Born to Political Extremism? Left Out, Right On!

Here’s a brain-scratching question: why do so few Israelis “cross the lines” from Right to Left (or vice versa) when voting in elections? After the calamitous Oct. 7 debacle and mass protests against the government for its confused hostage release policy, one would expect significant movement from one ideological camp to another, but that hasn’t taken place. Yes, the polls show significant transference away from the Likud. However, almost all such voters are simply moving to former PM – and bona fide Right-Winger – Naftali Bennett’s comeback party (or to the even more extreme Right-wing, Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzmah Yehudit camp). Israel’s Right-Left cleavage has remained much the same for a very long time. The question is why?

This issue has become increasingly relevant as Israel’s next election campaign is thick in the air: the Haredi parties have left the government (not yet the legislative coalition), internal party primaries are taking place (the Likud just held its primaries a few days ago), and in any case there’s less than one year to go before elections have to be held – and very few Israeli elections have occurred at the last possible date.

Of course, there is no single answer to this conundrum, but there is a major factor that the media don’t mention – in large part because few of us want to admit its salience to politics. In a word: biology.

Numerous recent research studies – genetic, sociological, and political – have shown that extremist thinking is (in large part) a function of the structure of our brain’s neo-frontal cortex (NFC). Without getting too technical, this brain section is where we practice self-control. It turns out that people who tend to be extreme have a thinner NFC – and that goes equally for Left-wing and Right-wing authoritarian leanings because the more rigid a person’s thoughts, the more they incline toward extremism (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452225003045).

There’s another critically important brain section: the amygdala that processes negative emotions such as disgust, threat, and general fear. Here research has found a significant difference between Right-wing supporters and their Left-wing counterparts: the former has a larger amygdala than the latter. It should be noted that this pattern is consistent across cultures and countries, with the brains of hundreds of people studied under an MRI machine.

On the face of it (or should I say under the face of it), this all might seem to be depressing. As human beings, are we all “locked into” a predisposed political stance based on our brain biology? Two words in this question offer a (partial) way out. First, “all”: not everyone has an enlarged amygdala or a thinner NFC than “normal.” As everything else in biology, there’s a spectrum of brain structures – otherwise we wouldn’t find any “center” parties in our political systems. Second, except for extreme “brain outliers” i.e., very “thin” NFC or very large amygdala, many people will show a mild tendency but not necessarily an inevitability to their political ideology. Indeed, recent psychological research has found that there’s a third type of personality beyond the two classic ones that either seek happiness or seek meaning in life: “psychological richness – experiences that challenge you, change your perspective…” (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-psychologists-path-good-life-full.html). In an election campaign context, such citizens will listen to the other side, even seek out opposing opinions as an intellectual challenge that might lead them to change their vote.

Beyond the amygdala and NFC, there’s a third element that affects our political inclination: social acculturation. A hypothetical example: two identical twins separated at birth but with the same thin NFC, with one growing up in a hardline Right-wing family and the other in a hardline Left-wing family, will also end up as adults at the opposite ends of the political spectrum from each other. Of course, it’s not just the family; one’s social peers will have some influence too. In short, we are not “biological robots,” and do have the ability to “rewire.” Nevertheless, that would take either great mental effort, severe cognitive dissonance between one’s beliefs and experienced reality, and/or a significant change in a person’s social environment (e.g., marrying someone of the opposite ideology, strongly held).

Finally, an important consideration: heredity is not destiny. It is here that education enters the picture in a big way – in school and within the family. In both cases, what is needed is a focus on open-mindedness, on intellectual flexibility, and on critical thought. To a large extent, this is what Judaism has been all about for millennia. Whether the major critiques of the Prophets against the powers-that-be, Talmudic exegesis that leaves no opinion unquestioned, or other anti-authoritarian elements (from Shabtai Tzvi to the modern Reform and Conservative movements), Judaism has stood for openness to unconventional theological thought. True, the opposite exists as well e.g., from the ostracization of Karaites to contemporary ultra-Orthodox authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the main thrust of Jewish thinking – the halakha (meaning “walking forward”) – lends itself to greater flexibility of thought than blind acceptance of the status quo.

As Israel’s election approaches – by almost all accounts, one of the most fateful in the country’s history – it behooves each and every voter to think clearly about who and what they stand for, and most of important of all: why.