Stress, Brains, and the Strange Appeal of Demagogues
If you’ve ever found yourself doomscrolling Twitter at midnight, muttering “surely this can’t get worse,” congratulations: you’ve experienced the peculiar cocktail of stress, anxiety, and brain fog that makes humans exquisitely vulnerable to nonsense. It turns out, when we’re stressed, the brain does something rather unhelpful—it abandons its higher reasoning functions and effectively outsources thinking to anyone loud enough to offer a simple explanation. Unfortunately, that “anyone” is often a demagogue with a megaphone.
The Neuroscience of Going Dumb Under Pressure
First, let’s peek inside the cranium. The rational bit of your brain—the prefrontal cortex—is like the wise accountant of your mental firm. It handles planning, weighing evidence, and making cost–benefit decisions. Unfortunately, under acute stress, this accountant gets locked in the stationery cupboard.
Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (Arnsten, 2009) shows that stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine literally impair prefrontal cortex function. Instead, the amygdala—the brain’s “threat detection” center—takes charge. The amygdala is brilliant at spotting lions in the grass but hopeless at nuanced debate about fiscal policy. Under stress, your brain switches from “considering multiple perspectives” mode to “get me out of here now” mode. 【Arnsten, 2009†source】
In other words: stress makes us less rational and more reactive. This is why people buy toilet paper in bulk during pandemics. Not because it makes sense, but because their brains are yelling, “Do something!”
Outsourcing Reasoning: A Coping Mechanism
So what happens when the rational brain checks out? We look for shortcuts. Humans are cognitive misers at the best of times—we like easy answers. Under stress, we’re positively desperate for them.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explains this beautifully: we have a fast, intuitive system (System 1) and a slow, rational system (System 2). Stress effectively locks the door to System 2. Suddenly, System 1 is running the show—and System 1 loves a confident, simple-sounding answer.
That’s where demagogues come in.
The Demagogue’s Toolkit: Simple Lies for Complex Times
A demagogue is essentially a con artist who realized politics pays better than selling snake oil at county fairs. Their trick is to present simple but false answers to hard problems.
Immigration is why you can’t get a job. (Never mind automation, global trade shifts, or corporate offshoring.)
One secret cabal runs everything. (Because acknowledging the messy complexity of economics and geopolitics is less emotionally satisfying than blaming a shadowy group with a secret handshake.)
If only we returned to the “good old days.” (Which, if you check the record, were mostly “good” only for a narrow group who could afford cigars and waistcoats.)
These answers are appealing because, under stress, our brains are allergic to ambiguity. Uncertainty feels like pain. Certainty—even false certainty—feels like relief.
As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it: “People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Under stress, they’ll gladly swap truth for a soothing illusion.
Why We Keep Falling for It
The phenomenon is depressingly consistent. After the 2008 financial crash, populist movements surged globally. After the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories flourished like mushrooms in damp basements. In each case, uncertainty bred stress, which reduced rational capacity, which made simple narratives sound irresistible.
And the science backs this up. A study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Petersen et al., 2019) shows that heightened anxiety makes people more likely to adopt authoritarian attitudes and seek strong, decisive leaders—even if those leaders are demonstrably incompetent. 【Petersen et al., 2019†source】
It’s not that stressed people become stupid; it’s that their cognitive bandwidth shrinks. They start leasing out their thinking to third parties—preferably ones who sound like they know what they’re talking about. And demagogues, whatever else you might say about them, always sound confident.
The Humor in All This (Because Otherwise, We’d Cry)
If you want a metaphor: imagine your brain as a Wi-Fi router. Under normal conditions, it connects multiple devices, runs smoothly, and maybe buffers Netflix now and then. Under stress, it’s like someone just microwaved popcorn next to it—the signal drops, half the devices disconnect, and suddenly your neighbor is offering to “fix your internet” by wrapping your router in tinfoil.
That neighbor is the demagogue. And millions of brains under stress are happy to hand him the router.
The Business (and Life) Lesson
You might be wondering: what does this have to do with corporate strategy or competitive intelligence? Everything. Leaders under pressure—whether in boardrooms or parliaments—are just as susceptible to stress-induced simplification. When markets crash, when rivals surge, when shareholders glare, leaders may ditch nuanced analysis and instead grab onto the first confident voice in the room.
That’s why robust decision-making systems matter. You need processes that keep the prefrontal cortex metaphorically “online” for organizations, not just individuals. Think red-teaming, stress-testing strategies, and ensuring that dissenting voices aren’t drowned out by whoever is shouting the simplest solution.
Because in the end, complexity doesn’t go away just because you ignore it. It waits patiently until your “simple solution” collapses, and then presents the bill—with interest.
Final Thought
Stress is inevitable. Pandemics happen, markets crash, children discover glitter. But the danger isn’t just the stress itself—it’s how stress hijacks our ability to think rationally and leaves us vulnerable to anyone offering certainty.
Demagogues thrive in those moments, selling simplicity at a discount, even when the true cost is ruinously high. The antidote isn’t to eliminate stress (good luck with that), but to build resilience: individually, organizationally, and societally.
So the next time someone offers you a simple explanation for a complex mess, ask yourself: is this genuine clarity, or just my stressed-out brain outsourcing reasoning to the loudest person in the room?
If the answer comes with a secret cabal, a magic fix, or a promise to “return to the good old days,” it’s probably the latter.
Sources:
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Petersen, M. B., et al. (2019). The politics of stress: How stress influences political attitudes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5), 369–372.