Minds in the Trenches

Why does one person see tradition as safety and another as a prison? Science shows that biology, too, stands behind political conviction. A look at both right and left, without labels.

Do you remember the last time you sat at the family table, or scrolled through social media, and stumbled on an opinion that instantly sent your blood pressure soaring? That moment when heat spreads through your chest and a single word flashes through your mind: idiot. Or worse: enemy. We’re fascinated by dissecting the psychology of others in minute detail. We long to know what defects in the thinking apparatus lead people to vote differently, to prioritize differently, to hold different values than we do.

The truth, though, is that political orientation is neither a moral defect nor an absolute truth, but an evolutionarily and psychologically conditioned filter through which our brain sifts the reality of a world that’s probably too divided for its own good. Those who want to understand this filter look for a way; those who don’t want to, look for a reason to simply slap a label on their opponent and be done with it.

Our minds constantly crave ease. When we find ourselves in a state of inner certainty, we get a pleasant hit of dopamine — everything suddenly feels great. But the world around us is complex and ambiguous, and so, for our own protection, we subconsciously build psychological pigeonholes and seek out people who think the way we do. This instinct is, evolutionarily speaking, perfectly sound — it once helped us survive in the tribe. But these days we’re no longer chasing mammoths on the escalators of the metro or the tram.

The real problem starts the moment a mere political conviction, driven by fear inside our heads, hardens into rigid dogma, and the opponent becomes, in our imagination, an archdemon who must be exorcised. Exorcised immediately. So let’s look, without emotion or prejudice, at what science actually knows about the psyche that tends toward this kind of division and labeling.

Openness, order, and fear of the unknown

The broadest and most consistently replicated finding concerns so-called openness to experience. A large-scale American study of nearly fifteen thousand respondents confirms that openness to experience predicts a shift toward liberal ideology, while conscientiousness predicts conservative ideology.

In practical life, this shows up as a preference for stability and tried-and-tested structures, as well as a preference for visiting only familiar places, over constant change. Where the progressive mind sees tradition as a prison that needs tearing down, right-leaning thinking sees it as a protective wall against chaos. And where openness pairs with tolerance for novelty, conscientiousness instead correlates with a preference for organization and order — and therefore with greater resistance to change. Put plainly: rules should apply equally to everyone, and success should be the result of merit, not social engineering.

Alongside personality traits, the body itself plays a role in this drama. Neuroscientific studies show that conservative-leaning individuals tend to have a greater volume of gray matter in the right amygdala — the structure responsible for detecting threat — while liberal-leaning individuals show more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region associated with processing ambiguity.

Physiology plays along too: people with higher reactivity to sudden noises and threatening images are significantly more likely to support protective policies — things like defense spending, the death penalty, or patriotism. This sensitivity isn’t limited to physical threat; it extends to disgust as well. In their perception, the world is a place where real risk is lurking, specifically for them, and against which one ought to guard oneself rather than ignore it with that incomprehensible liberal recklessness.

Where right-leaning thinking meets the need for certainty, another mechanism enters the picture: the need for cognitive closure. This is the desire for clear, quick answers instead of a prolonged stay in the gray zone of doubt. An Italian study of more than two hundred respondents found that people with a high need for closure were more likely to vote for right-wing parties and hold more conservative positions, express stronger anti-immigration views, and prefer authoritarian leadership.

A world divided into clear yeses and nos is, for them, more comprehensible. It helps eliminate informational noise and allows for efficient action instead of endless theorizing. All of this, however, comes at the cost of far less tolerance for differing opinions.

The last thread has nothing to do with biology anymore — it concerns values: ideas about who bears responsibility for one’s own fate. Cultural-psychological research on individualism shows that people with an individualistic orientation more often attribute poverty to personal responsibility and self-sufficiency, while more collectivist thinking sees the causes as lying more in social structures. This is no longer a question of the amygdala, but of what story we tell ourselves about the world — and it’s the only one of these five points that rests on a values-based rather than a neurobiological foundation, a distinction worth admitting out loud.

The limits of the scientific mirror

It would be a gross journalistic failure to accept these findings without a critical distance. Most of the studies cited come from what’s known as a WEIRD environment — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, drawn largely from university populations. That naturally skews how these particular traits get interpreted in the literature.

