We don't naturally approach narrative with science or sound logic. These are intentional acts. They must be learned and applied.

Intelligence is a broad categorization. It is unlikely to apply exhaustively to any person.

Propaganda takes an obvious lie, and surrounds it with acceptable narratives. Those surrounding narratives are attached to emotional identity. Once a person accepts the surrounding narratives as part of their identity, they have implicitly accepted the obvious lie. Whether or not they accept the lie as stated directly is a matter of semantic argument, not logical deduction.

We are not machines. We do not follow a series of instructions based on logic and arithmetic. We are mammals.

A machine cannot accept vague narratives. It must be explicit about every logical connection, because everything it is and does is written in a "context-free grammar". Since all context-free grammars can be translated into pure mathematical functions, machine belief is pure logic.

Humans do not have that feature. We use "context-dependent grammar" to communicate. That means our narratives can, and often do, include ambiguous conclusions.

This is a powerful tool: we can express unknowns without resolving them. This allows us to extend our knowledge outside of what is already known. It allows us to work with vague data, draw impossible conclusions, then put those conclusions to the test. This is the foundation for science itself, yet science is not the only path ahead.

Ambiguity must be resolved with decision. Not only is it a lot of work to decide every time language gets ambiguous, making that decision at that step in the process makes the decision itself as arbitrary as possible.

Thankfully, we have an optimization: worldview. By constructing a system of beliefs, we essentially give ourselves a precomiled library of narratives. Whenever we interpret ambiguous language, we can quickly check our library for a narrative that resolves the ambiguity.

Of course, this really gets into the weeds: language is full of complex high-order patterns, and any one of them can contain or resolve ambiguity. Multiple narratives may resolve an ambiguity ambiguously: effectively moving the problem instead of solving it.

Because humans build a worldview out of narratives, that worldview can contain flawed logic, and even outright contradictions. It still works, because any time a person tries to resolve an ambiguity using a conflicted set of worldview narratives, they simply choose which narrative applies to that ambiguity. This choice is most easily determined by emotion: what result feels right.

People don't get their narratives exclusively from the outside. We also invent new narratives. I suspect that we do this by hallucinating fictional stories that bridge the narrative gaps in our worldview.

If you have ever talked with someone who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, you may have noticed a pattern of direct questions and dry logical answers. It's well known that people with ASD have difficulty directing their focus away from external stimulus. Studies have also shown that people with ASD report more hallucinated physical experiences than people without ASD. I suspect this leads to a fundamental need for logically categorized worldview: if you can't ignore a narrative, you probably need to find room for it in your existing worldview. If you are already bombarded with both real and hallucinated simulation, you will probably feel too worn out to hallucinate your own narratives, which would make narrative gaps and contradictions stressful.

If you have ever talked to (or read about) someone who has taken a trip on LSD, psilocybin, etc., you may have noticed a pattern of wildly fictional stories, some of which continue well after the trip as a part of the person's worldview. Hallucinagens are known to cause many arbitrary and random connections across the brain; where connections would normally follow the "grooves" that were carved by lived experience. The experience of a trip is well known to help restructure unwanted patterns of behavior (like addiction), and also to result in new unwanted behavior patterns (like fear and anxiety). Because hallucinagens don't replace cognition entirely with the noise of hallucination, having someone else guide the experience can be very effective. Without guidance, it's possible for negatively engaging hallucinations (like fear or anxiety) to become a focus of the experience, carve new grooves in the brain, and become a lingering experience after the trip has ended.

How can we intentionally curate our worldview?

Critical thinking allows us to reconsider the narratives we hold as beliefs objectively. We can copy those narratives into a place that is totally detached from emotion, and criticize them. By doing this intentionally, we can more easily accept the result, and change our worldview. This is like hallucination, but following the strict rules of logic.

We can also accept narratives from trusted sources. If we feel confident that someone else has already performed the critical thinking, it's easy to accept their result as a shortcut. The obvious problem here is that that person may be wrong, or even dishonest. The more insidious problem is that that person is not likely to share all of the narratives in their own worldview: instead they share only the narratives they changed. The worldview you apply that change to may be compatible but different, resulting in a completely different result.

We may also continue living without any intentional curation. A conflicted worldview does not inherently need resolution. Many stories contain contradictions that remain unsolved until the end: maybe you are living in the middle of your story, and find the conflicts exciting. Living this way is called "cognitive dissonance". Like two notes a half step apart create many harmonic voices, two contradicted narratives allow for a very large set of potential resolving narratives. A life lacking direction is full of possibilities.

Dissonance is uncomfortable: our reaction to it may be to resolve it with critical thinking, but simple avoidance is a much shorter path to comfort.

If we want to help people change their beliefs, we should focus on the narratives that construct those beliefs. In order to know what those are in the first place, we must practice empathy. It's hard work, and it feels like the wrong strategy. Even worse, it feels insidious, because intentional empathy is very similar to propaganda.