I can only reduce it down to gullibility and self-centered, arrested development, (adolescent-style behaviors).
It's not that you aren't going to have a sampling of a population that can't think for themselves and rely only on external sources that appeal to their emotive, knee-jerk reality, (isn't that what advertising does, essentially?). It is all in the numbers and how those people are motivated to do what they are told to.
While we know that that is being demonstrated by way of AstroTurf inducements, we don't know just how much of this population fits in the above, meme-robot category of shallow thought and lack of critical thinking skills. The media is giving them a lot of attention so those that participate stand out in that sense.
My gut feeling though is that we have a very large number of 100% knuckleheads among us now, perhaps about one-third or more of the population, and that's being generous. The key is that they are poster children for the findings of the Dunning-Kruger effect--proof even! How can they ever get that they don't know that they don't know how much they don't know?
I think, in part, we can thank decades of advertising/media for conditioning and dumbing them down, as well as a failure to properly educate more people in how to think, not just what to think so that they have something more than walnuts in their heads to work.
That sentence could blow their circuits easily.
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