... years of Republican propaganda seems to have created a larger percentage of Americans who are addicted to believing whatever they want to believe, in my opinion.
My very religious sister routinely ignores EVIDENCE about many issues, especially in regard to the effectiveness of her prayers -- choosing to only recall the times when there was the slightest alignment of her prayers and later outcomes, and forgetting the numerous times they did not -- and she behaves the same way in regard to politics or pretty much anything that deals with human interactions.
Evidence is only a factor in her life during daily routines that she performs -- e.g., preparing a meal and observing that food appears to be sufficiently cooked and it might burn if heated much longer. So she's clearly capable of using evidence to make choices, but she chooses to ignore evidence if it pertains to complex issues such as human behavior. That's when she repeatedly falls back on her generalizations, avoiding the discomfort of accepting when they're clearly wrong.
https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/why-people-are-wired-to-believe-what-they-want-to-believe-4d9b4e161eb5
When thinking about the current political moment, it’s important to remember that as human beings we’re wired to interpret new information as confirming our beliefs and reject it if it runs counter to those beliefs.
First, there’s physiology. Sara Gorman, a public health specialist, and her father, Jack, a psychiatrist, explore this matter in their book Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us. They cite research that suggests that processing information that supports one’s beliefs leads to a dopamine rush, which creates feelings of pleasure. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, says that “extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”
On the flip side, “When something is inconsistent with existing beliefs, people tend to stumble. … Information that is inconsistent with one’s beliefs produces a negative affective response,” according to Norbert Schwarz, Eryn Newman and William Leach, experts in cognitive psychology.
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