AKA, I have a pre-existing worldview that provides me with some sense of identity, and that is more important than reality or truth.

This is 'cognitive bias' leading to 'cognitive dissonance' when you unconsciously or unintentionally believe in things that sound right but are later revealed to you to be false...

... And its called 'motivated reasoning' when you just actually consciously know that you're rejecting things that clash against your worldview.

Anyway all of this has been known by psychologists for what, 50+ years?

They just rarely explicitly state that this applies to political beliefs, even though there is no real scope limitation on what topic one can pick and choose acceptance or rejection on.

I suppose the only interesting part here is that people are now just en masse admitting they are fact-shunning hypocrites?

Truthiness

• Colbert

This is merely a function/mechanic of self-delusion. But, then again, I’m sure everyone here already realizes that.

Isn’t that exactly what religions do?

Hey, you who is reading! Yes, you! This is you too, it’s not only those wretched degenerates on that other side.

You can blame the gullible listener to only wanting to hear what they want to hear ....

... or ...

You can blame the well trained, educated and directed media for promoting, highlighting and normalizing the idea of spreading semitruth and fabrication in order to push an overall agenda.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, I don't subscribe to dumb delusions of aliens or illluminati cults running the world ... but I do believe that there is a culture of highly trained individuals working in media these days who just knowingly spread extreme views and pass them off as legitimate enough to be debated. A politician like Turnip shouldn't be normal ... but a national media has made it completely normal to have someone as unwell, politically unstable and sociopathic as Turnip to be acceptable enough to talk about endlessly as if there is nothing wrong with him.

In this case .... I blame the messenger

In other words, many voters lack critical thinking skills. Yep, that tracks.

"Alternative facts"

It's how religions work. The positive bullshitting is not much different than a sermon full of made up anecdotes - stories with the purpose of "evoking a deeper truth".

This is literally the "WOLOLO!" meme in action...

As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.

Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children's innocence and imagination.

Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.

Isn't that just tribalism or clubism in general?

For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their "judgement" on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of "their" team (like the coach, important players and even the club's manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against "their" team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.

People with a strong emotinal bond to a "team" judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.

Of course they do.

If there’s a binary choice (and here in the UK it basically is), you’re going to vote for the candidate that broadly covers your requirements from government, conveniently ignoring the bits you don’t like. The alternative is to not vote at all because no one candidate or party can perfectly mirror your values.

It's kind of like this: I just want it to be possible to smoke weed and be still gainfully employed. Even if Harris gets up on stage and starts spouting bullshit about Jewish space lasers, I'm still voting for her. Even if a bunch of people get hella pissed off that jewish space lasers aren't a smart use of tax dollars I'M STILL VOTING FOR HER because political issues that effect me are, to me, the more important ones.

In reality it wouldn't matter even if that's the plan. Building space lasers is still a less destructive thing to do to our society than all the utterly corrupt shit Trump and his goonlings want. I just need the bad guys to lose. We all do. Even if it's just this once.

I haven't read the article or study yet. But I wonder if the observation is one of "probably approximately correct learning" (PAC learning) in action. There's a book of that title by Les Valiant proposing that all biological learning works that way.

What the actual fuck? No. You need to listen to the words that come out of these motherfuckers' mouths. None of them have any "deeper meaning". If it's fascist on its face it's fascist the whole way to the bottom.

So its scientifically proven that many current voters should not be allowed to vote.

You can fool some of the people all of the time.

They're called Republicans.