Many voters are willing to accept misinformation from political leaders – even when they know it’s factually inaccurate. According to our research, voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important “truth.”
AKA, I have a pre-existing worldview that provides me with some sense of identity, and that is more important than reality or truth.
This is ‘cognitive bias’ leading to ‘cognitive dissonance’ when you unconsciously or unintentionally believe in things that sound right but are later revealed to you to be false…
… And its called ‘motivated reasoning’ when you just actually consciously know that you’re rejecting things that clash against your worldview.
Anyway all of this has been known by psychologists for what, 50+ years?
They just rarely explicitly state that this applies to political beliefs, even though there is no real scope limitation on what topic one can pick and choose acceptance or rejection on.
I suppose the only interesting part here is that people are now just en masse admitting they are fact-shunning hypocrites?
In summary: You and me, we’re in the same tribe, and we hold the superior worldview. Those people over there in the out-group are wrong. They also do things the wrong way, because they aren’t in our tribe.
Hearing this sort of talk pulls some strings in the human mind. There’s this interesting default setting that says tribalism = TRUE.
Which itself is something notable imho, in showing how far it has come along, i.e. as a barometer reading on how far gone his supporters are.
They used to hide it, feeling more shame that their views might not be as acceptable by the general public as they now know that they are.
Don’t forget that some sitting members of Congress are currently calling for an active, not-joking civil war.
We ignore all of this at our peril.
Truthiness
- Colbert
I wonder how much of that was the show’s writers.
This is merely a function/mechanic of self-delusion. But, then again, I’m sure everyone here already realizes that.
I dunno. The story of George Washington and the cherry tree is surely factually false, but it is ok as a parable. The higher truth evoked is that people should be honest. The irony is in dishonestly presenting the story as fact, of course.
His teeth were not wooden. They were pulled from the mouths of healthy slaves. Before novocaine was invented.
I do know. People will convince them of whatever they want if they’re desperate enough. It’s self-delusion.
Isn’t that exactly what religions do?
Yes. They lie and act like it’s true. It’s how they implement control. And billions of people still eat it up because of forced indoctrination from birth.
Hey, you who is reading! Yes, you! This is you too, it’s not only those wretched degenerates on that other side.
Show me the study.
That’s bullshit. Not everyone is like this. I’m sure there are many who share my political beliefs, who fall for this shit. Maybe I do too. But for you to say that everyone does this is bullshit. This sort of thinking only serves to normalize idiocy.
You’re a human with human flaws just like the rest of us.
I never denied it. But not everyone has the same flaws. I might even have this exact flaw, but not everyone has it.
Not everyone has the same flaws to the same extent. It’s probably more of a spectrum than a yes or no thing. I’d say it’s a safe bet to say we all suffer from this - some more than others.
This sort of thinking only serves to allow people to delude themselves into thinking that they are not victim to the same things as everyone else.
No one is immune to these cognitive biases. There are aspects of it effectively hardcoded into the human brain structure.
Studies have shown that being aware you’re watching an advertisement does not negatively impact its effect on the viewer.
Put short:
You can blame the gullible listener to only wanting to hear what they want to hear …
… or …
You can blame the well trained, educated and directed media for promoting, highlighting and normalizing the idea of spreading semitruth and fabrication in order to push an overall agenda.
I’m no conspiracy theorist, I don’t subscribe to dumb delusions of aliens or illluminati cults running the world … but I do believe that there is a culture of highly trained individuals working in media these days who just knowingly spread extreme views and pass them off as legitimate enough to be debated. A politician like Turnip shouldn’t be normal … but a national media has made it completely normal to have someone as unwell, politically unstable and sociopathic as Turnip to be acceptable enough to talk about endlessly as if there is nothing wrong with him.
In this case … I blame the messenger
Why does it have to be either or? It’s totally reasonable to blame BOTH.
I could agree … but the gullible masses have no idea they are being manipulated … while the trained and educated media managers and owners (and to a lesser extent the actual journalists) know exactly what they are doing and why
I can blame the listeners for being stupid … but I still blame the messenger for intentionally misleading the public.
Things are different now as the educational system is being intentionally damaged, but every single child who grew up in America between the ages of 10 and 80 was raised in an educational environment that taught them in no uncertain terms ALL of the warning signs of fascism and manipulation - these haven’t changed in hundreds of years. They are either willfully ignoring them or spent their years in school eating paint instead of internalizing anything.
It’s totally reasonable to recognize they’re victims. It’s also reasonable to recognize that in most cases, they made themselves that way.
Have you met an average human?
Moreover, the founding fathers warned us of this happening, in advance. They knew that it would, they told us that it was all but inevitable, we have had multiple centuries of time in which to shore up democracy… like to implement ranked-choice voting, while instead… we chose not to.
I do not hold out hope for democracy to last much longer, not against such repeated assaults as this. The game of Russian Roulette never ends in happiness, but it does always end.
It might be reasonable to blame people but it’s entirely useless and even counterproductive. There’s no solution that can come out of that. Even if you rebuild the education system, a significant portion would still be vulnerable. You can see that in countries with better education systems. And then of course there’s the blowback that results from blaming people, which the very same actors you’re trying to protect from co-opt and use against you.
