The Credentialed and the Clueless

Sounds like a soap opera, but it is real life—research shows intelligence makes it easier to defend false beliefs—not correct them

I must admit that I’m no social scientist or professional researcher, but I’m completely fascinated with the ability for smart people to believe stupid, false things. I’ve seen studies indicating it’s easier to fool highly credentialled people (those with more degrees than a thermometer) than common folk, because the highly educated tend to have narrow silos of knowledge and when they venture outside those silos, they’re kind of lost.

I’ve been watching Lefty-X today and from regular, highly credentialled people to professional basketball coaches to elected officials—like one of the Senators from California, Adam “Shifty” Schiff—people have advanced completely insane “facts” about Renee Good, claiming she wasn’t an activist at all, just a mom of three kids who wrote poetry, was lost and trying to turn around when an ICE Demon shot her in cold blood.

So, my Mississippi educated self rolled up our sleeves and dove in.

Since it seemed like a pandemic of reason-resistant dissonance, I started researching potential mechanisms that would cause large groups of people, seemingly of a common social and political perspective, to believe things that simply are not true, and even when incontrovertible proof was available, reject it in favor of continuing to believe the falsehoods.

I searched for some psychological, physical, environmental, or biological condition that would approximate the voluntary form of brainwashing that sure seems common within progressive Democrat strongholds across America.

While I didn’t find any Love Canal level environmental toxin or physical DNA commonality, nor any bacteria or virus indicating a biological cause, I did come across several brain imaging studies, particularly using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), that investigated how the brain processes information challenging existing beliefs, often linking it to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, or similar cognitive phenomena. These studies suggest that rejecting or rationalizing away disconfirming evidence can engage neural mechanisms akin to reward processing, potentially driven by dopamine signaling, which reinforces the behavior in addiction-like patterns. Sort of like Hunter Biden was with hookers and blow.

I more or less rejected these possibilities when I read that the area of the brain that “lit up” during these studies is consistent with the dopamine driven reward/relief response but isn’t uniquely specific to dopamine or addiction. It’s also a value/learning hub used in many processes, so the physical/biological angle simply hasn’t been proven.

But I did find very interesting studies and papers indicating strong empirical evidence that when societies reward identity loyalty more than accuracy, people reliably shift from truth-seeking to identity-protective reasoning.

So, down the psychological rabbit hole we go.

Research in political psychology and behavioral economics shows that individuals do not primarily use reason to discover truth, but to defend social belonging and moral identity. When beliefs are tied to group membership, disagreement becomes a threat, and evidence is evaluated not for correctness but for whether it protects or endangers one’s standing in the group. Under these conditions, belief accuracy becomes secondary by design.

Crucially, this dynamic does not produce actual ignorance—quite the opposite. It produces sophisticated rationalization. Studies consistently show that people with higher cognitive ability or greater numeracy are often more polarized when evidence threatens their identity. Intelligence increases the ability to construct convincing defenses of false beliefs rather than correct them. Moralization further hardens this effect: once beliefs are framed as moral imperatives, counterevidence is perceived as immoral or hostile, making falsification socially and psychologically unacceptable.

So, I guess, in a sense, it isn’t really a mental illness. It’s a survival mechanism driven by a need for belonging.

Neuroscience helps explain why this system is self-reinforcing. Belief-challenging information activates threat and conflict circuits, while successfully defending group-consistent beliefs is associated with neural signals linked to relief and valuation. The result is a feedback loop in which rejecting evidence reduces psychological discomfort and reinforces group loyalty. As I read the situation, it seems more about securing an avoidance of pain rather than chasing Hunter Biden-level hooker and blow pleasure.

At the population level, evidence suggests that societies privileging allegiance over accuracy predictably generate citizens who defend falsehoods with intelligence and passion—not because they cannot or will not reason, but because reason is being used to serve social survival rather than truth.

Why am I not surprised that this dovetails almost perfectly with the communist “critical theory” identitarian wave we’ve experienced in America for the past thirty or so years. This wave is all about “identifying” as part of some group to satisfy the need for status, prestige and belonging—even if that group is a bunch of self-loathing, highly credentialled, white people who love to self-flagellate to show how much they care about other “disadvantaged” and “oppressed” groups.

Do you recall the names Saira Rao and Regina Jackson? They co-founded a struggle session venture called Race to Dinner, which explicitly marketed paid, invitation-only dinners for affluent white women, framed as “educational” sessions about white supremacy, complicity, and oppression.

They even receive membership points in the cool kid’s club for allowing these other groups to demean and debase them if they haven’t done enough of that work themselves. Now they conduct the struggle sessions inside their own brains without external input.

Membership has its privileges, so it turned into a widespread progressive ethos and it is evidently a short trip from one of Saira Rao's dinners to the Portland Police Chief breaking down in tears as he announced that two Tren de Aragua members were shot when they tried to Renee Good more ICE agents.

This is all that in a Sam’s Club/Costco sized box.

As Christopher Cross once warbled, “Yes, it’s crazy—but it’s true...”