Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

Hugo Mercier wrote in this 2020 book:

* Writers for the Washington Post and Foreign Policy claim Donald Trump was elected thanks to the “gullibility” of “ignorant” voters. A common view of Brexit—the vote for Britain to leave the European Union—is to see the Brexiters as “uneducated plebs” while those who voted remain are “sophisticated, cultured and cosmopolitan.”

In contemporary academic literature, the link between unsophistication and credulity mostly takes two forms. The first is in children, whose lack of cognitive maturity is often associated with gullibility. A recent psychology textbook asserts that as
children master more complex cognitive skills, they become “less gullible.” Another states, more sweepingly, that “children, it seems, are an advertiser’s dream: gullible, vulnerable, and an easy sell.”

The second way in which lack of cognitive sophistication and credulity are linked is through a popular division of thought processes into two main types, so-called System 1 and System 2. According to this view—long established in psychology and recently popularized by psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow—some cognitive processes are fast, effortless, largely unconscious, and they belong to System 1…

* In 2017, the Collins dictionary designated fake news, information that has no basis in fact but is presented as factual, its word of the year. This decision was a reaction to the abuse of fake news in two events that took place in 2016: the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, and the decision made in the United Kingdom, by referendum, to leave the European Union (Brexit). In both countries, a large majority of the elites and the traditional media, surprised and dismayed by people’s choices, searched for explanations. Fake news was a common answer.

“Fake News Handed Brexiteers the Referendum” was the title of an article in the Independent, a British newspaper. Across the Atlantic, the Washington Post ran a piece claiming, “Fake News Might Have Won Donald Trump the 2016 Election.” Even when it is not about politics, fake news is scary: a piece in Nature (one of the world’s foremost scientific publications) suggested that “the biggest pandemic risk” was “viral misinformation.”

Some fake news spread the old-school way, carried, for instance, by “Brexit buses” claiming the United Kingdom was sending £350 million a week to Brussels that could be redirected to the health services instead (in fact, the number is nowhere near that high, and most of the money goes back to the United Kingdom anyway). But fake news, which has always existed in one form or another, was seen as particularly threatening this time around because social media had vastly expanded its reach.10 In the three months leading up to Donald Trump’s election, the twenty most popular fake news stories related to the election garnered more than eight million shares, comments, and likes on Facebook. Among the most popular fake news were stories about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent, selling weapons to the terrorists of ISIS, or the pope endorsing Trump. Through the sharing of fake news, and of partisan news more generally, social media have been accused of creating echo chambers that amplify people’s prejudices and polarize the population, leading to extreme political views.

What do the humoral theory of disease, blood libels, and Trump’s endorsement by Pope Francis have in common? Obviously, they are inaccurate pieces of information. They are also linked with outcomes ranging from the clearly terrible (ethnic attacks, the systematic mistreatment of patients) to the arguably suboptimal (Trump’s election, Brexit). It would be natural to think that these false beliefs led directly to the outcomes described: physicians practice bloodletting because they accept the humoral theory of disease; ethnic minorities are massacred because of the atrocities they are accused of committing; people vote the “wrong” way because they are misled by fake news.

* What about fake news, then? Can it sway momentous political decisions? Here I focus on the election of Donald Trump, the event for which the most data are available. At the individual level, there was a correlation between viewing fake news websites, which overwhelmingly supported Trump, and being a Trump supporter.21 At the state level, the more people visited fake news websites, the more likely the state was to vote for Trump. Does this mean that viewing fake news prompted people to vote for Trump? Not necessarily. The majority of people who visited fake news websites weren’t casual Republicans but “intense partisans,” “the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets.” These people were very unlikely to have turned from Hillary voters to Trump supporters. Instead, they were scouting the web—not only fake news websites but also the traditional press—for ways of justifying their upcoming decision to vote for Trump, or of demonstrating their support.

