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Trump Supporters Think Like Children · The Lucas Bean Show

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why the Trump cult thinks like children do.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a psychological reason for that.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Before the age of 11, the human brain can't think abstractly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: It processes the world in concrete terms.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: One cause, one villain, one answer.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is a developmental stage most people grow out of.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: But most people aren't Trump supporters.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologist Jamie Luguri at Yale University studied what happens
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: when you shift people between concrete and abstract thinking,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: and then measure their political beliefs.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He found that when conservatives are thinking concretely,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: they are significantly more intolerant than liberal people are.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: More tribal, more hostile to anyone outside their group.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologists call this construal level theory.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It measures how the brain shifts between concrete and abstract thinking.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when researchers forced conservatives into abstract thinking,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: basically the way adults think, that intolerance disappeared completely.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Political orientation stopped predicting intolerance.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Their prejudice was not a deeply held belief.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a setting.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: It only exists when conservative brains were operating at the level of a child.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the problem.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Conservatives don't shift into abstract thinking on their own.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers had to force them into abstract thinking.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Without that push, conservatives' default thinking mode is that of a young child.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to that again.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Unless someone forces them to think abstractly, they never think like an adult.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they can't think like an adult, but because they're lazy thinkers.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: They default to the simplest cognitive mode the brain has available,
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: and they never leave that mode.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why propaganda works on MAGA so easily and almost nobody else.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Trump says immigrants are destroying the country.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is a concrete sentence.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: One cause, one villain, a 10-year-old could understand it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the point.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Trump speaks exclusively in child mode.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Every sentence.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Every rally.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Every post.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: One enemy.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: One solution.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: One leader.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's speaking to adults the way you speak to children.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they love him for it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Trump is the first politician who makes the world as simple as their brain needs it to be.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like a child.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: These people would rather be told what to think than do the work of thinking for themselves.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: MAGA isn't a political party.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a cognitive disability.