Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?
An interplay between how all humans think and how conservatives tend to
act might actually explain a lot about our current moment.

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).

Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only
25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is
caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall
believe that humans have evolved over time.

And then it gets really crazy. Almost 1 in 6 Trump voters, while
simultaneously viewing photographs of the crowds at the 2016 inauguration
of Donald Trump and at the 2012 inauguration of Barack Obama , insisted
that the former were larger. Sixty-six percent of self-described �very
conservative� Americans seriously believe that �Muslims are covertly
implementing Sharia law in American courts.� Forty-six percent of Trump
voters polled just after the 2016 election either thought that Hillary
Clinton was connected to a child sex trafficking ring run out of the
basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., or weren�t sure if it was
true.
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If �truth� is judged on the basis of Enlightenment ideas of reason and
more or less objective �evidence,� many of the substantive positions
common on the right seem to border on delusional. The left is certainly
not immune to credulity (most commonly about the safety of vaccines, GMO
foods, and fracking), but the right seems to specialize in it.
�Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right,�
concluded a team of scholars from the Harvard Kennedy School and
Northeastern University at a February 2017 conference. A BuzzFeed
analysis found that three main hyperconservative Facebook pages were
roughly twice as likely as three leading ultraliberal Facebook pages to
publish fake or misleading information.

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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It�s also not just misinformation gained from too many hours listening to
Fox News, either, because correcting the falsehoods doesn�t change their
opinions. For example, nine months following the release of President
Obama�s long-form birth certificate, the percentage of Republicans who
believed that he was not American-born was actually higher than before
the release. Similarly, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats
corrected their previous overestimates of the unemployment rate after the
Bureau of Labor Statistics released the actual data. Republicans�
overestimated even more than before.

Part of the problem is widespread suspicion of facts�any facts. Both
mistrust of scientists and other �experts� and mistrust of the mass media
that reports what scientists and experts believe have increased among
conservatives (but not among liberals) since the early �80s. The mistrust
has in part, at least, been deliberately inculcated. The fossil fuel
industry publicizes studies to confuse the climate change debate; Big
Pharma hides unfavorable information on drug safety and efficacy; and
many schools in conservative areas teach students that evolution is �just
a theory.� The public is understandably confused about both the findings
and methods of science. �Fake news� deliberately created for political or
economic gain and Donald Trump�s claims that media sites that disagree
with him are �fake news� add to the mistrust.

But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even
than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and
liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes �truth.�
Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of
liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and
trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.

To understand how these differences manifest and what we might do about
them, it helps to understand how all humans reason and rationalize: In
other words, let�s take a detour into psychology. Freud distinguished
between �errors� on the one hand, �illusions� and �delusions� on the
other. Errors, he argued, simply reflect lack of knowledge or poor logic;
Aristotle�s belief that vermin form out of dung was an error. But
illusions and delusions are based on conscious or unconscious wishes;
Columbus�s belief that he had found a new route to the Indies was a
delusion based on his wish that he had done so.
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Although Freud is out of favor with many contemporary psychologists,
modern cognitive psychology suggests that he was on the right track. The
tenacity of many of the right�s beliefs in the face of evidence, rational
arguments, and common sense suggest that these beliefs are not merely
alternate interpretations of facts but are instead illusions rooted in
unconscious wishes.

This is a very human thing to do. As popular writers such as Daniel
Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler have pointed out, we often
use shortcuts when we reason, shortcuts that enable us to make decisions
quickly and with little expenditure of mental energy. But they also often
lead us astray�we underestimate the risks of events that unfold slowly
and whose consequences are felt only over the long term (think global
warming) and overestimate the likelihood of events that unfold rapidly
and have immediate consequences (think terrorist attacks).

Our reasoning is also influenced (motivated, psychologists would say) by
our emotions and instincts. This manifests in all kinds of ways: We need
to maintain a positive self-image, to stave off anxiety and guilt, and to
preserve social relationships. We also seek to maintain consistency in
our beliefs, meaning that when people simultaneously hold two or more
contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, one or the other must go. And so
we pay more attention and give more credence to information and
assertions that confirm what we already believe: Liberals
enthusiastically recount even the most tenuous circumstantial evidence of
Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, and dyed-in-the-wool Trump
supporters happily believe that the crowd really was bigger at his
candidate�s inauguration.

