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Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies? (slate.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.^___^

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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?

[–] ickplant 5 points 1 day ago

Anyone who believes in the fairy tale of religion is going to be more susceptible to other lies.

[–] chonglibloodsport 4 points 1 day ago

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.