Are conservatives more scared of stuff than liberals?

Donald Trump’s inauguration speech two weeks ago stood out because it painted a vision of the United States many Americans don’t recognize. Trump spoke darkly of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and pledged to stop the “American carnage” that had ensnared the nation. The U.S. has plenty of problems, of course, but Trump made it sound like the country is on the verge of collapse, which it surely isn’t.

Trump was speaking to his core supporters, many of whom inhabit a very different information universe from the rest of the U.S. Their preferred news sources make a point of highlighting scary threats against the U.S., from Muslim radicals trying to infiltrate us via our weak southern border to Black Lives Matters “terrorists” — that’s the term that’s often used — seeking to kill police officers. Many of these claims, of course, tend to be severely overhyped or flat-out false — “fake news” was one of the major themes of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The evidence we have suggests that the fakest of this fake news — instances in which stuff is basically made up, rather than exaggerated or distorted — mostly targeted and was spread by conservatives, and that while there’s liberal fake news too, there’s less of it. Why might that be the case? In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan runs down an upcoming study in the journal Psychological Science which points to one possible explanation: Conservatives are just more scared of stuff in general.