The research reported in this article https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/20...src=newsletter has answered some of my questions about why some people believe what seems unbelievable or some cannot see another's viewpoint. It impacts our news, our shopping choices and our lifestyle choices as well.

Some quotes:
A series of experiments, led by psychologist Daniel Gilbert, that distracted participants while asking them to identify sets of true and false sentences found that the distraction interfered with the participants’ ability to identify the false statements, but not the true ones...
Dr. Gilbert proposed a different model of believing, one consistent with that of Descartes’s rival, the Dutch philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, who proposed that comprehending an idea and believing it to be true are actually the same process. Rejecting an idea, Spinoza said, requires an additional step that uses up additional mental resources.

Put another way, a belief is like an automatic email newsletter: you have to go out of your way to figure out how to unsubscribe...

“Most of the time, most humans are trying to tell each other things that are true and useful to them,” says Gus Cooney a researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who studies the psychology of conversations. Dr. Cooney says he suspects that this was even more true in our distant evolutionary past, when humans lived in small, stable groups and there was no advertising...

In the modern world, however, our natural credulity can be hacked. “The problem comes when we when we take that rule that's useful in one domain and then we misapply in a domain where people are trying to intentionally mislead us,” says Cooney.

The top three most common hacks, exploited by politicians for centuries, are repetition, repetition, and repetition. The more times we hear an assertion, say psychologists, the less effort it takes to wrap our minds around it, and humans, for some reason, confuse that ease with truthfulness.