Jul 10, 2025 08:24 PM
https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/the...extremism/
INTRO: Psychology is largely the study of correlations and the extent to which we can establish connections between correlations and causation. We are often told that “correlation does not mean causation” in the world of data. A classic example: Ice cream sales have a positive correlation with crime rates. Ice cream does not cause criminality, but apparently, the summer months cause both.
But this is no hard rule. Although correlation doesn’t always mean causation, it can often seriously imply or suggest it. Psychologists grapple with this all the time. For example, it’s been anecdotally obvious for millennia that people who sleep fewer hours tend to perform worse on memory, attention, and decision-making tasks, and young people with irregular bedtimes often achieve poorer grades. That’s “just” a correlation. It’s only relatively recently that we have the neuroimaging and neuroscientific apparatus to prove causality.
The specter of correlation/causation hovered over this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with the prizewinning author Leor Zmigrod about her recent book, The Ideological Brain. Zmigrod’s book explores extreme ideologies, and her career has been spent finding these correlations. During our interview, Zmigrod shared the findings of both her book and career to argue that there are four principal factors that correlate with someone holding extreme ideological beliefs.
In other words, these are the factors that most often lead a person to become an extremist... (MORE - details)
COVERED: Cognitive rigidity ..... Emotional volatility ..... Amygdala ..... Prefrontal cortex ..... Working backward
INTRO: Psychology is largely the study of correlations and the extent to which we can establish connections between correlations and causation. We are often told that “correlation does not mean causation” in the world of data. A classic example: Ice cream sales have a positive correlation with crime rates. Ice cream does not cause criminality, but apparently, the summer months cause both.
But this is no hard rule. Although correlation doesn’t always mean causation, it can often seriously imply or suggest it. Psychologists grapple with this all the time. For example, it’s been anecdotally obvious for millennia that people who sleep fewer hours tend to perform worse on memory, attention, and decision-making tasks, and young people with irregular bedtimes often achieve poorer grades. That’s “just” a correlation. It’s only relatively recently that we have the neuroimaging and neuroscientific apparatus to prove causality.
The specter of correlation/causation hovered over this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with the prizewinning author Leor Zmigrod about her recent book, The Ideological Brain. Zmigrod’s book explores extreme ideologies, and her career has been spent finding these correlations. During our interview, Zmigrod shared the findings of both her book and career to argue that there are four principal factors that correlate with someone holding extreme ideological beliefs.
In other words, these are the factors that most often lead a person to become an extremist... (MORE - details)
COVERED: Cognitive rigidity ..... Emotional volatility ..... Amygdala ..... Prefrontal cortex ..... Working backward