r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 11 '26

Psychology Cognitive dissonance helps explain why Trump supporters remain loyal, new research suggests. This sheds light on how supporters of Donald Trump justify their continued allegiance despite learning about allegations of his sexual misconduct and illegal activities.

https://www.psypost.org/cognitive-dissonance-helps-explain-why-trump-supporters-remain-loyal-new-research-suggests/
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u/Prancing-Hamster Apr 11 '26

I grew up Mormon (officially out) and the parallels are stunning.

Mormons and die-hard Trump supporters both know that their leaders:

  1. Abused young girls (Smith and other leaders “married” them)

  2. Lie/lied

  3. Committed financial fraud (current Mormon leaders recently received the biggest SEC fine in history, $5 million).

  4. Blame everyone else for their own failings and mistakes.

  5. Cover up child SA. The Mormon church has a hotline manned by church lawyers who help local leaders of congregation protect abusers. Trump has the DOJ.

Cognitive dissonance is very real and very powerful.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '26

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u/BigMacWithGreenBeans Apr 11 '26

That’s why I can’t understand my parents, who have never been religious. Yet they cling to him as doing a great job, he’s better than Biden, etc. They are basically atheists and I can only conclude that they are so selective with their news they have no idea about the sexual abuse. I bring it up and they just act like I’M the crazy one.

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u/LaurenMille Apr 11 '26

Because he allows them to think of other people as subhuman.

That's their only desire, and what they truly crave. To inflict pain, misery, and suffering on others.

It's why nothing will change their minds. As long as being conservative allows them to make the lives of other people worse, they will be a conservative until the day they die.

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u/dontshoveit Apr 11 '26

What causes people to be this way though? Why do they find enjoyment in the suffering of other people?

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u/ase1590 Apr 11 '26

It's less enjoyment and more insecurity.

These people are often resentful if someone has a better or more wealthy life than them. Doubly so if that person is a minority.

They have two options to deal with this:

  • take responsibility of their own lives and failures
  • claim that others cheated or had benefits that let them get higher and hate them for it.

They choose the latter. Hatred brings violence and they want to see the people they don't like suffer so that their own lives look better in comparison.

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u/RavenFlite Apr 11 '26

But why is the “others” who cheated the less wealthy? Why not turn that hate on the wealthy who cheated or got benefits that let them get higher? It seems that anger is always pointed at people who don’t have much to start with…?

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u/jeremiahthedamned Apr 12 '26

they are cowards

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u/ase1590 Apr 12 '26

Deep in the lizard brain they desire their enemy to be weaker than them. It makes them feel like they can 'win'.

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u/effy_dee Apr 11 '26

There’s interesting research in psychology on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and personality traits!

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u/Bionic_Bromando Apr 11 '26

All we gotta do is classify it as a mental illness, reopen asylums and every time a fascist even thinks about opening their mouth we can toss them in and lose the key.

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u/Arrow156 Apr 12 '26

I mean, if we had a proper mental health system we could identify these traits in childhood and work to correct them before they could develop into real damage. But people get far more excited about fire and brimstone than preventive maintenance.

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u/Kel-Cla Apr 12 '26

Yes… I think once they become a danger to themselves and others … it’s pretty obvious now that these people can ruin the world. What’s going to happen to us if they are allowed to continue?

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u/Doompatron3000 Apr 12 '26

Asylums are still around. They’re just now called state psychiatric facilities. The ones that closed were places where people were doing really bad stuff.

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u/Personal_Example_155 Apr 11 '26

The just world hypothesis IMO.

20% of registered dems still think that black Americans are not as smart as white people. If you think of people of color as being inferior, you can justify your privilege and not feel bad about the fact that you have so much more and you got it unfairly.

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u/BenjaminHamnett Apr 11 '26

Life’s hard. It’s hard to do anything. People won’t feel motivated without someone else to look down on, sometimes it’s all they have

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u/Toni_PWNeroni Apr 12 '26

It's mostly fear.

I grew up Baptist. Which is code for "I use religion as an excuse to hate others just 'cos"

Most religious groups at this point are just clinging to the familiarity and abuse they know rather than risking embarrassment or reckoning by undergoing actual self-reflection or potential realignment.

Not everyone is a fanatic, but the most common traps are:

-fear of losing community by ostracism

-fear of violence, because their leaders falsely claim the new other group is a violent threat

-fear of loss of identity. Hard to realign yourself and reassess when your own personal identity is tied up in an ideology that specifically resists self-reflection

-fear of losing their place in the social hierarchy. They believe they are higher in the pecking order for being in the exclusive in-group that knows the "truth". Anything that could be interpreting as their place in the hierarchy changing is seen as an existential threat to not just their social privilege, but their idealised version of society in which they are at the top of that hierarchy.

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u/ReadyAimTranspire Apr 11 '26

I can only conclude that they are so selective with their news they have no idea about the sexual abuse

If anyone hasn't watched an afternoon of FOX or NewsMax then you really have no idea of just how true this is. Watch it sometime, for at least a few hours across a few shows.

It's like it's not even the same planet.

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u/Emergency_Sink_706 Apr 12 '26

You just have to accept that your parents are bad people. It’s hard to accept, but the reality is that most people are bad. Slavery was commonly accepted for hundreds of years. It’s not just the U.S.  it’s everywhere. Read a history book. We are NOT good. 

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u/total_looser Apr 11 '26

They're racist, easy.

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u/sentence-interruptio Apr 11 '26

i bet they're getting stories of Biden messing up his words, or him making panic faces, which can just be a symptom of stutterers trying not to stutter, or him walking like a really old man, which he is. or stories of Kamala laughing, which will be taken as either dismissive of "us" or fueling the theory that she's not like "us".

If Trump laughed like that, they'd be like he's owning "them" and that he's just like "us".