i just found the best research article and i want to share with you all:
"The Complex Relation Between Receptivity to Pseudo-Profound Bullshit and Political Ideology"
that title in simple terms: are liberals or conservatives more susceptible to fake-deep bullshit?
the critical result is that people whose morality is based more heavily on loyalty to one's groups, deference to authorities, and moral purity are waaaay more susceptible to this kind of fake-deep bullshit.
that effect was so strong it wiped out a lot of other results in their data. for example, endorsing tradition/resisting change and being socially conservative were strongly associated with being more susceptible to bullshit, but those factors stopped predicting susceptibility once these moral foundations were accounted for.
arguably, the reason this happens is because "social conservatism" is almost shorthand for holding strong loyalty/authority/purity morals. like, a long series of research papers have found that political (especially social) conservatism is predicted by endorsing loyalty/authority/purity morals.
Not to make everything about fandom, but I've been confident for a long-ass time that fanpol antis largely base their morality on these moral foundations (loyalty/authority/purity). antis are loyal to the group consensus and get harshly rejected and excluded by other antis when they have a dissenting opinion (loyalty); they tend to be obsessed with canon validation and harass creators on social media, not to mention their deference to cult leader-like big name fans (deference to authority); and of course it's in the name: fandom purity culture.
(if you want a detailed write-up on that feel free to ask, i have thoughts)
Meaning, ultimately, i spent like 2.5 hours reading this paper and writing this post just so could write the research-supported assertion that:
Antis are particularly susceptible to bullshit
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additional description of the paper's other results under the cut, unrelated to fandom, for anyone who wants to know more of the political results but can't access the paper
a) social conservatives, people who endorse holding to tradition / who are resistant to change, and people who base their morality more heavily on loyalty to groups, deference to authority, and moral purity are definitely more susceptible to bullshit.
b) people who take the middle of the road it comes to fighting for greater societal equality (measured e.g. by asking about creating greater economic equality) are maybe slightly more susceptible to bullshit. this is apparently related to 'centrism theory' which they discuss as saying, and i quote, "less intellectually sophisticated individuals tend to avoid deviating from the mainstream" uhh ????. rather than interpret this as related to intellect, i'd sooner argue (especially with the other factors they've already taken into account like cognitive reflection), this result is mostly indicating that conforming to the middle/centre means more susceptibility to bullshit (because you don't challenge the status quo, you don't challenge the bullshit).
c) economic leftists are sometimes more susceptible to bullshit. this effect only appears when controlling for other things like social conservatism, resistance to change, and morality based in loyalty/authority/purity though.
this is possibly (they don't report enough detail for me to say for sure) because being economically right is correlated with being more socially conservative, meaning that this relationship being economically right and bullshit susceptibility only occurs when you compare people at the same level of political orientation (leftists to leftists, right-wing to right-wing).
d) swedish voting patterns are associated with susceptibility to bullshit in particular ways, related to their social and economic orientations, as you might imagine. socially left but economically right voters were among the least susceptible to bullshit. interestingly, voters for a particularly socially and economically left party were among the most susceptible to bullshit.
e) at the most basic correlations level (without getting into more complex analysis, so taking with a grain of salt), susceptibility to pseudo-profound bullshit is correlated with: being receptive to profoundness in general, worse numericity skills, engaging in less cognitive reflection, more tendency toward confirmation bias, being socially conservative, being resistant to change, basing your morality on loyalty/authority/purity, basing your morality on justice and harm (this one surprises me, but is also why we go deeper than just looking at correlations), endorsing more traditional religiosity, being spiritual, being younger, and being less educated.
Notes:
As an important caveat, this study was done in Sweden, and what looks socially and economically left vs. right in Sweden may not map on to your own country that well, especially when it comes to voting patterns. Having frequent conversations with a Danish friend who moved to Australia, her perspective on what politically 'conservative' means changed a lot after seeing what that means here vs. in Denmark.
The general results for left/right should largely hold across the board because those were personality-based results, not specific to country-specific voting patterns and thus should apply broadly (although there may be some more idiosyncratic culture-specific effects).
The results for values should hold pretty much globally, because a ton of the research on moral foundations has been done cross-culturally and specifically came from a cross-cultural lens arguing that psychology focuses way too much on western liberal morality and is missing most of the globe's different moral reasoning and values.
