Are Conservatives More Gullible? Seems So.

This article offers a few hypotheses about why the author believes “conservatives are more susceptible to believing lies.”

Conservative voters in the USA certainly seem gullible when it comes to believing things completely unsupported by fact—46% of Trump voters believe Pizzagate was real—but is gullibility really strictly divided along party lines, or does it just seem so to liberals? If so, is there a psychological basis for the phenomenon?

Here’s what it’s not due to: lack of education or low IQ. Those things do not seem to correlate with one’s ability to believe in lies. Author John Ehrenreich believes it is, rather, a difference in ontological understanding:

“at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes 'truth'.”

Further, he proposes a Freudian reading of conservatives’ sublimated desires manifested in what they falsely constitute as true—because it serves their own interests or hopes. Toward this end, he points out several statistically demonstrated personality differences that make those with conservative tendencies more susceptible to this type of psychological behavior: less empathy and introspection, less regard for fairness, more repressive toward unconscious desire, and affinity for authority and tradition.

These attributes, combined with a different understanding of 'truth' as something more like faith or belief, certainly make it clear that group psychology is at least partly to blame for conservatives’ disinclination toward fact-based inquiry.