websites like Raw Story, The Daily Beast, and Psychology Today, and in interviews with progressive voices like The Young Turks and David Pakman—I have come to realize that the war with Trump is a war of worldviews. But it is not as simple as the Right versus the Left, and if we make the mistake of thinking it is, then we are missing a massive factor in his continued popularity and will remain clueless about how to combat it.

Yes, it’s true that Trump has become the messiah for conservative America, and that Christian fundamentalists make up a big chunk of his support. These people feel like the conservative worldview is dying and that their Christian values and customs will fade into oblivion if something drastic isn’t done to reverse the trend towards secularism. Fox News fuels these fears daily, and Trump saw an opportunity to exploit the existential terror. But make no mistake—Trump is not a religious man and at his core he is no conservative. It is commonly known but ignored that he used to be a Democrat and a good buddy of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to mention Jeffrey Epstein, whose sleazy values were anything but conservative.

Steve Bannon’s social engineering helped Trump win over conservative America, and similar information warfare could reverse that. A deep and thorough character study of Donald’s anti-conservative past, that forces his followers to see him as an opportunist and not one of them, could go a long way if it were presented by a source that the Right perceives to be a neutral party. His followers will not watch CNN or MSNBC, so the challenge would be to figure out how to deliver the story to them from a source they trust, or at least don’t despise. Truth be told, not all his conservative supporters are racist or bad people. Many just believe everything that Right-wing media feeds them and are convinced that the Left is the real danger to America. If these conservatives can be persuaded that the reality show star is not a true tribe member, it could hurt Trump’s dominance over the Republican party, and reveal to everyone that he’s not invincible. We should not expect this content to make them switch political sides, but if it can weaken Trump’s grip on America, the effort could be worth it.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about what is happening in America is that people want change. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were the most popular presidential candidates because they were the ones promising to take on corruption in Washington and money in politics—even if one of them wanted to do none of those things in reality. People are angry at an economic situation that has led to the highest level of income inequality the nation’s ever seen. Billionaires and corporations on both sides have control over the stories media outlets run and influence the laws to work in their favor. What if we can offer something new to the rational people on the Left and the Right who want systemic change? What if it could be radically progressive—in the sense that the ideas are profoundly different—but in ways that appeal to people across the political spectrum? Is that even possible?

A New Political Party is the Way Forward

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman have founded a new party known as the Forward Party, and it has already announced candidates who will be running for office in the midterm elections.

The party is focused on depolarizing America and healing the division, but without proposing policies that are directly in the center, since they also do not move America “forward.” Because it is open to candidates who lean right and left, it is bipartisan, but it also the definition of progressive, because its platform consists of many radical new ideas—like Yang’s plan for universal basic income (UBI). It may sound like an oxymoron, but the Forward Party might just be America’s first “bipartisan progressive party.”

Could a third party be the thing that unites all rational Americans in a war against corruption, political extremism, and Trumpism? It is hard to say, since neither side seems to be too interested in compromise, and divisive issues like abortion and gun control make any kind of reconciliation difficult to imagine. And what new big ideas is the Forward Party offering that make it something radically different from the Democratic party?

I, for one, believe it is a step in the right direction, though I understand if some think the Forward Party is too young to stand a real chance in the next presidential election. However, if there was ever a time that a third party actually stood a chance, it is right now. If the Forward Party’s presidential candidate seems like the best choice for America, a reasonable strategy would be to support that candidate right up until the moment it seems like defeating Trump is no longer possible. At that point, the Forward Party candidate would urge their supporters to vote for the candidate who can ensure Trump never gets back into the oval office. But if the Forward Party’s pick is polling well and has a chance to win, then it would seem like the perfect opportunity to break America’s infamous two-party system. According to the Washington Post, a growing number of experts believe that the way to fix democracy is to move beyond the two-party system.

As a scientist, I believe that a scientific approach to improving society is what America needs. To be clear, that doesn’t mean looking to existing science for answers—most of our problems will not have obvious answers that can be found in any text book. I simply mean that we should always be experimenting with new ways of doing things and collecting data to see what is or is not working. That way we can collectively adapt and evolve and become an optimally-functional system. Evolutionary theory has shown us that organisms that can’t adapt to a changing world die out. Complex systems science says that social systems are similar to organisms in terms of their dynamics and structure. That means societies must also be able to adapt to a changing world. In other words, they have to be self-correcting. In his best-selling book The Beginning of Infinity, the theoretical physicist David Deutsch—father of quantum computing—explained how societies can be structured to be optimally self-correcting. This requires implementing mechanisms for error detection and correction. If the Forward Party wants to truly be forward-thinking, it must look at the strategies for optimizing systems discovered by nature and cataloged by science. This approach is known as “systems thinking,” and it is transforming how both scientists and citizens solve complex problems of all kinds.

In recent years, a growing number of scientists have recognized the societal significance of a statistical reasoning method known as Bayesian reasoning, which is a procedure for updating your theory, model, or belief-system in the face of new evidence. It involves a relatively complex mathematical formula but you don’t need to know any math to use informal Bayesian reasoning in everyday life—as philosopher Julia Galef explains in this short and accessible video. All you have to do is 1) consider all possible explanations for something, rather than relying purely on “gut instinct,” 2) rank and rate each theory according to how likely it is to be true based on all the known facts, 3) test each theory by using it to make future predictions, and 4) update how you ranked and rated the likelihood of each being true to reflect what you learned from the testing phase. Some of our most respected scientists, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, have identified Bayesian reasoning as a powerful tool in the war against irrationality, as it can combat misinformation and bogus conspiracy theories. At the same time, it can reveal real conspiracies should they exist, by demonstrating that a particular theory about a conspiracy explains the facts better than the alternatives, such as the mainstream narrative. What Bayesian reasoning provides in a nutshell is a universal approach to determining truth. Beliefs should not be believed blindly; they should be tested continually. This is another method for self-correction.

