Tell me they're stupid with out telling me they're stupid.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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They have narrative brains that work in a very linear fashion.
Warning: essay ahead.
This may seem like a more wordy way of saying "stupid" but if we understood the mechanics of what kind of stupidity it is, we could have controlled this situation from much earlier on instead of letting the world's worst criminals pied-piper these dumbasses.
They don't do narrative thought with language. I had this realization when talking to someone who leans conservative who actually got therapy and said how CBT changed his life.
If you've never had CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the crux of it is to interrupt your mental health episodes with conscious, language-based thinking and re-narrativizing your head-stories. Basically, it's learning to talk to yourself in a way to not ruminate on your feelings so the negative feelings pass quicker.
What struck me on this was the idea that not only had this person never tried to use his mind in a cognitive, present way to control his feelings, he rarely if ever used his mind in a language-based way to examine a problem in his life. CBT didn't just open a new way to manage his feelings, it opened up a new way to look at the entire world. (No idea yet if it will impact his politics, but he is a lot easier to talk to about larger issues now that his emotions aren't flaring up about every little thing.)
If you have an internal dialogue or monologue, you may take this for granted, but there are a LOT of people who don't, and the brain gets by just fine without language going on inside your head. We have thousands of layers of sub-systems that can analyze situations and find appropriate actions and responds within fractions of seconds, but it's not necessarily conscious and controlled. Your brain's conscious layer is just a story-telling device, it's not rational nor logical. It just assembles all the data into a coherent picture. Not a correct picture, just one that connects.
This is where many of the country's conservatives are, the narration in their heads is supplied by outside forces because they don't have their own, their emotions override any chance of critical analysis and they may have never in their life tried to consciously think about anything, much less their own feelings and thoughts.
If you know someone like this, you may change their whole universe if you introduce this idea, and get them to think "on purpose" for a period of time. it's uncomfortable for some, but some people want to be able to do more with their minds. We need to encourage it and try to pull people up.
Stupid and too lazy to fact check something said with authority as long it fits their bias.
That said, I am stupid and too lazy to fact check this information because it fits my biases.
You're not incorrect.... definitely fits my biases too
AKA they are more gullible.
OJ didn't do it.
"Conservatives not as good at critical thinking"
Considering conservatives were reported to also be more likely to believe fake news it seems the two could be correlated.
They are stupid. The fact they blindly trust AI is just another data point in favor of that.
blindly trust AI if it tells them what they want to hear
FTFY
Oh good they can go right from worshipping Trump to worshipping AI.
Next thing they will claim president should be Grok because it doesn't have a "bias" despite AI needing bias programmed in to all AI or it would never be safe to use.
I nominate the Auto-Pilot to be captain.
Conservatives in the US have the lowest intelligence of any group in the modern history of the world.
its not so much lowest intelligence, its fear of being pushed out of the in-group
so they will twist their logic to conform with the group-think, many times in ways that are intelligent even if cynical and hypocritical
One causes the other. It is 100% lowest intelligence + brains full of lead
I've got lead poisoning and I'd still never vote conservative. Personally I think at least part of it is being raised to believe in sky fairies that "love" you so much that they'd torture you for eternity for not falling in line, and thinking for yourself is somehow a bad thing.
A friend's kid used to be a relatively smart person until she got involved in the church and believed in the bullshit, now she's basically impossible to talk to because she simply doesn't live in reality anymore. Indoctrination and brainwashing plays a large part of it.
You’re exactly right, religious indoctrination requires suppression of critical thinking. This invades every aspect of the victim’s life, including political alignment.
But if they were actually critical thinkers in the first place, then they wouldn't be able to be religiously indoctrinated
Nah, don’t underestimate how much it affects people to be indoctrinated as a child. It took me until I was an adult to properly leave the religion I grew up with because children are vulnerable to indoctrination.
My friends and parents all forced my brother and I into church since kids. My brother and I easily saw how corrupt and morally bankrupt it all is - yes, even as children. No way we would ever follow that shit.
Yes children are vulnerable, but dont underestimate them and let them be how they want to be, they are also very intelligent. I bet most of them dont even want to go to church in the slightest
Yup. Where I live is overwhelmingly religious and also unsurprisingly a conservative stronghold as well. It's like living in a video game full of badly scripted NPCs.