These limits to �objective� reasoning apply to everyone, of course�left
and right. Why is it that conservatives have taken the lead in falling
off the deep edge?
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The answer, I think, lies in the interaction between reasoning processes
and personality. It�s each person�s particular motivations and particular
psychological makeup that affects how they search for information, what
information they pay attention to, how they assess the accuracy and
meaning of the information, what information they retain, and what
conclusions they draw. But conservatives and liberals typically differ in
their particular psychological makeups. And if you add up all of these
particular differences, you get two groups that are systematically
motivated to believe different things.

Psychologists have repeatedly reported that self-described conservatives
tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to
tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability,
conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and
ambiguity and uncertainty. They are more sensitive than liberals to
information suggesting the possibility of danger than to information
suggesting benefits. And they are more moralistic and more likely to
repress unconscious drives towards unconventional sexuality.

Fairness and kindness place lower on the list of moral priorities for
conservatives than for liberals. Conservatives show a stronger preference
for higher status groups, are more accepting of inequality and injustice,
and are less empathic (at least towards those outside their immediate
family). As one Tea Party member told University of California
sociologist Arlie Hochschild, �People think we are not good people if we
don�t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. But I am
a good person and I don�t feel sorry for them.�

Baptist minister and former Republican congressman J.C. Watts put it
succinctly. Campaigning for Sen. Rand Paul in Iowa in 2015 he observed,
�The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans
believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as
fundamentally good.�
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These conservative traits lead directly to conservative views on many
issues, just as liberal traits tend to lead to liberal views on many
issues. But when you consider how these conservative traits and these
conservative views interact with commonly shared patterns of motivated
reasoning, it becomes clearer why conservatives may be more likely to run
into errors in reasoning and into difficulty judging accurately what is
true and what is false.

It�s not just that Trump is �their� president, so they want to defend
him. Conservatives� greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in
authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be
true, even when the �facts� would seem to indicate otherwise. The New
York Times cataloged no less than 117 clearly false statements proclaimed
publicly by Trump in the first six months of his presidency, with no
evident loss in his supporters� faith in him. In the same way, greater
faith in the legitimacy of the decisions of corporate CEOs may strengthen
the tendency to deny evidence that there are any potential benefits from
regulation of industry.

Similarly, greater valuation of stability, greater sensitivity to the
possibility of danger, and greater difficulty tolerating difference and
change lead to greater anxiety about social change and so support greater
credulity with respect to lurid tales of the dangers posed by immigrants.
And higher levels of repression and greater adherence to tradition and
traditional sources of moral judgment increase the credibility of claims
that gay marriage is a threat to the �traditional� family.

Conservatives are also less introspective, less attentive to their inner
feelings, and less likely to override their �gut� reactions and engage in
further reflection to find a correct answer. As a result, they may be
more likely to rely on error-prone cognitive shortcuts, less aware of
their own unconscious biases, and less likely to respond to factual
corrections to previously held beliefs.
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The differences in how conservatives and liberals process information are
augmented by an asymmetry in group psychological processes. Yes, we all
seek to keep our social environment stable and predictable. Beliefs that
might threaten relationships with family, neighbors, and friends (e.g.,
for a fundamentalist evangelical to believe that humans are the result of
Darwinian evolution or for a coal miner to believe that climate change is
real and human-made) must be ignored or denied, at peril of disrupting
the relationships. But among all Americans, the intensity of social
networks has declined in recent years. Church attendance and union
membership, participation in community organizations, and direct
political involvement have flagged. Conservatives come disproportionately
from rural areas and small towns, where social networks remain smaller,
but denser and more homogeneous than in the big cities that liberals
dominate. As a result, the opinions of family, friends, and community may
be more potent in conservative hotbeds than in the more anonymous big
cities where Democrats dominate.

The lack of shared reality between left and right in America today has
contributed greatly to our current political polarization. Despite
occasional left forays into reality denial, conservatives are far more
likely to accept misinformation and outright lies. Deliberate campaigns
of misinformation and conservative preferences for information that fits
in with their pre-existing ideology provide only a partial explanation.
Faulty reasoning and judgment, rooted in the interactions between modes
of reasoning and judgment shared by all with the specific personality
patterns found disproportionately among conservatives may also play a
central role.