With these principles in mind, I created the Road to Omega Substack to sketch out how the sciences of complexity—like systems science, evolutionary theory, and statistical science—can reveal new ways to design optimally functional and resilient social, political, and economic systems. Not only that, collectively these sciences illuminate what could be called a “new cosmic narrative”—a picture of the universe as a creative system that inevitably generates complexity in the form of life, consciousness, and civilization. That means that we are not accidents of nature, we are actually the primary drivers of this complexity growth process. An awareness of this fact can instill within us a purpose, that purpose being to see that our civilization progresses into a more complex, integrated, and intelligent state of existence; one that acquires the ability to get off of the planet before our sun dies and takes all sentient life with it. I have described this new scientific paradigm, which creates a foundation for a unifying worldview, in my new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.

If a progressive ideology is one that aims to bring about human progress, then it must view society as a whole as an adaptive system, and it must look to the new sciences of complexity to understand the evolutionary mechanisms that drive organisms toward higher organization and computational capacity. The Forward Party is a chance to build a political party that is self-correcting and constantly evolving, rather than dogmatic and rigid. It is young and therefore can be shaped and sculpted into a truly progressive party, one that is not under the influence of billionaires and corporations that don’t have the best interests of the people in mind. It is also a chance to weaken the grip that Donald Trump has on the nation, by offering a new political option that is uncorrupted by money and untainted by extremist elements. The country desperately needs radical change, but change that is rooted in logic and rationality. Those are the requirements for change that moves us forward and not backward; that is, for change to be progress.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist, an author, and a Psychology Today blogger. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

Scientists establish link between religious fundamentalism and brain damage

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

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Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

'The laws of physics overwhelmingly favored the emergence of consciousness': are intelligent ETs out there?

We are living it totally crazy times, and if you don’t think so, you haven’t been paying attention. For the first time in modern history, it is no longer fringe to believe in UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects that move in ways that seem to be leagues beyond today’s technology have been captured on video by military agencies and released by the U.S. government. Whether these UFOs are spacecraft manned with extraterrestrials or just shockingly advanced military technology is an open question. There’s also the possibility that the videos are not what they appear—that they are capturing something in some sort of way that creates a visual illusion. Whatever explanation you favor, it is safe to say that you are in no position to claim any certainty in the matter. And if you are betting on aliens, you are not a fool. The physics displayed by the supposed craft in the videos released by the U.S. government defy explanation.

In this article, I don’t intend to convince anyone that the videos show aliens. I’m going to make an argument that I can back up with well-established science, which suggests that intelligent life is not all that rare in the universe, and from that fact, let the reader make up their mind about whether or not they think ETs are among us. Whatever you decide, you will come away with a new understanding of the universe and our place in it. The saga of cosmic evolution is a story of intelligent beings inevitably becoming gods, or at least sentient agents with god-like powers. This evolutionary trajectory has nothing to do with anything supernatural—it is a product of natural processes that create a tendency toward higher complexity.

Richard Dawkins, a god among evolutionary theorists, atheists, and skeptics—most famous for his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene, which revolutionized evolutionary biology—was recently asked “Do you think there’s intelligent life out there in the universe?” by MIT podcast host Lex Friedman. His answer might surprise you.

“Well, if we accept that there’s intelligent life here, and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic—10^22 stars have been estimated—it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that then you’re committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable; I mean ludicrously, off the charts, improbable. And I don’t think it’s that improbable.”

In other words, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, by today’s rough estimates. Either we are not alone, or we are unfathomably lucky to be here. But what if life were not a happy accident, and instead a regularity of nature that inevitably follows from the laws of physics on all those planets with the right chemical ingredients? Not an anomaly, but a natural manifestation of a universe that organizes itself to create complexity and consciousness?

Let’s get back to Richard Dawkins’ argument that intelligent life is almost certainly out there:

“…there are really two steps: the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also probably fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10^22-improbable.”

According to Dawkins, there are so many planets out there that the improbable becomes probable. But in this article we are going to explain why life’s emergence and subsequent evolution toward intelligence was inevitable rather than improbable, not just here on Earth, but on all planets with the right planetary conditions. Basically, if the planet is sufficiently Earth-like it will produce complex adaptive systems (i.e., organisms), which will form a biosphere that produces increasingly complex and intelligent agents. Why?

Because once you have a reproducing system that can evolve through Darwinian evolution, it’s just a matter of time before the biosphere generates an intelligent species with a collective intelligence capable of producing science and technology. In response to Lex Friedman’s question, “Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planet as well?” Dawkins remarked:

“I’ve stuck my neck out and said that ever if we ever do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life, in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection; the non-random survival of randomly-generated codes.”

In an article titled Darwin’s Aliens, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the authors argue that extraterrestrials would likely evolve through natural selection to be highly complex and intelligent, as Dawkins suggests. Now we are going to learn why new theoretical work is providing support for that idea.

To explain why life and intelligence emerge inevitably given Earth-like conditions, we must understand the role that energy flows play in organizing non-living matter into organic computing machinery with sentience. In other words, evolution toward conscious creatures of increasing intelligence was destined to emerge in a universe that is always increasing in complexity.

