
Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News - slantedview
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cognitive-ability-and-vulnerability-to-fake-news/
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Arbalest
Torn between calling this the bias of branding political opponents as being
voted for by incompetents, and the generic need to understand as much as we
can.

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brudgers
I think it is more a matter of recent political events shaping the discussion.
They are shaping the discussion because the results were surprising to many
people. That surprise has generated interest in understanding what
happened™...I don't think political branding is a particularly recent
phenomenon.

The other factor of the changing discussion is that there is more data and it
is easier to collect. For example measuring cognitive ability (whatever that
is) is easier with computers as is administering the experiment of rating
people and processing the data for interesting statistics controlled for other
variables (such as authoritarianism which apparently was also assessed for the
subjects of the experiment).

To put it another way, people often seemed stuck to their long held opinions
about the other candidate in light of additional information.

