Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
I’m convinced that conservatives are almost all mentally ill. Most are able to function day to day, which is how they go undetected and don’t access mental health services (for these issues).
Their illness is characterised by low empathy and other traits associated with ‘cluster B’ illnesses, probably in milder form than the ones seriously mentally ill people such as sociopaths show. However, the more seriously mentally ill such as sociopaths can be accepted within these groups due to their similarities.
People in these groups don’t feel remorse or follow other human positive norms such as valuing truth, justice, kindness etc. They aren’t able to understand most positive human traits and for example, when corrected would only understand that they’d been attacked and so go on the offensive and attack themselves.
They also show strong psychotic traits, which is why they will support conspiracy theories which align with their self interest with little insight.
Lack of insight is also a feature in itself, which deserves to be highlighted. There’s limited capacity for growth or improvement as they don’t have the innate capacity for what we would call humanity.
Educated doesn’t equate to intelligent. Be born in the south and grow up in that environment and you can’t help but come out of it either broken, or exactly like you’re suppose to.
born in south. Agree. Teachers can’t legally use my fucking name anymore because of ““woke””
Disagree with that statement. Education and intelligence don’t mean your world view can’t steer your wrong. Ben Carson is both, but that doesn’t stop him from saying insane shit
My parents are those college educated conservatives and their mental gymnastics are Olympic level. They also donate to charities and do volunteer work like meals on wheels. They don’t make any sense to me.
We don’t pay nearly enough attention to how flawed we are as a species, how easily we can discard reason and logic to validate feelings of fear, insecurity or shame, which is what drives conservatism, not reasoned arguments or fiscal responsibility.
When you discover in life that your brain does that trick, where it will ruminate on the things you feel and it’s not required at all to make sense or figure out things with logic, you can become free from at least one of your major flaws, which is how we tend to justify our feelings with irrational rumination. Learning to stop telling yourself stories will save your mental health. Smart people sometimes have as hard of a time as stupid people in this regard, because a smart person is equally likely to think their own rumination is factual and reasonable and are less likely to be self-critical.
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
I note that they state their thesis–conservatives are more susceptible to believing lies–but they only talk about lies conservatives believe, without anything to compare to. That is, they state specific misinformation that conservatives are likely to believe, but they don’t say anything about whether they’re actually more likely to believe lies, overall, than liberals/progressives/leftists. Everything that they seem to be citing is anecdotal; they have specific lies that are believed, but don’t talk about the over rate of believe of lies.
I dunno, feels low like low-effort dunking rather than actually dissecting the why.
“Conservatives are dumb, not like us liberals” is a coping mechanism liberals rely on to displace blame for failed policy. Its never the fault of the Democratic establishment when a liberal initiative fails. Its never the fault of a bloc of moderate voters, prone to selecting the most conservative voices in their own policy for fear of upsetting the Swing MAGA Voter, for backing conservative Democrats during a primary. Its never the fault of party Mega-Donors for squashing legislation inside a Dem legislative committee or bright-blue state legislature.
The lies liberals tend to believe live somewhere between “We’re helplessly outnumbered by conservatives even in states we dominate” and “Don’t trust the Radical Left, their views are too extreme and will never work!” It is the lie of impotency relative to the conservative lie of hubris. Republicans believe they can Do As Thou Wilt and mold the world to their reactionary beliefs. Democrats believe they need permission from the billionaire class and their media troglodytes before they can impose any kind of policy change.
The first two years of Biden are roughly equivalent to what Trump has now in terms of power and support, but there’s a massive difference in results.
Trump is completely sidestepping the legislative branch. Congress passed more anti-trans legislation back in December, under Biden, than it has since Trump took office.
So much of the spotlight has been on DOGE running around the Treasury Office and hijacking servers, and rightfully so. Trump’s plan to get around the legislature appears to be to pipe his cronies directly into the hardware that handles payment processing.
Because it’s a cult.
Fascism and religion run on the same hardware. The paramount values are obedience to a higher power, and the core belief in the scriptures/propaganda.
This is why centrist politics never work. Why make a step towards them when they will never make a step towards you?
Anyone who believes in the fairy tale of religion is going to be more susceptible to other lies.
But that doesn’t explain why some people are way more susceptible to being stuck in a cult than others.
Personally I think it’s genetic. It’s some kind of brain feature that leads to people having beliefs that are extremely hard to change. I say this is a feature, not a defect, because you only have to go back a few hundred years to find a society where not having the right belief system can quickly lead to ostracization and death.
It’s a survival tool that has suddenly found itself in the modern informational environment and it can’t cope. See it in action and it’s incredibly tragic.
No science behind this, but because their reality is based on them being a good guy in their mind. Simultaneously they are actually selfish but lie to themselves about that fact.
Now when a fact comes along and points out they are being selfish, they will seek any information that will allow them to continue the selfish behavior.
Tldr they lie to themselves so they can sleep at night.
Kond of you to assume I know how to read
In fact, there is a scientific explanation. The tonsils of the brain of conservative voters are approximately the size of a sesame seed, that is, slightly larger than those of progressive voters, according to a study published in the journal Cell Press iScience.
