More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what’s going on is already known. A lot of people just don’t want to believe it, because we’re all stuck on the metaphor that we’re all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they’re just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)

Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn’t really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we’re consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it’s notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody’s brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.

And that’s exactly what authoritarian demagogues do.