Inevitable Life

Until recently, most scientists believed that the origin of life was such an unlikely event, requiring the “chance assembly” of so many molecules, that it would be unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the universe. The Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod poetically summed up this view in his influential book Chance and Necessity, published in 1970, when he said, “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” It was his passionate and uncompromising belief that “The universe was not pregnant with life.”

However, another 20th century Nobel Laureate, the biologist Christian de Duve, challenged this view, arguing that the universe was indeed pregnant with life, going as far as to say that biology seems to have been “written into the fabric of the universe.”

De Duve was in good company. Carl Sagan, the most famous astronomer of the 20th century, also thought that life was a probable phenomenon in those places where conditions are ripe for life, writing:

“The origin of life must be a highly probably affair. As soon as conditions permit, up it pops!”

Indeed, the planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life is now estimated to be about 4 billion years old. It arose only 100 million years or so after the Earth’s surface cooled enough to support life. That’s a blink of an eye in cosmic time.

So what does it mean exactly to say that life was inevitable rather than improbable? It means that when you have the right thermodynamic conditions—thermodynamics is the science of energy flow—energy moving through a system will organize inanimate matter with the ingredients for organic chemistry into animate matter, or biology.

“The origin of life must be a highly probably affair. As soon as conditions permit, up it pops!”

Indeed, the planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life is now estimated to be about 4 billion years old. It arose only 100 million years or so after the Earth’s surface cooled enough to support life. That’s a blink of an eye in cosmic time.

So what does it mean exactly to say that life was inevitable rather than improbable? It means that when you have the right thermodynamic conditions—thermodynamics is the science of energy flow—energy moving through a system will organize inanimate matter with the ingredients for organic chemistry into animate matter, or biology.

How exactly does energy flowing through molecules organize those atoms into a complex adaptive system that can reproduce itself? Whenever there is a process that turns a simple system into something complex, we can suspect that some form of Darwinian evolution is at play. Dissipative adaptation is the newly-discovered process by which molecules assemble themselves when they are driven to interact by a flow of energy. Although this mechanism was described conceptually by Harold Morowitz many decades earlier, Jeremy England of MIT gave it a mathematical description and devised simulation studies that would serve as a proof of concept. To put it another way, the molecules of organic chemistry self-organize when sufficient energy is flowing through the system. Given enough time, a self-maintaining chemical system emerges that can copy itself. While there are many details that remain a mystery, the basic mechanisms underlying the origin of life have been illuminated by origin-of-life researchers.

According to the theories of England, Morowitz, and Smith, the emergence of life in the energetic conditions of the early Earth should be about as surprising as water flowing downhill. If you have the right ingredients, life emerging is not improbable but inevitable. So, when we ask how common is basic life in the universe, we must ask how many Earth-like planets are out there. Depending on what exact factors are critical—such as size, distance from a star, and molecular makeup—there are billions to trillions of them.

So alien life is almost certainly out there, and while it is obviously not present on the majority of planets—at least not anywhere near us—it is presumably not rare either. While it may be too far for us to see with current technology, the cosmos could be teeming with life. Given its inevitability, you could say we live in a “pro-life universe.”

“If life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order,” writes origins-of-life pioneer Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, “then we truly are at home in the universe.”

While this changes how we think about life—it is not accidental but a natural manifestation of the “cosmic code”—it would be quite disappointing if only single-celled life were out there. Bacteria are not going to produce anything interesting, like culture and technology. So the real question of interest is whether intelligent life is out there.

Well, extraterrestrial enthusiasts are in luck, because there are good reasons to believe that with biospheres like the one we inhabit, the eventual emergence of general intelligence may be just as inevitable as basic biology.

Inevitable Intelligence

If intelligence is not an unlikely phenomenon, but a natural manifestation of a universal tendency for complexity to arise and grow without bound where conditions permit, then we can expect intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos.

Those who have taken an evolution course in high school or college know that all species are not evolving toward higher complexity or intelligence. Sharks and crocodiles are well-known examples of species that haven’t changed in any significant way over many millions of years of evolution by natural selection. In fact, fish that have migrated to caves have been known to lose their eyes over evolutionary time, becoming simpler. This fact clearly illustrates that not all organisms, or even the majority, are growing more complex through evolution. If a genetic mutation simplifies the design of a creature, and that simplified design increases their ability to survive—their ‘fitness’—then that simpler form will be ‘selected’ by nature. In other words, they will get to live on and reproduce.

It would appear that evolution does not make species increasingly complex or intelligent per se, but simply well-adapted to whatever environment they habit. Some ecological ‘niches’ present a great variety of challenges that must be adapted to, while others present hardly any. As a result, some organisms become more complex while some barely evolve at all.

Some scientists, like the famous 20th century evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, have interpreted this to mean that evolution does not create any inherent drive toward higher complexity and intelligence, but this is a mistake. While evolution certainly does not drive every species to become increasingly complex, it does continually create new species, and over evolutionary time, will produce increasingly complex species.As the great sociobiologist E.O. Wilson explained in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life, there is a self-reinforcing tendency for ecosystems to create new niches and new species.

Not only that, the need to adapt to an increasingly complex environment will systematically increase the complexity of the most complex species through what is known as an “evolutionary arms race,” which is a name for a competitive struggle that ratchets up intelligence. For example, humans in complex urban societies, like the tech hub in Silicon Valley, are competing with each other for jobs that require high intelligence and flexible or adaptive thinking. This selection pressure has been around to some degree since homo sapiens emerged, and when civilization emerged, the need for complex problem-solvers exploded.

