A driver in his 70s and over in a taxi keeps talking

A driver in his 70s and over in a taxi keeps talking about all kinds of conspiracy theories, maybe he's seen a lot of TV. He doesn't even answer because he doesn't want to hear it, and he keeps talking even though he's wearing earphones. There are many explanations for why this is happening, but there are a few things

1. The college enrollment rate for those in their 70s is 14% and those in their 20s are in their mid-70s. (The college enrollment rate is not the total population of that age group, but the percentage of high school graduates in the current year. At that time, the high school enrollment rate was less than 70%.)

2. The elderly poverty rate once exceeded 50% and then fell to about 40.4%, but it is still No. 1 in the OECD.

Basically, the above level of education or income should not be an indicator of an individual's thinking or personality problem. These conditions are just conditions, and the differences according to the problems of thinking and personality are much more varied among individuals. (The average personality value may differ according to the blood type, but the individual variation is much larger, so blood type personality theory is not scientific.)

So the more valid stories are the following.

1. Loneliness tends to strengthen stubbornness.

2. Being old means that you have lived your life the way you used to. It is not easy to feel motivated to abandon the old method. It means that if you listen to what you want to hear and believe what you want to believe, your life will not fall into a big crisis. It is true that YouTube greatly reinforced this trend, but it was still the case with people like that when it was not there. (It means that it is strongly influenced by the region and its cultural group.) The Meme that Dawkins talked about is very powerful

3. In general, conspiracy theories become distrustful as you get older. This is because you have a lot of experience in life.

4. However, the condition most commonly known to believe in conspiracy theories is not actually the condition of age, income, or educational level, but of being "socially alienated." (Why Yoon came to believe in conspiracy theories is a bit different. It has the ability to alienate itself. Cognition is distorted in the first place.)

5. It is difficult to escape from one's existing thinking when you start to feel alienated and pushed to the outside world. If you actively engage in social interactions by the external environment, such as working at a company with people with various thoughts, you will experience fewer of these problems, but if you feel alienated for any reason, it is difficult to escape when exposed to negative or conspiracy-based thinking. Of course, you are a person and you look for people who feel similar to you. When you feel a sense of usefulness or satisfaction here, the same mechanism as a cult or multi-level works from then on, and you have a defensive attitude toward opinions that oppose it (an attitude that only talks about yourself is a kind of defensive attitude).

6. What is scary about the feeling of alienation is that it prevents you from acknowledging reality. The moment you do not recognize reality, cognition is distorted, and distorted cognition increases the bias of information collection, and this vicious cycle repeats.

In the end, it means that there is no affection for one's life and a warm and periodic exchange with the people around you. I really didn't want to hear the taxi driver's story, but I thought about this and decided to understand it while looking for data.