In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.
Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.
In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.
For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.
A good tool/exercise for analyzing your (and other’s) beliefs is logic trees, with the goal of taking any complex belief and determined what your core axioms are, being on the lookout for tautologies (God is real -> because the Bible says so -> because God is real…) and axioms that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
If you do the exercise correctly then you should find that most of those “beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven” have belief dependencies that can be objectively (and often easily) proven/disproven.