Why do conservatives fall for Trump? It's because of errors in our thinking and

[Akamai]

perhaps because of our brain structure.

For example, Trump benefits from "availability bias" effects -- eg, "If it's in thenews, it's in our thinking!"

Our minds have only so much room to consider different things, and so our brains are constructed to overvalue startling things, things we have heard recently about. For example, as Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman pointed out in his book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," if we suddenly hear about two airplanes crashing about the same time, the public greatly overestimates the risk of air travel. (I would add that the media greatly fans the hysteria and this leads to additional exaggeration of the risk -- e.g, the New York bombing of 9-17-16 which didn't kill anyone, etc.)

Kahneman describes very wonderfully in his book two different processes that go on in our brains, System 1 -- or fast thinking (in which we react without thinking and which helps us navigate the world more easily -- such as in driving a car, brushing our teeth, etc.) and System 2 -- slow thinking (this the more ponderous system that uses logic, carefully assess facts, etc.).

Most of our everyday thinking is in the realm of System 1. Kahenman says that most of our immediate reactions to thinks happen before we are aware of what is going on, before our System 2 thinking has a chance to analyze, consider, etc., the issues. And frankly, most of the time System 1 works perfectly well, such as in driving a car or riding a bike. Indeed, if you had to describe every action you took while you were riding a bike, you probably would quickly fall.

So when Trump mentions immigrant crime repeatedly, and the media repeats his lies on a continuous loop, people fall pray to the effects of "availability bias" because the logical side of their brain is off, and also because appropriate facts and good arguments have not been presented to them.

Add to this process what researchers have discovered about "terror management." (See the wikipedia article on this matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory)

In his 2-14-12 blog post, "Thinking, Fast and Slow... About Staying Alive — What’s Missing From Kahneman’s Classic," David Ropeik wrote:

"If you want to know what goes on in your brain as you “think”, and you can only read one of the flood of recent books on the subject, you can not do better than Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is a fascinating, rich, and eminently readable compendium of what Kahneman and others have learned about how the mind works. Truly a landmark book. But something’s missing....

"Beyond what is so richly reviewed in Thinking, Paul Slovic (a colleague of Kahneman) and Baruch Fischhoff (a student) and Sara Lichtenstein and many others have revealed several specific subconscious risk perception ‘feelings factors’ that guide our perceptions of possible peril. A few of them are simplified here;

"Control — The more control we feel we have, the less frightening a risk will feel. The less control we feel, the more afraid we’ll be.

"Dread — The nastier the nature of the risk — the more pain and suffering it involves - the scarier it is. (This goes a long way toward explaining why cancer, the number two killer in America, is far and away the disease people fear most.)

"Is the risk Natural or Human-made — Natural risks, like cancer-causing radiation from the sun or the toxic effects of some herbal medicines, scare us less than human-made risks, like cancer-causing radiation from nuclear power or industrial pesticides on fruits and vegetables.

"Personification — A risk represented by a name or a face (the starving child, a dead soldier in a flag-draped coffin) affects us more powerfully than a risk that may be much larger but is only represented by impersonal numbers (“millions of starving children”, statistics of battle deaths).

"Catastrophic risks (lots of harm from one large event, like a terrorist attack) worry us more than chronic risks where the harm is spread out over space and time (major killers like heart disease and drunk driving).

"Risks imposed on us (radiation from a nuclear power plant leak) feel worse than the same risk if we take it voluntarily (a chest x ray or CAT scan).

"Risks that are more immediate scare us more than risks that may be much larger but which are delayed (climate change... OOPS!)"

(See his excellent and still extraordinarily important blog post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/thinking-fast-and-slowabo_b_1147447.html)

Trump plays to our System 1 thinking processes with fears he conjures up regularly. These fears hit the part of our minds that are not logical -- the System 1, unconscious fast systems that do not rely on logic. And for far too many people -- aided by a cynical media and a wealthy over-class that does not want it's goodies reduced -- analyzing Trump's pronouncements through the lens of objective logic history is too time-consuming and effortful to be regularly done. With Trump, bumper-sticker logic
cements in our minds the fears he wants to implant, the fears that Republicans have been planting for the last 50 years.

Chris Mooney in his excellent book "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality", notes that by the time youngsters are about 5 years old, one can predict which of them are more likely to be conservative and which are more likely to be liberal. The frightened ones are more likely to be the Republicans and the more laid-back ones are more likely to be Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Republican_Brain)

At any rate, the ideas of Fast and Slow Thinking, of Terror Management, and actual differences in brains between Republicans and Democrats explain why conservatives are much more likely to fall prey to the lies and invented dangers created by Trump and repeatedly endlessly by our mainstream media, also viciously enhanced by FOX, Drudge, every national Republican leader, etc.