A similar idea is the “Red Queen Hypothesis,” which says that for the most intelligent species in a biosphere, simply persisting requires a continual increase in intelligence. Members of such a species must constantly adapt, evolve, and reproduce just to maintain their existence, due to a competitive, ever-evolving environment. The name, proposed by the evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen in 1973, comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. After Alice complains of running for a very long time and going nowhere, the Queen responds, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” In other words, some species must evolve to become increasingly complex just to stay in the game of existence. With evolutionary arms races happening constantly, it should not be surprising that increasingly intelligent species emerge over time as a result of blind and mechanical evolutionary processes.

Inevitable Expansion

The other major mechanism of complexity and intelligence increase is known as an “evolutionary transition,” which has also been called a “metasystem transition.” These terms typically refer to events where organisms come together, through cooperative evolution, to form a larger organism—a superorganism that has a collective intelligence that is greater than the intelligence of any of its members.

One such transition occurred when single-celled organisms formed a multicellular organism. Another occurred when multicellular organisms came together to form societies. Ant colonies are a popular example, but human civilization is another, although we don’t typically think of the global population of humans as forming a superorganism. But what we are collectively is a global brain, in which humans and their devices and AIs form something like a neural network that spans the planet. The body of the superorganism that supports the global brain is the entire biosphere, and the processes of life make up its physiology.

What’s the next stage in the evolution of the global superorganism? Well, depending on how far the organism metaphor applies, the biosphere’s next step would be self-replication. What would this look like at the level of a biosphere? If we colonize Mars, that would be the biosphere reproducing! When intelligent life terraforms a new planet, it will create a copy of its biosphere, and because the new planet will have different properties than the planet of origin, there will be replication with variation. These planets may compete economically and for new territory in space, or they may cooperate to form a new superorganism—perhaps one of galactic proportions, given enough time.

“I do believe that the laws of physics overwhelmingly favored the emergence of consciousness,” says one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Christof Koch, who was trained as a physicist.

“The rise of sentient life within time’s wide circuit was inevitable. Teilhard de Chardin is correct in his view that islands within the universe—if not the whole cosmos—are evolving toward ever-greater complexity and self-knowledge.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who wrote a truly prophetic book about the progressive nature of biological and technological evolution called The Phenomenon of Man, published after his death in 1955 because the Catholic Church considered it heresy. This book, written two decades earlier, predicted the emergence of what Teilhard de Chardin called a “noosphere”—a word he used to describe a state in which humans form a global mind as a result of communication technology (“noos” is Greek for mind). Due to the predictive power of his theory of progressive evolution, called the Omega Point theory, Teilhard was able to foresee the creation of the Internet even before the digital computer was invented. An omega point is a state of optimal complexity that an evolving biosphere tends to move in the direction of, due to what physicists call an “attractor.”

The great inventor Nikola Tesla also predicted strangely specific details about the future based on his idea that humans on Earth are forming a global brain:

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

Despite the appearance of having some kind of psychic ability to see into the future, these men simply understood the continual and accelerating increase in complexity and intelligence that results from continual biological, culture, and technological evolution.

While the success of our specific civilization is in no way guaranteed, it appears that there’s a natural tendency for biospheres being pushed by flows of solar energy toward greater organization to grow increasingly complex and intelligent. Adaptive complexity—which is what life really is—doesn’t just grow more computationally powerfully over time, it also becomes harder to kill or restrain. This is the magic of a self-correcting biosphere—by learning from its mistakes, a complex adaptive system actually becomes more powerful from everything that doesn’t eliminate it completely. So, the inevitable growth of complexity and the spread of life in the cosmos is not driven by some supernatural or conscious cosmic force; it is a learning process that creates knowledge which allows sentient systems to resist the natural tendency toward decay or disorder described by the second law of thermodynamics.

David Deutsch, father of the field of quantum computing and the leading advocate for the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, is very clear about the open-ended nature of evolution: “This process need never come to an end. There are no inherent limits to the growth of knowledge and progress.”

As long as there is usable energy to extract somewhere out there in the universe, intelligence can continue to spread through the cosmos, converting the inanimate matter of the universe into the living network. Through the process of complexity increase, the inanimate universe begins to wake up and experience the fruits of its own creation. Carl Sagan famously said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” and that poetic statement now rests on a firm scientific foundation.

Coming back to our original question: what have we learned about the likelihood of aliens in the universe? They almost certainly exist, and some of these aliens are almost certainly intelligent. Of course, the Fermi paradox remains: if intelligent life is out there, why haven’t we seen any traces of it. Well, space is a big place, and it may take a long time to get here. Our tools for detecting them may also be too primitive. So, we may just be early to the game—ETs may be on their way here right now, coming at us from a distant galaxy at near the speed of life. Of course, that is, if they aren’t already among us, keeping themselves undetected as they study our weird and seemingly self-destructive society in an attempt to better understand the nature of life.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and a science journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian. His new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity is available for pre-order now.

A neuroscientist explains how the far-right's most fanatical followers could lead America to societal collapse

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Do not be alarmed, but consider this article a prediction and a warning. Actually, it's okay to be a little alarmed, because recent events—like the storming of the Capitol—are certainly cause for concern. Let's call it what it is; Donald Trump has created a cult and radicalized its members. QAnon also shares a large part of the responsibility, whoever they are. We may not be able to see it because Trump has been banned from Twitter and Q conversation cleaned from social media, but behind the scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers.

