Why People Are Economically Conservative

As with nearly any complex question, there are many often interrelated facets to this. Here are some of what we hypothesize are some of the most common:

1. People make honest errors of judgment.
2. People simply lack of exposure to facts about the effects economically conservative philosophies have had on our world. It is generally not in the interests of the powerful for us to know about the vast amount of poverty and the sheer scope of inequality and injustice in the world, and it is to a very large extent the powerful who control the way information is distributed in our society.
3. Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, people tend to believe that the world is fundamentally a fair place. The facts may seem far away, or divorced from our everyday experience, making them easier to deny. This is called the Just World Effect.
4. People have a tendency to assume that personal characteristics, rather than situations and environment, are usually the primary cause of other people's actions. This is called the fundamental attribution error.
5. It's a way of justifying your own wealth and privilege. If you believe it's perfectly ethical to live in excess when others lack the resources to meet their basic needs, you can eliminate uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. It's very convenient to believe that what's moral also happens to be what one wants to do anyway.
6. It's a justification for why you're better than other people. If you believe that wealth and privilege are rewards from god, karma, the nature or reality, or something similar, you can believe that you deserve these things simply by virtue of having them. This is especially likely to be a cause of economically conservative beliefs among those who were once poor or miserable (or perceived themselves this way) and have since become successful.
7. Most people have had been inundated all their lives with conventional concepts of ethics which emphasize caring about other people. No matter how neglected these ideas may be in practice, it's easy to tire of hearing them repeated, causing people to rebel against them.
8. Even if you aren't particularly successful, it feels good to think of yourself as such. Even when you know you're neither prosperous nor powerful, it can be exciting to align yourself with those who are.
9. It's tempting to believe that good politics boil down to a fairly simple set of principles, namely that there's one villain responsible for most of society's problems (government) and a simple solution to them (deregulation).
10. People tend to resist change. Once you believe something, no matter what it is, it takes courage to reevaluate it in light of new evidence, and few people are willing to do so.