Dr Leor Zmigrod is a psychologist and neuroscientist who asks an unusual question about politics: not what people believe, but how their minds hold on to what they believe. Her research uses experimental psychology, cognitive science, political science and neuroscience to explore the psychology of ideological extremism. She is best known in the UK for a 2018 study linking Brexit voting to thinking styles, and for her 2025 book, The Ideological Brain.
This guide covers who she is, what her research actually found, what the book argues, and where critics push back. It’s written for readers who want the substance without needing a psychology degree.
Leor Zmigrod at a glance
| Profession | Political neuroscientist, psychologist, author |
| Best known for | Research on cognitive flexibility, dogmatism and ideological extremism; The Ideological Brain (2025) |
| Education | BA and PhD, University of Cambridge (Gates Cambridge Scholar) |
| Current Cambridge listing | Visiting Fellow (Churchill College), Department of Psychology |
| Earlier post | Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge |
| Visiting fellowships | Stanford, Harvard, and the Paris and Berlin Institutes for Advanced Study |
| Book | The Ideological Brain (Viking, UK, March 2025) |
| Age and birthplace | Born in the United States; exact date of birth not public (see below) |
Who is Leor Zmigrod?
Zmigrod is a Cambridge-trained scientist working at the border of psychology, neuroscience and political science, a field often called political neuroscience. In plain terms, it asks whether basic features of how people think, such as how easily they adapt when rules change, are linked to how they hold political and religious beliefs.
She is also a public communicator. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, TIME, New Scientist, the Financial Times and The Times. Her website says her 2026 TED talk, “How to Protect Your Brain From Extremism”, was chosen as a Global TED Editor’s Pick.
Early life and education
Her publisher’s biography says she was born in the United States, spent her early childhood in Israel, and lived in Amsterdam before arriving at Cambridge in 2013 at the age of 18. The same biography says she speaks fluent Hebrew and has varying levels of Dutch, Spanish, French and German.
She stayed at Cambridge for both her undergraduate degree and her doctorate. She completed her BA and PhD there as a Gates Scholar. After the PhD she won a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College to build an independent research programme on the cognitive roots of ideological conviction.
How old is Leor Zmigrod? Her exact birth date isn’t published by any authoritative source we could find. Because she began at Cambridge aged 18 in 2013, she was born in the mid-1990s and is in her early thirties. Any page giving a precise age is guessing.
What does she research?
Her central idea is that ideological thinking isn’t only about the content of a belief system (left, right, religious, secular). It’s also about style: how rigidly a mind handles rules, evidence and disagreement.
To test this, her team uses standard laboratory tasks that have nothing to do with politics, then compares people’s performance with their political attitudes. Two matter most.
The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test
This is the task at the heart of her public writing. Participants match cards that vary in colour, shape and number, and must work out the sorting rule from feedback, knowing the rule can change. Most people find the rule, then hit a moment when it stops working. The test measures how quickly you drop the old habit and find the new one.
The Remote Associates Test
This test gives people three cue words, such as fly, cracker and fighter, and asks for a single word that links all three. (The answer is “fire”.) It measures a different side of flexibility: whether you can move beyond the obvious and make unexpected connections.
Her argument is that performance on these neutral tasks, which involve no emotion and no politics, can be statistically related to how dogmatic or extreme someone’s attitudes are.
The key studies, in plain English
1. The Brexit study (2018)
This is her best-known UK-relevant paper. Published in the journal PNAS with Peter Rentfrow and Trevor Robbins, it looked at 332 UK citizens and used their attitudes and voting behaviour in the 2016 EU referendum.
A flexible view of national identity and culture was linked to cognitive flexibility on the card-sorting and word-association tasks.
- Cognitive inflexibility predicted stronger authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism and system justification, and these in turn predicted support for Brexit.
It’s worth being precise about what this does not say. The study doesn’t claim that Leave voters have worse brains, and it doesn’t say cognitive style causes a vote. It describes statistical patterns across a group. Zmigrod wrote up the findings for a general audience in a piece for the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog.
2. “The Partisan Mind” (2020)
Many people assume mental rigidity belongs to one political side. Her team tested that. Across more than 700 US citizens and three independent cognitive tests, partisan extremity was linked to lower cognitive flexibility regardless of political orientation. The pattern was an inverted U: people at both the far left and far right were more rigid than moderates.
This is a nuanced result, and the wider field hasn’t settled it. Zmigrod herself describes a live debate between the “rigidity of the right” idea and the “extremity” idea, and argues that differences in how researchers measure flexibility and define ideology need to be resolved. The authors also acknowledged that online participant samples have limits, and that replication in nationally representative samples would be valuable.
3. Extremist attitudes (2019) and a replication
A third paper found that across UK and US samples totalling 1,047 people, cognitive inflexibility predicted endorsement of violence to defend a group. This is the kind of result that gets misread, so it’s useful that it has been tested independently. A UCL-led team ran a registered direct replication with 1,378 participants. It reported that cognitive inflexibility on the Remote Associates Test was again related to willingness to fight and die for the group.