How do we know that it is as serious as I say; that this is not just more fear mongering? Well, for one, people have died. Heather Heyer, a counterprotester protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. Last year a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. On the day of the Capitol riot, a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. In addition to these troubling events, many others who will go unnamed have been the victims of hate crimes that can be traced to the alt-Right, pro-Trump movement.

But the causalities have not only been on one side. Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt was fatally wounded by a cop as the mob tried to breach a door, another frightening moment caught on video. The point I'm making has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified—though saying that level of force was necessary strikes me as uncomfortably close to Right-wing apologists who defend cops that shoot unarmed black men. The point is that the violence is escalating, and there's every reason to believe that escalation will continue. To use Newton's third law as a metaphor—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, what does this mean for the future of America?

Since aggression provokes fear, and fear promotes aggression, a dangerous feedback loop has been established, dividing the nation to such a degree that something like civil war seems imminent. It may be a "cold civil war," but there will still be violence, destruction, and death. There will also be more gridlock in Washington, which makes any kind of progress impossible. It is hard to calculate the suffering that could have been avoided with a functional Congress, but we can be sure it is substantial. And if the division gets too severe, which is where we are headed, there will be a point of no return. Social chaos and economic collapse will follow, the United States will lose its status as a superpower, and life as we know it, will cease. If the pandemic showed us anything, it is that despite how advanced we are technologically, we are not protected from disaster, and our way of life can change overnight.

The good news is that this gloomy future is only inevitable should we choose not to intervene. But we do have to make a conscious effort to avoid catastrophe if we want any chance of being successful. I'm not talking about compromising, or forgiving, or forgetting—because we should do none of those things. I'm proposing something altogether new, something radical to stop Right-wing radicalism. But to understand the solution, and why it is necessary, we first have to get a clearer understanding of the problem, and of the predictive power of science.

The Predictive Power of Terror Management Theory

To those skeptics who consider a civil war of sorts an unlikely scenario, just ask yourself how likely any of the events mentioned above would have seemed in the pre-Trump era. Imagine taking a time machine back to 2014, and telling people that the reality show star Donald Trump would be our next president. That alone would sound ridiculous. Now imagine telling people that thousands of his supporters would storm the Capitol—many armed—in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. It would sound like some zany plot for an over-the-top comedy. Now imagine that after such event, and after trying to get his vice president killed, Trump would still own the Republican party and all of conservative media. On the surface, this outcome seems so improbable that it makes one doubt our ability to predict the future at all.

Despite how unlikely this general scenario might have seemed, I'm going to argue that it was in fact predictable with a high degree of statistical certainty, if one had the proper theoretical framework through which to understand those events as they were unfolding. That framework is called Terror Management Theory(TMT), and this paradigm from social psychology will be our sense-making lens in a time where nothing seems to make much sense.

Armed with the logic of Terror Management Theory, and an understanding of the relevant neuroscience, I was able to predict the rise of Trump, the white Nationalist movement that put him in office, the Q problem that led to the Capitol attack, and the refusal to accept the results of the election by Trump and his supporters—many months in advance. These predictions will be explained later in the article. No, I am not a psychic, but I did have a crystal ball called "science."

Karl Popper, the father of the philosophy of science, said the riskier the prediction made by a scientific theory, the more convincing it is when that prediction comes true. And you can be sure that when I was making such predictions, in articles for websites like Raw Story, Daily Beast, and Psychology Today, they seemed to describe highly unlikely outcomes. That is, if one were getting their analyses from mainstream news media and professional statisticians unfamiliar with the effects of "mortality salience"—in other words, making people think about death, or making them feel that there is a looming existential threat. I bring up these predictions not to say "I told you so" or for bragging rights; rather, it is a plea for the reader to take the predictions of the theory seriously.

To understand how Terror Management Theory can be used to predict the collective behavior of a society when existential threat looms—whether that threat is ISIS, Right-wing terror, or the pandemic—a brief introduction is in order. If you are already familiar with the theory and its relevance to Trump supporter psychology from past articles published at Raw Story, know that this piece presents new insights and ties up many seemingly unrelated features of cognition in a way that illuminates precisely why everything happened the way it did. The Trump loyalist is a mystery we are about to unravel, and in doing so, we come to see that the average MAGA maniac had little choice over their behavior.

Cultural Worldviews are Death-Anxiety Buffers

Terror Management Theory, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book from the 1970s called The Denial of Death, has been supported by hundreds of psychology and neuroscience studies. According to the theory, most of human behavior is driven by our subconscious fear of death. Unlike most if not all other animals, we have an awareness that one day we will inevitably die, for reasons that are beyond our control. This realization leads to an existential fear that is always bubbling beneath the surface. Without any way to cope with that cold hard fact of life—or fact of death, I should say—it can be difficult to get up in the morning, and to go on living, knowing it is all in futility.

How do we deal with our fear of death and unrelenting existential angst? Through cultural worldviews.

According to TMT, as a way of dealing with persistent death anxiety, humans created cultural worldviews—like religions, national identities, and political ideologies—to ease our fears and distract us from the fact that we will soon be gone, and probably forgotten. These worldviews make us feel safe and permanent by providing paths to immortality.

Through the concept of an afterlife, religions make literal immortality possible, while political ideologies and national identities give us symbolic immortality. In other words, they make us feel like we're part of a group and a movement that will outlive the individual. Worldviews also give life a meaning and a purpose. Whether we identify as Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, we all belong to a tribe. Some tribes are just more ideologically extreme than others, and less accepting of outsiders. This applies even to atheists and anarchists, who are often just as ideological as the ideologies they are trying to escape.

