Why Trump Supporters Cannot Sit With Uncertainty
Conspiracy theories are not beliefs. They are painkillers.
In 1949, psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik at the University of California, Berkeley published a study that would reshape how we understand the relationship between personality and political behavior. She was not studying conspiracy theories. She was not studying politics at all. She was studying perception. Specifically, she was studying why certain people could not tolerate the experience of not knowing something.
She called the trait intolerance of ambiguity.
Frenkel-Brunswik found that some people can sit comfortably with…
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