Anecdotally, ignorance and fear seems to be significant factors supporting conservative beliefs.
When I tell a liberal something that they aren’t expecting or that they didn’t know, they’ll respond with “what? How do you know that? Really?”
Then with a conservative, I usually get “No, no. Really? Well, I don’t know about that, anyway…”
And that’ll be some hard truth or contradicting statistic that the conservative doesn’t want to address or learn about because it will fly in the face of a fear or ignorance based belief.