The amygdala controls the perception and understanding of threats and uncertainty in the face of risk, so it makes a lot of sense that people more sensitive to these issues have a greater need for security, something that usually coincides with more conservative political ideas.
The relationship between the size of the amygdala and conservatism also depended on the political party with which the individual was identified.
Tonsils of the brain?
Surgical tech here: …yeah my bad. I’ll leave it to the surgeon next time.
Because being conservative is directly caused by being a gullible moron.
Can confirm, many “conservative atheists” I knew in the beginning of 2010’s (they almost all became christian if they didn’t leave conservatism itself) were conservative due to some combination of “we need conservative representation within atheists” and the “they told me I would eventually grow out from liberalism, I’m just doing the unavoidable”.
Yah even as a man of science and research, even I got about 3/4 through the article and started rolling my eyes.
This is a lot of over-explanation for the common state of stupidity that comes from having shit parents, shitty school and living in a poor, shitty area. Some people rise above their adversity and insecurity, through whatever arcane and secret paths one’s thought streams follow, others become defined by their stupidity and fear and insecurity and find a community that lets them validate such feelings.
You’re never going to get rid of the stupid segment of your population, and in fact if you want to mitigate the damage they can do, as a leader you should provide for them and make sure they’re not suffering like the rest of us, because it’s not the stupid themselves that are the problem, it’s what they become when they’re desperate and how easily they can be manipulated to serve others.
As far as I’m concerned we should just admit they’re gullible and want to blame someone for their failings. Let’s take that and manipulate them to our ends. Blame the billionaires, call them thieves, keep rattling the cage and provoking them. Tell them they’d have a Ferrari if Bozo and the rat didn’t steal from them. Sure it’s gross, but it’s what you’d do with a child refusing to take their medicine. It’s ultimately for their own good.
Gullible yes, probably motions too. You can be extremely intelligent and still have massive blind spots. My mom and Grandpa are both conservatives but I’d consider them intelligent. I was able to have discussions with them and convince them a lot of conservative policy is unnecessarily cruel and short sighted. Got both to promise me they wouldn’t vote for Trump, but they’re fiscally conservative because they’ve got money.
And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming
Also known as the “I must know more than every scientist to ever live” effect
I honestly think this ties into a core flaw of conservativism, the same one that causes them to respect authority too much to question it. In their mind there’s an almost tautological essence that someone in power can do no wrong. They ignore missteps because they “must have earned their position” but then say they deserve their position because they haven’t made any missteps. Same goes for the climate change thing: surely they must have the right opinion on it, since they’re smart! And they’re smart because they have the right opinion. Isn’t life so easy?
This is also why they try so hard not to “lose”. To them, there are winners who never fail, and losers who never succeed. They will ALWAYS try to save face or say “let’s agree to disagree”, because they do not fundamentally accept that failure is a method of improvement. This ties into black-and-white thinking as well.
More insulated communities.
Way lower education rates with worse outcomes.
Being religiously indoctrinated as a child.
I was going to mention religious indoctrination as well - if you’re taught your entire life to believe in something not based on evidence, I think that you’re more likely to believe things without evidence.
People are naturally predisposed to believe the information set before them. If you present someone with a variety of opinions and views, but you constrain the scope of those opinions, you can convince people they have a level of agency in selection that is actually severely limited by the discourse.
In the US, we see this explicitly in terms of Climate Change as a discussion of
- Right: Climate Change is an Evil Foreign Hoax / Good Aktuly
- Center: Let the private sector fix it
- Left: Maybe spend a little public resources encouraging emissions reduction eventually
By taking the right-wing view further and further to the extreme and conflating Center and Left views as identical, you give people a plethora of variations on right wing views (its fake, its actually good, its not real but overstated, its caused by sunspots and there’s nothing we can do, its too expensive to address, its impossible because God won’t let it happen) that audiences can pick from.
Combine this with the general neutering of public input into policy and you present right-wing viewers with a comforting lie (climate change isn’t a problem, that’s why we’re not doing anything about it) rather than an unsettling truth (climate change isn’t a problem for the current generation, so we’re just going to keep doing it because it generates profit for an elite cartel and steady jobs for a large underclass).
The alternative is to align with a liberal view of “It’s a huge problem but there’s nothing we can do!” which has been the Democrat policy since the Clinton Administration. Why feel impotent when you can feel smugly self-confident instead? If politicians aren’t paying attention to your demands, simply join the camp that aligns with the current leadership’s slanted views so you can feel like you’re on the winning team.
They want to feel safe and secure
Lots of it stems from early childhood. If you are punished for asking questions, If you are rewarded for just repeating what your parents say, critical thinking gets buried deep within your mind. As the „we vs them“ tribal mentality, right and wrong stops being about the action and instead on the alignment of the person committing the action. So a priest molding children might not be nice, but he is one of the Christian tribe and that’s important. On the other, if an Democrat dies diverting, it’s by definition bad, because he is in another tribe. It’s simple as that, but hard to understand if you have a progressive worldview.
Maybe it’s the other way around… Maybe people predisposed to being lied to will end up with political views based on that lie.
