Each of us finds our own personal truth about what the world is like and how it works. All of us then tend to confuse our experience of reality with reality itself. (Sometimes referenced as the map versus the territory.) The narratives we create about our world and then operate from are good enough to have allowed our species to survive, but we all believe things that are comfortable and useful but not true. Extreme versions of this are the outlandish conspiracy theories: flat earth, 9/11 conspiracy, Covid vaccie makes peole magnetic. However, we ALL routinely create, live in, and operate from our own versions of reality. Why is this?
Faced with the need to survive in a potentially dangerous world, humans have evolved with 3 hard wired needs: comprehension, control, and community.
Comprehension. Understanding why things happen implies the possibility of predicting what will happen next and what our best choice of action would be. Sadly, because being wrong and being right feel exactly the same (unlike feeling warm or cold) what humans need is to *think* they understand. A simple, usable, comfortable but false explanation that fits with our world view will prevail over an accurate explanation that is complex or nuanced and conflicts with our world view. (The concept that something is either unpredictable of unexplainable is even less palatable to most.) We are all hard wired to find a comfortable narrative.
Control. Humans want agency, the ability to act autonomously as an individual, in ways that improve our chances for survival and comfort. In actual fact, individual humans have very little control over the world in which they live, and the minimal control they have is generally limited to very local effects. (One can warm up one's living room by adjusting the thermostat but one canot control the cost of the energy that creates the warmth or the weather/climate that generates the need for heating.) Just as with the need for comprehension, humans deal with their lack of real control by settling for believing they have control. We comfort ourselves by telling ourselves that if we do *A*, then we can make *B* happen - despite daily evidence to the contrary.
Community. Humans are what ethnologists call obligate pro-social beings. We are not skilled, strong, fast, big, adaptable, or tough enough to survive as solitary individuals. Our species has survived only because we form groups (which requires a division into 'us' and 'them') that leverage things like communication, shared information, collaboration, collective action, specialization to compensate for our vulnerabilities as individuals. Over the history of our species, these groups have evolved from small bands of families through larger tribes, and then a variety of still larger collections like clans, various political and geographic systems like chiefdoms and principalities and kingdoms, nation states, and even larger (like the EU, OAS, or OPEC). The core values of a community are strength in numbers and consistency in culture/governance. It is critically important to be a member in good standing of one's community in order to feel secure that the community has one's back. To be a member of a group, it is important to align one's personal identity to what one sees as one's group/social identity. Being a member of the group is more important than being right.
Our need for control and comprehension predisposes us to blame things that threaten or harm us or make us uncomfortable on 'them'.
Although this framing evolved from an analysis of conspiracy theories, it applies to all of us. We all go through our lives inventing or accepting comfortable narratives to explain the world, believing that our autonomy gives us control over what happens, and adjusting what we think and believe and how we act to fit in with our group.
(Side note: most of us belong to multiple communities that may partially overlap but also often conflict with each other. There is substantial behavioral evidence that the most effective way to get people to change their beliefs is to get them to align themselves with a different one of their communities. This is easy to say but not so easy to do in today's polarized world, and it requires making the effort to have substantive contact and interaction with people whose beliefs and behaviors upset us.)