Conservative

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Because being conservative is directly caused by being a gullible moron.

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.

They want to feel safe and secure

More insulated communities.

Way lower education rates with worse outcomes.

Being religiously indoctrinated as a child.

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.

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.

I'm. not so sure that is true. I think it's that conservatives are lied to more. There are plenty of liberal falsehoods, but there isn't a persistent overarching design to them.

But It also my be self selecting the more likely you are to believe false things may make you more susceptible to being a conservative. it seems like people are drawn to the lies seeking them out and choosing them.

Maybe it's the other way around... Maybe people predisposed to being lied to will end up with political views based on that lie.