It's kind of intuitive, isn't it? There is a certain category of people who understand only simple explanations and don't like complexity, whereas most phenomena in our lives have several layers of complexity. It's natural these people are attracted to those who can provide false but simple explanations of reality.
"People with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests"
≠ "Cambridge University team say their findings could be used to spot people at risk from radicalisation"<p>Correlation implies causation?<p>I have to read the rest. But this article starts of promising.
What exactly is an extremist view? I wonder if the taking away of professional sports from "fanatical" viewers, or fans may also result in more people joining extremist political and religious tribes regardless of their intellect. Of course maybe sports fans are also "less able to do complex mental tasks" or is that just what the "nerds" would have us believe?
TL;DR:<p>> <i>In some cognitive tasks, participants were asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible. People who leant towards the politically conservative tended to go for the slow and steady strategy, while political liberals took a slightly more fast and furious, less precise approach.</i><p>> <i>“What we found is that demographics don’t explain a whole lot; they only explain roughly 8% of the variance,” said Zmigrod. “Whereas, actually, when we incorporate these cognitive and personality assessments as well, suddenly, our capacity to explain the variance of these ideological world-views jumps to 30% or 40%.”</i><p>This says nothing about the direction of cause and effect.