I understand why they do it. After all, they do dominate western media and internet so to them it is the majority of content they see.

Edit: Although, this is feddit.uk, but again I often forget to check where I am.

As a Manc my major beef is with the Scouse.

Where you from for this Stockport hate?

I did reference this in another comment further down.

I don’t blame Americans for it. It’s natural. Even though it’s a UK instance, we don’t always check where we are

Edit: Not sure why you being downvoted for this.

Yes, belief is social. What our in-group believes is way more important for what we believe and how we change our minds than one might think.

Like, if someone is a flat-earther, changing their mind with facts and figures isn't going to be very effective. Their in-group believes otherwise. And when you come at them with contrary facts, the brain treats it similarly to a physical threat to its survival. In ancient, pre-history humans, this might have been an advantage. The guy who didn't go along with the group got left for dead. Unfortunately, modern life is more complicated.

If we want to make the world better, we should probably focus on breaking up shitty ingroups (eg: fox news, the gop) and fostering groups that are worthwhile (I can't think of an unassailable group, which may indicate another problem)

It's not about lacking the hardware for thinking through complex things, it's about thinking habits (non methodical, not validating conclusions, operating at a pure language level rather than at a very concrete and precise meaning level - which is why you see people dispute scientific conclusions based on their own definitions of words) and being emotional about it without the needed introspection to spot that and stop doing it (becoming wedded to the conclusions one reaches and take it really bad when they're disproven, overestimating one's knowledge and being unable to reevaluate that estimation because it feels unpleasant to admit one might not know something, wanting to feel one is winning the argument hence digging into ever more illogical arguments and basically ignoring the full picture when trying to "win by attacking the words of the explanation").

In the old days, people would yield to authoritativeness on domains outside their expertise, which is something that was abused (for example, look at how experts were paid by tobbaco companies to say that their products were no dangerous for Human Health or if you want a more recent example, look at the field of Economics) so now we have the problem that a lot of people think they're as good as any expert even while not understanding even the most basic of basics of that expert domain (a quite common problem I see is people simply not knowing basic Statistics and assigning meaning and even motive to coincidences of random events or misreading as causation something that can just as easilly be correlation or even reverse causation).

Most people don't have training in Analytics or Science, so it makes sense that they just apply their day-to-day way of thinking (which has no method and using "common sense") to any and all subjects including domains which are highly structured and can't just be understood on face value or which are heavilly probabilistic and you can't just apply the mental shortcut from day to day life (of the "if I thrown a stone it will fall" kind) to draw conclusions.