So, worldviews are a double-edged sword: on one hand they give us direction and comfort, on the other they divide us into in-groups and out-groups, turning fellow humans into spiritual or political enemies. The unfortunate result is tribalism. Racism can be thought of as a specific type of tribalism, as tribalism proper would include other types of prejudice, like bias against people of other nationalities, religions, and political parties.

Tribalism, or loyalty to one's social group and aggression toward outsiders, is bad enough when times are good, but when there is an atmosphere of existential fear lingering over society for whatever reason—terror attacks, political incompetence, or a pandemic—tribal behavior gets turned up to eleven. In response to mortality salience, we double-down on our beliefs and try to force them on dissimilar others, and if they resist, we try to punish them. Whether the purpose of this punishment is to enforce fairness or to get revenge is largely in the eye of the beholder.

Understanding racism as emergent from tribalism can make sense of many confusing things. For example, during the Capitol riot, footage from Fox News showed more than a few black protestors in the audience. CNN cameras showed practically none, and we will probably never know whether Fox was selectively focusing on the minorities in the crowd, or if CNN was selecting them out of shot, though we can reasonably assume the truth is probably somewhere in between. While the minorities appeared to be safe in the crowd of QAnons and Trump soldiers, Nancy Pelosi would have undoubtedly gotten mauled by the mob. This of course does not mean that many of the Alt-Right rioters were not racist—it simply means they interpreted the minorities in the crowd to be tribe defectors, and as long as they show allegiance to the Nationalist movement or conspiracy theory mindset that signals they belong to the right tribe, the white tribe, they are accepted.

While the Alt-Right is mostly composed of Christians and Republicans, their Christian-American worldview has evolved into the more-extreme philosophical framework outlined by the tribe leaders—Donald Trump, Q, and conservative talk show hosts looking to boost ratings. At the same time, these influencers are monitoring social media and gauging sentiment on the ground, so the views of the tribe members and leaders evolve together, and this coevolution is guided largely by the atmosphere of existential fear, which is enhanced by the fear mongering coming from the top. And then, Trump's reassuring words, and Q's perceived righteousness, provide scared and confused human beings with a philosophy that gives them comfort and purpose. It is difficult if not impossible to reach these people with reason alone, as reason is not going to make them feel safe or comforted or inspired. And if the reasoning is perceived as being based on principles from an opposing tribe's worldview, they will flat out reject that logic on principle alone. That is not to say these people are completely unreachable—it's just going to take a lot more than reasoning with them.

Predictions Come True

What were the sources of existential threat that created the conditions that would put an opportunist like Trump in the most powerful position in the world? In 2016, I wrote an article for the website Aeon titled How the Fear of Death Makes People More Right-Wing, which argued that the Brexit and Trump movements were catalyzed by existential fear created by the string of ISIS attacks that had recently rocked the world. Prior to that essay, in January—almost a year before the election—I wrote an article for Raw Story called Donald Trump Has a Mental Disorder That Makes Him a Dangerous World Leader, which over the course of his presidency would receive upwards of 30 million views, making it the website's most popular article ever published. In July of 2016, when all the pundits and statisticians were predicting a blowout by Hillary Clinton, I published another article titled A Neuroscientist Explains Why Trump is Winning, and one month later another piece titled The More People Think About Death, the More They Think About Voting for Trump, which directly linked Terror Management Theory to Trump's rabid support. A 2016 Daily Beast article along the same lines, called Why Do Some People Respond to Trump? It's Biology 101, issued a warning for voters in its concluding paragraph:

"The rise of Trump has defied almost all logic. But he isn't appealing to logic. He is appealing to our most basic survival instincts. Those include fear and the natural tendency to thrive and conquer. This presidential election will be an important test for our nation. We will see if we are evolved enough for our logic to overcome our instincts."

Apparently we were not. Over the next few years, I would write more than a dozen articles on Trump-related psychology for Raw Story and Psychology Today that would receive millions of views, and land me offers of representation by fancy literary agencies, and media requests for appearances on popular web shows like the Young Turks' Damage Report and the David Pakman Show. In these interviews I described how Trump would respond as he began to lose power, based on insights from Terror Management Theory and the neuroscience of narcissism. Again, I deserve no special credit for these predictions; had I not been introduced to Terror Management Theory by a colleague, I would have been just as clueless as the pundits and statisticians. However, Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist who wrote The Denial of Death, and Sheldon Solomon, the psychologist who turned Becker's idea into an actual testable theory, are prophets in my book. Prophets of death, I guess you'd call them.

A more recent article, posted in September of 2020 at Psychology Today, titled How Trump and Media Allies Target the Mentally Vulnerable, had another clear warning. The teaser text read, "We can expect that conspiracy theories will be weaponized this election (again)." In it I explain how Trump and Q targeted people with schizophrenia and related disorders, by exploiting their heightened sensitivity to patterns (which are often not actually there). In another article published around the same time, I warned that the division was getting so bad that we could expect the election results to be rejected by half of the country. Despite these dire predictions being widely broadcast, the future that the science was foreshadowing seemed to be unavoidable. Why? Because unless we can learn to mentally override our fears and biases, they will completely control us, and they will make us tribal. But we are not totally hopeless—if we understand the neuroscience underlying these phenomena, we can fight back.

The Prefrontal Cortex is the Source of "Free Will"

The kind of person who is likely to be a Trump extremist is also likely to have impaired or suboptimal brain function in an important region known as the prefrontal cortex. A healthily-functioning prefrontal cortex is what allows one to override their primitive instincts, to think rationally, and to respond to stressful events in a controlled manner, rather than being controlled by fear and reflexive behavior. It does this by arming the conscious agent with a higher form of self-regulation and control, known as cognitive control, executive control, or effortful control.

