Researchers say people with extremist views face difficulty in doing complex mental tasks

People with extremist views face difficulty in performing complex mental tasks as per the latest research. Guardian reported that researchers from the University of Cambridge have evaluated that people with extremist attitudes perform poorly the complex mental tasks. The study also evaluated how a person perceives information and how it is processed. Evaluations were made on the basis of political, nationalistic beliefs beyond the impact of factors like age, gender, race. The study also mentioned that the findings could be used to identifying and supporting people most vulnerable to radicalisation

'People with extremist view' 

The study built on previous research studied 330 US-based participants. The participants were aged between 22 to 63 and they were tested by giving them different tasks to perform. The tasks which they had to perform included 37 neuropsychological tasks and 22 personality surveys over the course of two weeks. The researchers then used computational modelling to extract information from that data about the participant’s perception and learning, and their ability to engage in complex and strategic mental processing.

According to the study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B., Researchers found that the ideological views resembled decision making. Dr Leor Zmigrod, Author of the department of Psychology at Cambridge said, people with extremist views think about the world in black and white terms. They also face difficulty in solving complex mental tasks. She added that people with extremist views are not good at responding to emotional experiences. She said, "And so that kind of helps us understand what kind of individual might be willing to go in and commit violence against others."

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The authors also found that people with extremist views are stuck in their ways and are resistant to factual evidence. They face problem in processing factual evidence. Dr Leor Zmigrod said when a person with extremist views is given a neuropsychological task of determining whether dots are moving to the left or to the right, they take longer to process the information which leads to a longer time in decision making. In cognitive tasks, participants who leant towards the politically conservative go for the slow and steady strategy while political liberals took a fast and less precise approach.

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Dr Leor Zmigrod said, "Its fascinating, because conservatism is almost a synonym for caution. We are seeing that at the very basic neuropsychological level, individuals who are politically conservative simply treat every stimuli that they encounter with caution". Researchers said, The "psychological signature" for extremism across the board was a mixture of conservative and dogmatic psychologies. Dr. Leor Zmigrod said, "What we found is that demogrphics don't explain a whole lot; they explain roughly 8% of the variance." She added, "Whereas, actually, when we incorporate these cognitive and personality assessments as well, suddenly, our capacity to explain the variance of these ideological world views jumps to 30% to 40%".