A study by Brendan Nyhan and his colleagues supports this interpretation. Trump supporters were provided with accurate information correcting some of Trump’s false statements (rather than fake news, but the principle is the same). Most of them accepted
the corrections. Yet the supporters didn’t waver in their support for Trump. This suggests that the initial acceptance of the false statements hadn’t caused their support for Trump. Rather, they had accepted the statements because they supported Trump.

* Some political fake news—for instance, “WikiLeaks: Clinton Bribed 6 Republicans to ‘Destroy Trump’ ”—might sound plausible enough, at least to people with little knowledge of politics; that is, most of the electorate. But many stories would presumably sound quite absurd to almost everybody (e.g., “[Evangelical leader Franklin] Graham Says Christians Must Support Trump or Face Death Camps”). In this respect, political fake news resembles other fake news. In 2017, the biggest hit was “Babysitter Transported to Hospital after Inserting a Baby in Her Vagina”; in 2016, the runner-up was “Woman Arrested for Defecating on Boss’ Desk after Winning the Lottery.”35 As suggested by cultural evolution researcher Alberto Acerbi, the most implausible fake news stories, whether or not they are political, spread largely because they are entertaining rather than because they offer justifications for anything.36 The most absurd political fake news stories might also owe their appeal precisely to their over-the-top nature, as they make for great burning-bridges material.

* even people who recognized that some of their views were mistaken (in this case, some of Donald Trump’s untrue statements they had accepted) did not change their underlying preferences (voting for Trump). As long as the demand for justifications is present, some will rise to fulfill it. Before the internet made fake news visible for everyone to gloat at its absurdity, it could be found in the pages of specialized newspapers—such as the canards of eighteenth-century France—with exactly the same patterns as those observed now. Most of the time, the news was pure sensationalism: one of these canards announced the discovery in Chile of a creature with “the head of a Fury, wings like a bat, a gigantic body covered in scales, and a dragon-like tail.”64 But when people wanted to give voice to their prejudices, the canards obliged, for instance, by inserting Marie Antoinette’s head in lieu of that of the Fury to please the revolutionary crowds. And if newspapers couldn’t do it, word of mouth would.

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The Role of Identity in Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarianism and pragmatism, the liberal elites are committed to their own particular brand of identity politics, complete with its own special kind of otherization. The “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of gun control are not merely criticized as misguided, but despised as occupants of a lower moral and cognitive order, atavisms of a barbaric past that liberals alone have superseded. Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not. The former have the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism. The latter lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the drawbacks of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge.

* The liberal virtues are in truth gestures of identity-assertion designed to come at the expense of conservative ordinary Americans.

* The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount.

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* the emergence of a conservative identity politics, a conservative politics of recognition. The tropes and ideals of the Left are being marshaled, not simply to advance one or another conservative cause, like ending abortion or untrammeled free markets, but moreover in defense of conservatives themselves as an unfairly maligned social group. This is what defines a conservative claims of cultural oppression.

* Social meanings can constrain us because they ground our identities. To preserve identity is to contain freedom—to limit the range of possibilities that one can seriously contemplate. This narrowness is the sine qua non of taking oneself seriously, which is what social meanings allow us to do.

* A biological male is within his rights to self-identify as a female and attach more importance to this inner self-conception than to his biological sex. But he cannot reasonably expect others—for who many such disjunction between biology and identity is foreign—do the same and recognize him as a female. His sexual self-identification is a private matter, but his biological sexuality is a public one, and others will respond to what they can see and hear. His perspective is legitimate, but so too is theirs. Both express equal but ultimately incommensurable frameworks of identity. He is on the losing end of this conflict, not because he is morally inferior, but because of a utilitarian calculus resting on 1) a social consensus that the sexes should use separate restrooms, 2) the fact that he is in the minority and3) the fact that the resources available for the construction of public restrooms are finite. Someone is going to be left feeling uncomfortable, and it is the greatest good of the greatest number that determines who this will be.

