Republicans’ beliefs are bending to Trump. Here’s why they might not even notice.

If you look at polling data, there are a few issues on which Republican voters seem to have changed their beliefs since Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency. …

It’s easy to look at these changing poll numbers and see something blatantly hypocritical — that these Americans are knowingly giving in to Trump rhetoric praising Putin and belittling free trade, betraying their former ideals.

But new research from psychology suggests something else is probably going on: Many political beliefs are fickle, and people probably don’t realize it when they change their minds.

Michael Wolfe, a memory and learning researcher at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, recently published an experiment in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that found when people change their mind on a subject, they have a hard time recalling that they ever felt another way. CONT.

Brian Resnick, Vox