No shit. If you tell people what they want to hear, they trust you more.
The sad thing is that as a society we are stupid, as individuals we are (possibly) the smartest living beings, and this means that the smart get stuck either respecting the dumb as adults and being honest with them (which leads to where we are now) or treat them like children that can’t yet handle reality as it is (which probably leads to other issues)
We are at the tipping point where we now find out that giving all adults the same treatment leads to the smart enough ones can abuse and manipulate the not smart enough ones to go against their own interests and against the really smart ones