What you are talking about are Critical Thinking Skills, which is how humans are supposed to think, but it has to be taught to us, and we have to learn it, and we have to practice it until it becomes second nature to just think that way. It starts with just questioning an assertion and picking it apart on its face, to offering sources for your arguments, and insisting on sources for the other side.

If you don’t learn how to automatically apply Critical Thinking Skills, then your brain substitutes a chaotic form of thinking that could settle into anything. It’s like tossing a box of LEGOs in the air, and hoping they land as a fully constructed house.

They become easily susceptible to manipulation, because they never learn how to spot it. So a guy like Trump is easily manipulated by the most insincere flattery, a quality that surprised the Soviets on his first visit to Moscow in 1987, that they recognized his value as a Useful Idiot, and gave him the code name Krasnov.

They also take unrelated facts and connect them, filling in the gaps with “obviously logical” fabrications, and declare them the truth, and a conspiracy theory is born.

Or they become Sociopaths, because they never learned to see the value in empathy or honesty.

Or they become White Supremacists, for the same reasons.

All of them are easily attracted to sophisticated propaganda, which manipulates them by rewarding their Dopamine receptors. Their hate is literally addictive.

The only cure is Critical Thinking Skills. It’s best to adopt them early, and be able to resist the propaganda from the start. That’s the way we are supposed to think.