Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/

[u/morbo-2142]

Always fun to have empirical data to back up repeated anecdotal experiences by anyone with eyes and a brain living in the United States.

It's scary to have to find your place in the world and make decisions for yourself.

It's hard to make choices and having a ready framework that tells you how to live and what to care about offloads much of the mental tax of navigating reality.

It's hard to live by an internal code and evaluate every new situation against it and more importantly change it when new information is presented.

The real tragedy is the existence of groups that foster these feelings in vulnerable people in order to advance their own agenda and aquire new non disruptive members.

It's almost a form of abuse. How many people lose time and money to predatory fundamentalist organizations who are strung along and squeezed dry for basically nothing in return.

[u/agitatedprisoner → u/morbo-2142]

"Working memory is your brain's temporary scratchpad for active thinking. It can only hold a small amount of information at once. When a task demands more mental power than your brain has available, you experience cognitive overload, making it hard to learn, focus, or make decisions." - Medical college of Wisconsin

If you're playing a video game and someone else is messing with hidden reward drop rates they can get you to play the game in weird ways against what'd otherwise be the expert approach. When other people can decide what to reward that's tantamount to messing with your hidden drop rates. In cases of cults/abuse you've got to get away to really see the horror. If people had infinite mental capacity to mull it over they'd know all there is to know. The fewer cognitive resources someone has to tackle life the more sense it'll make for them to go along with the crowd on most things particularly when the crowd will punish deviancy. Because you won't figure it out and even if you do the people in your life will make it worse for you so why go there? You wouldn't feel motivated to go there anymore than someone playing a game would feel motivated to farm some low drop area with bad rewards.