Many voters are willing to accept misinformation from political leaders – even when they know it’s factually inaccurate. According to our research, voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important “truth.”
AKA, I have a pre-existing worldview that provides me with some sense of identity, and that is more important than reality or truth.
This is ‘cognitive bias’ leading to ‘cognitive dissonance’ when you unconsciously or unintentionally believe in things that sound right but are later revealed to you to be false…
… And its called ‘motivated reasoning’ when you just actually consciously know that you’re rejecting things that clash against your worldview.
Anyway all of this has been known by psychologists for what, 50+ years?
They just rarely explicitly state that this applies to political beliefs, even though there is no real scope limitation on what topic one can pick and choose acceptance or rejection on.
I suppose the only interesting part here is that people are now just en masse admitting they are fact-shunning hypocrites?
In summary: You and me, we’re in the same tribe, and we hold the superior worldview. Those people over there in the out-group are wrong. They also do things the wrong way, because they aren’t in our tribe.
Hearing this sort of talk pulls some strings in the human mind. There’s this interesting default setting that says tribalism = TRUE.
Which itself is something notable imho, in showing how far it has come along, i.e. as a barometer reading on how far gone his supporters are.
They used to hide it, feeling more shame that their views might not be as acceptable by the general public as they now know that they are.
Don’t forget that some sitting members of Congress are currently calling for an active, not-joking civil war.
We ignore all of this at our peril.