People don’t like uncertainty. If their uncertainty lies in a zone where they’re supposed to act and decide things, uncertainty translates into incompetency.
Critical reasoning is attractive if you can master it and make sense out of things. Coherent sense, sense that enables you to select outcomes and have them actually come out as planned. Sense that integrates with the rest of your understanding of the world and isn’t shot full of contradictions that give you cognitive-dissonance headaches.
Critical thinking is a lot less attractive to people when all it does is remind them of how incompetent they feel when trying to make sense out of life and its challenges. And if the outcome of embracing a bunch of oversimplified and overextended truisms matched to bullshit conclusions is no worse than the outcome of fumbling around trying to actually make sense of things they don’t really understand worth a damn, hey, it feels better to have that sense of certainty, however fake it may be.
So that’s part of what we’re up against.