politics

When people feel threatened, they are less likely to use careful, fact-based, rational thought and decision-making processes and tend to depend more on intuition, gut feelings, and 'vibes' to assess the situation and decide what to do. When one senses danger, prompt and immediate action is called for. This preference under threat for what Kahnemann and Tversky termed System 1 thinking over System 2 thinking has a good evolutionary survival benefit: when an unknown large animal with big teeth and claws suddenly appears, that is a lousy time to sit and think.

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.