Episode Details

There is a way to measure how simply or complexly a person thinks. Not what they think. Not whether they are right or wrong. How their brain processes information. Whether it can hold one idea at a time or several. Whether it sees the world in two categories or twenty. Whether it can sit with a contradiction or needs to crush one side of it before the thinking can continue.

Psychologists have been measuring this for over fifty years. And the results, applied to political extremism, are as clear as anything in the research literature.

What Suedfeld Measured

Peter Suedfeld, Dean Emeritus of Graduate Studies and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, spent over three decades developing and applying a measurement system for the structural complexity of human thought. His work spanned more than 300 published studies across political psychology, crisis decision-making, leadership under stress, and extremism.

The system he developed measures something called integrative complexity. It operates on a scale from 1 to 7, and it captures two distinct cognitive operations.

The first is differentiation. This is the ability to recognize that a problem has more than one dimension. That a situation can be viewed from more than one perspective. That two things can both be true at the same time even if they seem to contradict each other. A person scoring low on differentiation sees every issue as having one side. One cause. One answer. A person scoring high on differentiation sees multiple dimensions operating simultaneously.

The second is integration. This is the ability to draw connections between those different dimensions. To see how competing perspectives relate to each other. To build a framework that accounts for complexity rather than flattening it. Integration is the higher-order operation. You cannot integrate perspectives you never differentiated in the first place.

A score of 1 means the person sees only one dimension and draws no connections. Everything is black or white. Good or bad. Us or them. A score of 7 means the person sees multiple dimensions and draws sophisticated connections between them. They can hold contradictions, tolerate ambiguity, and construct frameworks that account for competing truths.

Suedfeld found, consistently, across decades of research and hundreds of analyses, that political extremists score the lowest on integrative complexity. This is not a finding about one party or one ideology. It applies to extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. But the application to the modern American right is devastating, because the MAGA movement has turned low integrative complexity into an identity.

What Low Complexity Looks Like

A person operating at level 1 integrative complexity processes the world the way a child processes the world before the age of eleven. One cause. One villain. One answer. No middle ground. No gray area. No possibility that the opposing side has a point.

Every issue is sorted into exactly two categories: for us or against us.

Immigrants are destroying the country. Not some immigration policies create economic tradeoffs that affect different communities in different ways. Immigrants are destroying the country.

The media is the enemy of the people. Not some media outlets have institutional biases that should be critically evaluated. The media is the enemy.

The election was stolen. Not the electoral system has weaknesses that should be addressed through institutional reform. It was stolen.

These are level 1 statements. One dimension. No differentiation. No integration. No complexity of any kind. A ten-year-old could process them. And that is the point.

Why They Are Proud of It

This is where the MAGA movement does something that Suedfeld’s research framework was not designed to anticipate. They have turned cognitive simplicity into a virtue.

They call