Said the liberal who buys into Obama, Hillary and Al Sharpton’s bullshit.
Why does this happen? It’s tempting to say that it’s because conservatives are simply more gullible than liberals, but that’s not likely it. I used to get a lot of these kinds of emails from conservative friends and family members, until I started redirecting them to Snopes for debunking. Instead of thanking me for setting them straight, they instead just stopped sending the emails. Not the choice of sincerely mistaken people so much as people who know, on some level, that this email is bunk and just don’t want someone to spoil the illusion.
Instead, the reason has a lot to do with how people rationalize and justify their beliefs. As science writer Chris Mooney explained to Salon in 2013, “you feel these views before you think these views, and then you rationalize your beliefs”. Both liberals and conservatives, then, have a tendency to decide how they feel about something and then “take whatever evidence there is out there and twist it so that it supports their view”. We like evidence that supports our views and we discount evidence that conflicts with our views and creates cognitive dissonance.
Bluntly put, and as has been understood for awhile now, liberal views generally tend to be better supported by real world evidence like facts and scientific research. (There are exceptions, of course. The hostility to GMOs is very liberal and very much rooted in wishful thinking instead of facts.)
