The neurobiology of the true believer

Recent work in neurobiology suggests the possibility that people who become “true believers” may in fact be mentally wired to believe things absolutely, or at least to be predisposed to believe things absolutely. I suspect they are predisposed to be uncomfortable with ambiguity, and so are easily converted to whatever political, social or religious dogma that happens by that offers them a sense of certainty and fits moderately well with their cultural upbringing. Which one of the many competing dogmas they latch on to is of course a matter of chance, of what culture they were born into and what people they chanced to meet and which dogmas they happened to be exposed to.

And I would guess that the majority of the human population is so wired, because the majority of the population seems to be predisposed to see things in black and white, to want simple answers, and to want to be “right” and even enjoy thinking they have the truth without looking for evidence, and that everyone else is wrong.

This conclusion, if correct, suggests to me two things:

1. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, there is little prospect of ever having the majority of the population behave rationally, and anyone who tries to build a workable political system needs to account for this.

2. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, the only thing that stands a chance of displacing irrational beliefs and dogmas is a competing dogma based on a more rational foundation, but still a dogma. I know that a “rational dogma” sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t know how else to express the concept. What would such a dogma look like, I wonder?

It’s an interesting conjecture.