Science, moreover, is unable to reliably separate what’s given by the brain’s genetic architecture from what results from upbringing, trauma, or the pressure of one’s immediate surroundings. Indeed, even the most recent systematic review of nineteen studies on the relationship between conservatism and threat sensitivity concludes that the relationship does exist, but is modest in strength and heavily dependent on cultural context, threat type, and measurement methodology — in other words, it’s no immutable law of nature.

The mirror turned the other way

To keep the balance, let’s turn our mirror toward the left as well. It is in no way psychologically cleaner. For a long time the prevailing theory held that fear and anxiety push people to the right. Newer and more extensive data show almost the opposite. A British political science study, summarizing nearly two decades of research, states that people with higher levels of neuroticism — the trait linked to anxiety and emotional instability — are more likely to support left-wing economic policies and parties advocating redistribution.

Another American analysis reaches the same conclusion: neurotic people are more likely to support policies that help the economically disadvantaged, which runs counter to older theories but matches more recent findings. The explanation is simple and deeply human: an anxious person longs for a safety net, and the state offers one more readily than the market does.

While the right-winger may slide into a blind defense of the status quo, the left-winger often falls prey to the illusion that human beings are naturally good through and through, and that establishing paradise on earth requires only rewriting the laws correctly and voting for whoever promises exactly that. Both of these worldviews, paradoxically, suffer from their own form of blindness and from reasoning driven by their picture of how the world should be — not by its real image and its actual effects on their lives. They see, after all, only what they want to see.

The way out of the trenches

What can we take from this small piece of research into our own lives? Next time you meet someone standing on the opposite political shore, try to pause for a moment. Switch off the inner prosecutor inside you who wants to win the argument immediately and prove the other person’s stupidity.

Realize that this person isn’t looking at the world through a filter of moral depravity, but through a differently calibrated biological and psychological compass. They simply have a different amygdala, a different level of anxiety, a different need for certainty.

And maybe it’s time to admit one more thing: most of us are not a single pure point stuck on one axis. On the question of safety, we might be right-wingers; on the question of equality, liberals; on the question of community, left-wingers. Left and right are coordinates of a flat, two-dimensional world — convenient for headlines, but far too narrow for an actual human being. A real human being is three-dimensional, and the same is true of how we think about the world.

True asceticism of thought, to my mind, doesn’t lie in finding some third camp that everyone can fit into. It lies in being able to listen to opinions that unsettle us without immediately sending the person who holds them to hell — and in admitting to ourselves that the voice that irritates us across the table might also live inside our own heads.

No label, after all, has ever described a person as accurately as how we actually treat them.

Sources Used

Scientific sources:

• Personality, Childhood Experience, and Political Ideology (PMC) — A representative American study of nearly 15,000 respondents confirming the relationship between openness and conscientiousness and ideology.
• Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults (PMC) — Kanai et al., an MRI study demonstrating a link between conservatism and gray matter volume in the amygdala.
• Engineering polarization (arXiv) — A review of physiological studies on threat sensitivity.
• Fight, Flight, or Vote Right? Systematic Review (PMC) — A systematic review of 19 studies on the strength and limits of the relationship between conservatism and threat sensitivity.
• Need for cognitive closure and politics (Chirumbolo, Wiley) — An Italian study on the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and right-wing voting.
• Why Anxious People Lean to the Left on Economic Policy (Cambridge) — A review of nearly two decades of research on neuroticism and left-wing policies.
• Individualism vs. Collectivism (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia) — Attributional differences between individualist and collectivist orientations.

Related articles from the Wizard Michal blog:

• Na křižovatce nenávisti: Jak vystoupit z algoritmu, který z nás dělá nepřátele? — Explores how social media algorithms amplify mutual hatred between political camps, and what an individual can do about it.
• Dvojí metr politiky a politiků — Shows how we judge the same behavior differently depending on whether it comes from the right or the left, and why this double standard divides us more than the facts themselves.
• Komu už tečou nervy z dnešní doby? — Describes how exhaustion and dwindling patience deepen polarization, and offers empathy and respect as a way back to dialogue.
• Budoucnost patří změnám, ne hierarchiím — Argues that the labels “liberal” and “conservative” hold back both personal and social growth, and looks for what unites the two groups.
• Zrcadlo společnosti: Tragédie, která nás nutí přemýšlet, ne obviňovat — Using a specific tragedy as an example, shows how society reacts with blame instead of reflection, and what could help break that reflex.