To be clear, impaired cognitive control is not just a problem we see with Right-wing radicals. It is connected to ideological extremism more generally, so poor prefrontal activation is a concern for Left and Right-wingers alike. In fact, this cognitive profile is also associated with stimulant and alcohol addiction, as well as mental illness, like schizophrenia. And in super stressful times, like during a pandemic, we all become mentally ill in some way (anxiety, depression, etc.), and therefore less in control of our biases and behavior, which limits our ability to act freely. Why? Because the cognitive mechanisms that normally allow us to do so dissolve, leaving us with only preprogrammed behavior.

While some people will claim that they have no racial biases, or any biases for that matter, a famous experiment called the implicit bias task reveals that almost all of us do, and there's plenty of data to prove it. This bias affects how we process information and perceive the social world around us. However, this bias is subconscious and not easily detected with the naked eye. This has the unfortunate result of making it easy to ignore. Whether or not our implicit racial bias leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically the amygdala, which lights up when we experience something we perceive to be threatening, and the prefrontal cortex, whose job it is to regulate and suppress that fear response and the associated behavior. But if the prefrontal cortex isn't working right, it can't do its job.

Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display a stronger implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in the amygdala. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden sensation of feeling scared. In people with healthy functioning brains, the fast amygdala response activates the prefrontal cortex, which is slower and plays a regulatory role. When the fear system is triggered, prefrontral areas work to assess the situation rationally, calming the mind and curbing fear-evoked behavior. Thanks to specific neural regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain exercises cognitive control, suppressing the tendency toward tribalism.

The problem is, not everyone has a properly functioning prefrontal cortex, and these people are the ones whose biases control them. They cannot reason those fearful surges away because they lack the mechanisms that make that kind of high-level reasoning possible. Since alcohol and amphetamine addiction can exacerbate this problem, Fox News viewers with such vices will be more vulnerable to the effects of fear mongering, and if they are given a "call to action" by a tribe leader like Trump or Q, more likely to act aggressively in an effort to push their worldview on others. Most supporters will stay home, but with many millions of followers tuned in, it is not surprising that a few thousand showed up to storm the Capitol.

So now that we understand the root cause of it all, perhaps we should view Trump and Q followers differently. They are not normal supporters, but more akin to cult members who have been radicalized by fear, their fates determined due to a lack of free will—which refers to our ability to override our primitive programming and tribal instincts. They are, in a sense, victims. They have been duped and brainwashed by rigid ideologies almost from the time of birth, and those ideologies have been weaponized by divisive politicians like Donald Trump. Does it make more sense to want to punish or fight these people, or to recognize them as agents who've lost their autonomy and ability to reason effectively?

The enemies are the influencers intentionally deceiving these vulnerable people, stoking their fears and fueling their biases. You may say some were racist, crazy, or ignorant before Trump, but we now see how that got that way. Politicians create fear and hatred for votes, Alex Jones does it for clicks, Fox does it for ratings, and QAnon does it for…chaos, I suppose. These are the people we must not let win. The actual followers are pawns in their game.

So, what can we do to release these people from the grips of their psychological captors?

The Path to Deradicalization

The solution is multi-faceted, and change won't happen overnight. One major goal would be to alter the worldview and belief structure of the extremist, and another would be to strengthen their prefrontal cortex, so that the agent is in control, rather than being controlled by the primitive brain.

Fortunately, one fascinating feature of the brain is its plasticity—or ability to rewire itself in response to new information and experience throughout life. Through exposure to new stimuli, new synaptic connections can be formed, creating neural pathways that can promote a restructuring of old and rigid belief systems. To facilitate cognitive restructuring, meditation and attentional exercises can train the prefrontal cortex to attenuate a hyperactive amygdala and control those bad instincts. A campaign to make these kinds of practices commonplace should be a goal of scientists and educators. It is not easy, but it is certainly possible to reverse biased and even racist tendencies through cognitive interventions. Counterbias training has proven effective in making police officers more aware of their implicit biases, though enhanced awareness does not always immediately translate into changes in behavior.

That could require more extreme therapeutic measures, such as pharmacological treatments to reset the brain. Psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms, or LSD, supplemented with talk therapy could be an effective way to alter rigid worldviews and dissolve biases. In a 2016 article, I suggested LSD therapy for Donald Trump, and although the title may make one chuckle, I seriously believe it would be the most effective way to get Trump to understand the effects of the division he's sowed. Psychedelics work by relaxing belief structures, so that the agent can "achieve a healthy revision of pathological beliefs," to quote psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris. Unfortunately, this remedy would require that the extremist be open-minded enough to give such an experimental treatment a try. Given that the average Q follower is all about "waking up" and seeing reality as it is, it is not unreasonable to think that a psychedelics campaign could catch on in those communities. Studies have shown that the use of psychedelics is associated with a decrease in authoritarian political views and an increase in views associated with liberalism, like open-mindedness and empathy (though one could argue some "liberals" today have neither of these). These drugs work by dissolving the ego, making one feel more connected to nature and to others.