I've seen this game played by conservatives in red states. Wealthier, whiter cohorts tend to have lower dropout rates and more college degrees. So you end up getting some real "FBI Crime Statistics" tier analysis when you go into Mississippi and start asserting all those uneducated [poor black] voters are stupidly voting for Democrats while the intellectual elite [rich white] voters are smartly voting Republican.
Scale this up nationally, and you get the same impact reversed. Liberals tend to live in big urban neighborhoods with more money for education, more professional jobs, and more creditworthiness (which is critical to accessing college, owning a home, etc). Conservatives tend to live in the exurbs, work in the extraction industries, foregoing education in pursuit of immediate income, and suffering the various indignities of being lower class.
But when you get under the hood of their politics... Don't tell me Eric Adams isn't as big of a techbro idiot as anyone on the DOGE staff. Don't tell me Gavin Newsom and Kristen Gillibrand aren't as much slaves to Silicon Valley as JD Vance or Steve Scalise. Don't try and sell me on John Fetterman being a smart guy because he came up through the Dem party.
Right-wingers more likely to be thickos
TL;DR: Conservatives are fucking idiots. Full stop.
They are also dumber, study finds.
Well, of course they are. AI generation is the ultimate narcissist mirror. It always agrees, always appeases and never antagonizes. There's also a correlation with political conservative world views and dark personality traits like narcissism. It's no wonder they love the narcissism machine.
Tell a conservative what they want to hear, and they'll gladly follow you straight off a cliff.
Surprise surprise, the people who support the obvious grifters and crooks, and who are convinced the problems of the world are due to immigrants and trans people, are especially gullible.
LLMs are winging it through every conversation they ever have.
Conservatives lack reasonable bullshit spotting skills.
LLMs often start by telling you that you are right, irrespective of the facts.
Conservatives don't Lille having their worldview challenged by facts.
Of course conservatives would happily swallow ai slop.
Conservatives seek to maintain the status quo, so its not really surprising they like it when something tells them the thing they already like is the thing to like. Nice to have it confirmed through science though.
The study did not consider this effect in the experiments, but that could be an interesting follow-up.
The title could also be: "Conservatives are more likely to be entertained by jiggling keys in front of them"
But the rest of the world sees democrats, non voters and republicans as dumb, dumber and dumbest respectively.
I think a big part of this is probably related to religion and the conservative mindset about traditional families. In other words, authoritarianism.
Religions teach followers blind obedience. Even if a person tries to reason for themselves, they are required to change their minds if their conclusions don't match what their religious leaders tell them to believe.
Similarly, the traditional family that conservatives espouse is one where the children's primary trait is obedience.
All of this authoritarianism training is going to make people more vulnerable to AI flummery. AI is very good at sounding confident and convincing. And because conservative children have been stripped of their natural human ability to reason for themselves, all they have left in their toolbox to determine the validity of written words are how confident the writer sounds.
Maybe I'm reading too much or too little into this, but I think I would be more likely to entertain AI-generated recommendations that I was told consider my past media consumption or interests, since the alternative seems to be considering AI-generated recommendations that do not consider my past behavior.
I'd assume the latter would just be a bunch of algorithmic slop based on what is trending in general, and therefore of zero value to me.
There's maybe a subtle detail in that "recommendations based on past behavior" could mean "more of the same", which is not necessarily helpful. But my default assumption would be that it includes "people with similar habits to you also like", and/or "things that combine your known preferences". Even then, if typical streaming services recommendations are any reference, I'd take "more of the same" over "trending" 9 times out of 10.
Something similar crossed my mind, and I thought it wasn't too crazy to like what you like. I guess their main point was that conservatives follow the trend more closely, whereas liberals are evenly split. What I wish they had questioned was the reason for liberals being less trusting. Maybe they're more conscious of environmental impacts or tend to see through AI for what it is rather than thinking of it as a magical black box? Would've been good to know.
I will cop to not having fully read the original source, but going off the excerpts posted, my takeaway was that participants were told they were getting AI generated recommendations--the difference was whether it was explicitly stated that they were based off their previous consumption/preferences or if they were not explicitly told this fact.
IMO generating recommendations for new content to explore is actually one of the better use cases for a LLM, since reading and distilling tons of organic online conversations from people who have expressed similar interests to me is exactly how I would ideally go about it.
But yeah, back to the main point...maybe there is more to it, but this seems like a relatively neutral point that can be spun in either direction depending on which echo chamber you're in. For example, imagine r/conservative being all "those silly liberals hate AI so much that they would rather get random recommendations than ones they were told come from AI"