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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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[–] UnderpantsWeevil 4 points 1 day ago

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.