But the real problem is that our most popular worldviews—the major religions, political ideologies, and national identities—divide us into tribes, and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and shared human interests. If Terror Management Theory is correct, then the obvious solution is a new cultural and political worldview that unites us all under a common existential goal: the continued survival, progress, and eventually, the outward expansion of humanity. This worldview is called the Cosmic Perspective, and I have outlined it in a Psychology Today blog post titled, Could a 'Cosmic Religion' Unite a Divided Nation? You can learn about how the Cosmic Perspective naturally emerges from Terror Management Theory in this YouTube video on my channel (Road to Omega), Trump Divided America—Here's How We Heal.

Part of being liberal means being compassionate, but this is just as much about practicality as it is empathy. There's really no other choice than trying to make things better. I'll be playing my part by creating more content aimed at coming together—call it propaganda for a psychedelic revolution. Coming together does not mean meeting in the middle—as extreme centrism can be just as counterproductive as any other kind of extremism. We need radical solutions that push us forward, and we cannot go forward if we're at war.

If you'd like to be part of the solution, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, Road to Omega, which is a project aimed at fighting misinformation, healing division, and redistributing wealth and power in America. The project will be tokenized with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and token holders will benefit from the project's success, so there is value in participating.

Simply stated, Road to Omega is an effort to save the world with science and epistemology. The plan entails:

If you'd like to read more about Road to Omega before subscribing, check out the first Substack newsletter—a plan to save the world with science and epistemology—here. This post lays out the plan in detail and tells you how you can get involved. Alternatively, you can read the much shorter About page.Aside from the newsletter, I will be continuing to publish articles at Raw Story along the same lines, so stay tuned!
Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian.

'Follow Trump off a cliff’: Psychological analysis reveals 14 key traits of people who support the president

As he himself said even before he won the presidential election in 2016, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not, at least for the majority of his supporters, and that is something that should disturb us. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president's lies should have us all wondering why they haven't destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven't sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy." Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man's political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paper published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016 by myself, a cognitive neuroscience and psychology researcher, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect

This list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump's intransigent support, and as the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters' unbridled allegiance.

The psychological phenomena described below mostly pertain to those supporters who would follow Trump off a cliff. These are the people who will stand by his side no matter what scandals come to light, or what sort of evidence for immoral and illegal behavior surfaces.

1. Practicality Trumps Morality

For some wealthy people, it's simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not matter if he's a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent. It is unknown whether these people are eternally bound to Trump in the way others are, but we may soon find out if the Mueller investigation is allowed to come to completion.

2. The Brain's Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump

According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session. This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn't necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple language clearly resonate with some at a visceral level

3. America's Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America's addiction with entertainment and reality TV. To some, it doesn't matter what Trump actually says because he's so amusing to watch. With the Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained

4. "Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn."

Some intelligent people who know better are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and Democrats like Hillary Clinton that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people do not have their priorities straight, and perhaps have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others, or a deranged obsession with schadenfreude.

5. The Fear-Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala — a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you've found your protector, you become less concerned with offensive and divisive remarks.

6. The Power of Mortality Reminders and Perceived Existential Threat

A well-supported theory from social psychology, known as Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump's fear mongering is doubly effective. The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitability of one's death creates existential terror and anxiety that is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have confirmed this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they influence actual voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forces that could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives, which can likely be attributed to their heightened fear response.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. Liberals and Independents who have been puzzled over why Trump hasn't lost supporters after such highly offensive comments need look no further than Terror Management Theory.

    7. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Humans Often Overestimate Their Political Expertise

    Some support Donald Trump do so out of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it's ever been, they simply take his word for it.

    The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn't just that they are misinformed; it's that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden.

    Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, "The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment." These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are the ones who should be reaching others.

    8. Relative Deprivation — A Misguided Sense of Entitlement

    Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

    Common explanations for Trump's popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

    These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as "relative," as opposed to "absolute," because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to.

    9. Lack of Exposure to Dissimilar Others

    Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one's own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it's important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump's white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that "…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support." This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters' physical distance from the Mexican border. These racial biases might be more implicit than explicit, the latter which is addressed in #14.

    10. Trump's Conspiracy Theories Target the Mentally Vulnerable

    While the conspiracy theory crowd — who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy QAnon — may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, the truth is that many of them suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are at least vulnerable to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

    The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy theories is well-established, and a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDs epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of "odd beliefs and magical thinking." One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.

    Donald Trump and his media allies target these people directly. All one has to do is visit alt-right websites and discussion boards to see the evidence for such manipulation.

    11. Trump Taps into the Nation's Collective Narcissism

    Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one's national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the 'true identity' of a nation — the 'ingroup,' in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them 'unrightfully.' This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

    A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward 'outsider' groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

    Donald Trump exacerbates collective narcissism with his anti-immigrant, anti-elitist, and strongly nationalistic rhetoric. By referring to his supporters, an overwhelmingly white group, as being "true patriots" or "real Americans," he promotes a brand of populism that is the epitome of "identity politics," a term that is usually associated with the political left. Left-wing identity politics, as misguided as they may sometimes be, are generally aimed at achieving equality, while the right-wing brand is based on a belief that one nationality and race is superior or entitled to success and wealth for no other reason than identity.

    12. The Desire to Want to Dominate Others

    Social dominance orientation (SDO) — which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome (#13) — refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

    In Trump's speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities). A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.

    13. Authoritarian Personality Syndrome

    Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome — a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition — is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one's authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

    Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wing around the world. President Trump's speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like "losers" and "complete disasters," are naturally appealing to those with the syndrome.

    While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise

    14. Racism and Bigotry

    It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump's supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that many do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with "dog whistles" — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

    While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump's signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There's no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims "dangerous" and Mexican immigrants "rapists" and "murderers," often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

    Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian.

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