Replication matters in psychology, so this is a point in the research’s favour. It still doesn’t turn a correlation into a cause.
Awards and public roles
Recognition includes:
- Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and Healthcare
- A 2020 Women of the Future award
- The ESCAN 2020 Young Investigator Award and the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science
- MHP’s 30ToWatch in British Politics Gold Winner Award (Unifier of the Year category)
She has also worked with policymakers. Her publisher’s biography says she has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and advises policymakers at the UN and the UK and US governments. A 2021 Cambridge Independent profile described her as one of 14 academics working with the Commission for Countering Extremism.
The Ideological Brain: what the book is about
Publication details (and why there are two titles)
The book has two subtitles depending on where you buy it, which confuses many searchers.
- UK: The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds, published by Viking on 20 March 2025.
- US: The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, published by Henry Holt. The listing gives a publication date of 25 March 2025.
It was her debut, and Viking won it after a thirteen-way auction. Her website says it has been published in 20 translations.
The main argument
The book argues that cognitive rigidity, struggling to adapt to new rules, mirrors the rigidity with which people cling to social and political ideologies, and that some people are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, though everyone can work to become more flexible. It also explores what she calls “the epigenetics of extremism”: whether brains work this way from birth or come to embody the behaviour over time.
It reads as popular science with a personal voice. It opens with a scenario that puts the reader inside a card-sorting experiment, then widens into biology, psychology and the social forces that push people towards dogma.
How it was received
Reception was strong in the UK press. The publisher’s listing cites its inclusion in The Telegraph’s best books of 2025 and The Guardian’s list of brilliant books to read in 2025, and endorsements from figures including Steven Pinker and A. C. Grayling. Her website adds lists from New Scientist, Prospect and Waterstones.
Criticisms and limitations worth knowing
Most pages about Zmigrod are promotional and skip this section. A fair picture includes it.
- Correlation versus causation. One reviewer summed up the research as suggesting that biological susceptibility plus environmental exposure produce ideological patterns, while stressing the usual caveats: correlation isn’t causation, and it’s hard to tell which comes first. The book itself explores the chicken-and-egg problem, but it remains unresolved.
- A UK critic’s objection. Lord Alderdice, reviewing the book in The House, called it engaging but flawed, taking issue with the hypothesis that some people are born uniquely susceptible to radicalisation rather than shaped by their communities. That is one reviewer’s reading, and you should weigh it against the book’s own emphasis on interaction between biology and environment.
- Reader complaints. Some reader reviews say the book doesn’t define “ideology” precisely, that its tasks measure dispositions rather than ideologies themselves, and that it is light on references. These are opinions from general readers, not academic critiques, but they show where sceptical readers land.
- Sample and measurement limits. As noted above, several key studies used online samples, and the measures capture general thinking styles rather than anyone’s individual beliefs.
None of this means the research is wrong. It means the honest reading is “interesting, replicated in places, and still developing,” not “the brain explains politics.”
What you can take from her work
The findings are about groups, not a test you can run on yourself, so treat the following as reflection rather than diagnosis.
- Notice how you react when a rule you relied on stops working. Do you adapt, or repeat the same move harder?
- Separate opinions from people. In her own account, flexible thinkers can dislike an opinion without projecting hatred onto the person holding it.
- Watch for the pull of certainty. Her research suggests strong ideologies offer clarity and belonging, which is exactly why they attract people under uncertainty.
- Rigidity isn’t a left or right problem. Her partisanship findings point to extremity, not a particular party.
Where to start with her work
- The book, The Ideological Brain, for the full argument.
- Her LSE blog piece on Brexit and cognitive style, for a short, readable summary of the 2018 study.
- Her TED talk (2026), for a quick spoken introduction.
- The original papers, if you want the data. The Brexit study is in PNAS (2018) and the partisanship study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2020).
Frequently asked questions
What is Leor Zmigrod’s nationality?
No reliable public source states it, so it’s safest not to claim one. She was born in the US, spent early childhood in Israel, lived in the Netherlands, and has built her career at Cambridge in the UK.
What is ideological thinking?
It’s a rigid way of thinking in which a set of beliefs is treated as the complete truth. Its rules are strict, doubt is discouraged, and evidence that doesn’t fit gets ignored. Zmigrod studies the style of this thinking, not just which beliefs people hold.
What are the four types of ideology?
There’s no single official list of four. A common textbook grouping is political, economic, social and religious ideologies. In politics classes, the “big four” are often liberalism, conservatism, socialism and nationalism. Zmigrod’s research cuts across all of them, because she argues rigid thinking can show up in any ideology.
Who is known as the father of ideology?
Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment philosopher. He coined the term “ideology” in 1796 as the “science of ideas.” The word only later came to mean a set of political, economic or religious beliefs.
Who started ideology?
Ideas that work like ideologies are much older than the word. But the term itself started with de Tracy in revolutionary France, and it took on its modern, more critical meaning in the 19th century, especially through Karl Marx.