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TachyonTele @lemm.ee

Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?

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.___

67 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Because they aren't "conservatives", that's just a label they slap onto themselves and their changes are more radical than those they label "liberals". What they really are is what you've said, voters more susceptible to believing lies, the psychotypes that have been identified through social network big data profiling that are particularly susceptible or within a network susceptible to manipulation. That's also why a lot of these social network are pretty shameless about how they want to stimulate fake AI users. It is the cattle-lification of social network for those with the wealth and the power to do it, to such an extent that terms like 1984's "doublethink" apply quite aptly well beyond the theoretical.

67 comments