It might not seem like it, but I often try to understand how people that I otherwise recognize as intelligent and educated can hold beliefs that I consider to be, for lack of a better word, wacko. What's the difference in how their mind works and how mine does that might explain the different beliefs we hold?
John Ehrenreich, in a Slate article ("White Evangelicals' Continued Support of Trump Feels Surprising. It Shouldn't.") offers a theory predicated on fundamental differences in how conservatives and liberals see the world. These differences are probably set very early in life and individuals (myself included) are probably powerless to do much about them. It's just the way we see the world.
Ehrenreich:
Conservatives also show a greater tendency than liberals toward dichotomous thinking and have a stronger need for certainty and cognitive consistency. ("I don't do nuance," George W. Bush famously told Joe Biden.) ...
Dichotomous thinking, a trait associated with conservatism, is equally central to evangelical thought: God and man, saved and unsaved, Christianity and secularism, abstinence or the devil, male and female, life begins at conception and not at some nebulous time between then and when consciousness and rationality emerge. There is no room for ambiguity.
I guess what I'm saying is that "I do nuance."
