The longer fork represents the consensus of the network, as it has accumulated more computational work and has a greater number of participants supporting it.
This is not correct.
As I explained above, the longest chain does not necessarily continue more accumulated work. I could fork bitcoin right now, drop the difficulty to 1, and then churn out 10,000 blocks in a few minutes. My new chain would be far longer than the main chain, but have much less accumulated work because the number of hashes required to generate all 10,000 of my blocks would only be tiny fraction of the number of hashes to generate a single block on the main chain.
By choosing the longer fork, miners align themselves with the majority, reducing the risk of their blocks being orphaned or invalidated in the future.
No, they do this by aligning themselves with the chain with most work, which again, is not the same as the longest chain.