Blaming corporate media on the other hand can produce solutions and quickly. The political system has unfortunately been captured to such an extent by capital that this isn’t even considered. Still that the easier and more productive avenue to pursue if anyone would try.
Unfortunately, we’re at a point where any attempt to fix media directly will be met with push-back by those very same people - we see this happening RIGHT now. They are weaponized and can be turned on any outlet that DARES try to speak the truth.
These people are now an army and bad actors will NOT willfully give them up. You have to assume the worst… that any attempt to fix the system will necessarily involve confrontation with them, and more we can reduce their numbers or limit their reach the easier that will become.
Treating them lightly with kid gloves will only encourage more people to join their ideologies, and it’s not a matter of hovering around 50%, there’s a tipping point. The moment there are visibly more people on the side of lies and fascism, a huge chunk of people who simply want to fit in or be on the winning side will simply change sides. Fascism and populism are diseases, and like any disease, it’s tragic that they’re sick, but you first and foremost have to contain it and stop it from spreading. THEN you can start worrying about their well-being once they are no longer a threat.
Let me frame this like so:
It’s just another example of capitalist for-profit corporations that maximize profits while offloading their negative externalities onto the rest of us.
They know they’re making money when they tell lies and they don’t care about the downstream effects. For some the downstream effects might even be desirable.
Another way to frame it is: corporate media makes money, with informing (or disinforming) the public as a byproduct.
In other words, many voters lack critical thinking skills. Yep, that tracks.
“Alternative facts”
It’s how religions work. The positive bullshitting is not much different than a sermon full of made up anecdotes - stories with the purpose of “evoking a deeper truth”.
This is literally the “WOLOLO!” meme in action…
As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.
Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children’s innocence and imagination.
Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.
I hate myths, even ones with good intentions. Things like “Santa” are just teaching kids to be disappointed and that their parents are full of shit.
As a side comment, what in the actual fuck is the tooth fairy?
None of this stuff makes any sense to me, whatsoever.
It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.
It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.
It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.
A hypothesis is absolutely fair game. I am not going to spend the time to prove it right or wrong in this case, but it’s still 100% legit in my book.
(Just don’t go telling your child spawn that space pot… err… space teapots are definitely the reason that time travel could be possible.)
The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can’t find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.
Like Roko’s Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don’t consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.
As with many of my hypotheses, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.
Our culture is obsessed with lies.
It’s obsessed with fantasies as an escape from the dystopia it creates in reality. A better world is actually possible.
Isn’t that just tribalism or clubism in general?
For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their “judgement” on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of “their” team (like the coach, important players and even the club’s manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against “their” team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.
People with a strong emotinal bond to a “team” judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.
Of course they do.
If there’s a binary choice (and here in the UK it basically is), you’re going to vote for the candidate that broadly covers your requirements from government, conveniently ignoring the bits you don’t like. The alternative is to not vote at all because no one candidate or party can perfectly mirror your values.
It’s kind of like this: I just want it to be possible to smoke weed and be still gainfully employed. Even if Harris gets up on stage and starts spouting bullshit about Jewish space lasers, I’m still voting for her. Even if a bunch of people get hella pissed off that jewish space lasers aren’t a smart use of tax dollars I’M STILL VOTING FOR HER because political issues that effect me are, to me, the more important ones.
In reality it wouldn’t matter even if that’s the plan. Building space lasers is still a less destructive thing to do to our society than all the utterly corrupt shit Trump and his goonlings want. I just need the bad guys to lose. We all do. Even if it’s just this once.
What the actual fuck? No. You need to listen to the words that come out of these motherfuckers’ mouths. None of them have any “deeper meaning”. If it’s fascist on its face it’s fascist the whole way to the bottom.
You seem to be missing the point. There are very few fascists who wake up. Look in the mirror, smile to themselves and think damn. I’m going to make some fantastically fascist choices today. They are billions of people who wake up every morning. Look at themselves in the mirror and think I’m going to choose what’s right for me because I deserve it. Billions more will wake up look in the mirror and decide that they want to do what’s best for the world because the world deserves that. The other third keeps sleeping because they’re tired of listening to the first and second third argue.
That’s the deeper meaning greed, compassion, apathy. Choose your flavor.
This said it’s both parties (inb4 “both parties are fascist”). This would seem to apply to things like “J.D. Vance fucks couches.” Do Democrats know it’s false? Of course. But he’s weird, and doing that is weird, so they’re willing to keep saying it. Yes, it’s a joke, but it also seems to match what’s described in the article.
I haven’t read the article or study yet. But I wonder if the observation is one of “probably approximately correct learning” (PAC learning) in action. There’s a book of that title by Les Valiant proposing that all biological learning works that way.
to me this is just ex-post-facto justification for motivational reasoning or confirmation bias. people just look for the easiest possible way to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Why do you post an article you haven’t even read?
It looked interesting and that was good enough.
Because even if it winds up being a bad study, it still evokes a deeper, more important “truth.”
I’m being sarcastic but that’s actually what’s going on here.
You can fool some of the people all of the time.
They’re called Republicans.
…in the past 40 years it’s changed from “some” to “most”.
