You’ve probably heard conservatives trot out the same mantra: “We are the party of logic and reason, while liberals are snowflakes living on emotions.” It sounds so pretty, like a slogan on a t-shirt. But then came this study published in PLOS One in January 2026, and let’s just say it slightly spoils their jam. Scientists decided to check how people actually seek evidence before forming an opinion. Not how they twist facts when they’ve already made up their minds, but exactly the process of seeking truth.
What was the essence of the experiment? They took 583 people and gave them a task: assess the effectiveness of the cash bail reform. The situation is classic: there are 100 cities with reform and 200 without. The task – to understand if crime rates have decreased. Participants were given a “data bank.” You could look at dry statistics (where crime increased, where it decreased, compare groups) or read the opinions of “experts” and party bosses (from Democrats to Republicans and NRA).
And that’s when things got interesting. It turned out that liberals (and people with high cognitive reflection) behaved like tedious accountants. They dove into the statistics, gathered a complete picture: they compared cities “with reform” and “without,” looked at growth and decline. That is, they used a scientific approach: need a control group, need a sample, need all 4 pieces of the puzzle.
What were conservatives doing in the meantime? They more often relied on “intuition” and what are called “categorical proofs.” Simply put, they plucked out one fact. For example: “In City X, they implemented reform, and crime increased! Aha, you’ve been caught!” The fact that in a neighboring city without reform it grew even stronger bothered them little. Context? Control group? That’s for boffers! But worse still – conservatives were much more eager to see what “authorities” thought about it (i.e., their favorite party or organization).
Why should this bother us, libertarians? Because it’s a diagnosis. We often laugh at left-liberals for their economic illiteracy (and rightly so), but right-wing conservatives suffer from a different disease – intellectual laziness, blind faith in authorities and a penchant for the boss’s shoes. Instead of calculating figures themselves, a conservative asks: “What does Trump/The Republican Party/The Pope think about it?” This, naturally, is not individualism, but collectivism, simply colored in another shade.
Firstly, their thinking is based on intuition instead of data. “I just have a gut feeling about this being bad.” A gut feeling is a terrible advisor when it comes to complex social policy. If you make decisions based on one bright example, ignoring overall statistics, then you’re an easy target for populists. Secondly, they suffer from a lack of willingness to think. The study showed a direct correlation: the lower your ability at analytical thinking (cognitive reflection), the higher the probability that you will simply confirm your prejudices with the first convenient fact.
The result: those who shout the loudest about “reality” and “facts” are often actually relying on feelings and opinions of authorities. Liberals may be wrong in their moral conclusions or propose monstrous methods for solving problems (take and divide), but, as this study shows, at the stage of collecting data they at least try to look at the whole table.
For us libertarians, this is a good lesson. It’s not enough just to hate the state. You need to work with information better than opponents do. If your method of analysis is “to look at one scary headline and listen to your favorite blogger,” then you are definitely not a fighter for freedom—you’re just an NPC (non-player character) with a different skin, and it doesn’t matter what color it is, it won’t change anything.