* The liberal identity is premised on the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, and this places it in direct conflict with those whose patriotism resists that ethos.

* most people’s need for cultural identity affirmation is largely defensive in nature…

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The People vs The Elite (7-30-24)

01:00 Who is Kamala Harris? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156656
12:00 Robin Hanson, Professor & Author of “The Elephant In The Brain: Hidden Motives In Everyday Life”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTf97SCyVQg
12:30 Medicine doesn’t matter much for length and quality of life
14:00 Body language and dominance
21:00 Carnal Knowledge (1971), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnal_Knowledge_(film)
23:50 Kip joins the show
30:00 What a nervous flier fears, https://www.newyorker.com/humor/shouts-murmurs/what-a-nervous-flier-hears
40:00 The Paranoid Style Of Adam Curtis, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/05/08/the-paranoid-style-in-adam-curtis/
42:00 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
46:00 The Producers: Profiles in Frustration, https://www.amazon.com/Producers-Profiles-Frustration-Luke-Ford/dp/0595664636
52:00 Will Trump keep listening to Suzy Wiles? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC4R-vTW20U
Israel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH0ewmNlFc8
59:00 The rhetoric of political flip-flopping, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156714
1:04:00 Israel’s infuriating rule by judges, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH0ewmNlFc8
1:10:00 Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=155888
1:31:00 Secret Service in Crisis: Inflexible Protocols, Security Lapses in Spotlight, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/07/15/secret_service_in_crisis_inflexible_protocols_security_lapses_in_spotlight_151265.html
1:35:00 New Video Surfaces In The Secret Service Scandal (Ep 2297) – 07/30/2024, https://rumble.com/v591qb9-new-video-surfaces-in-the-secret-service-scandal-ep-2297-07302024.html
1:39:30 Ted Cruz grills head of Secret Service, https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1818325313467842949

Posted in America, Kamala Harris | Comments Off on The People vs The Elite (7-30-24)

Representations of reliability: The rhetoric of political flip-flopping

Joshua Bentley published in 2019:

One option when a politician changes positions is to simply announce the new position without acknowledging any change occurred. Ignoring the flip-flop may allow the politician to avoid awkward questions about it, if the issue has low salience for key stakeholders. For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama criticized John McCain for proposing a commission to study the recent financial crisis on Wall Street. “A commission,” Obama said, “That’s Washington-speak for we’ll—we’ll get back to
you later” (Jacobson, 2010, para. 2). However, after his election, President Obama created commissions to deal with the BP oil spill, the national debt, nuclear energy, and bioethics. PolitiFact reported that the White House declined to comment on its story. It may be that most voters had little interest in the issue of government commissions, and even Obama’s political opponents were not motivated to attack him over it. Thus, ignoring the apparent inconsistency was a viable strategy.

Another situation in which politicians may be able to ignore their flip-flops is when only their partisan opponents are concerned with the flip-flop, or when the flip-flop has become commonplace in Washington. Between 2013 and 2018, for example, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, and Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, both changed their positions on filibustering judicial nominees. When Democrats controlled the Senate, Reid supported eliminating the filibuster (to allow Democrats to confirm their judges) and McConnell opposed it. Later, when Republicans controlled the Senate, McConnell supported the elimination of the filibuster and Reid opposed it. PolitiFact found that both men performed full-flops, but neither senator attempted to justification the
change. The mostly likely explanation for the change seems to be naked partisanship; however, because most Republicans and Democrats were guilty of the same thing, and because each party’s base supported its actions, there was little reason to address these
flip-flops directly.

If politicians try to ignore their flip-flops, they run the risk of looking foolish when someone questions them on the subject. We found several cases in which politicians announced new positions and did not explain how they had arrived at them until journalists or voters challenged them on the change. A few politicians tried to continue ignoring the issue by dodging the questions or giving non-responsive answers. Most attempted to deny or justify their flip-flops. We believe a more effective and ethical strategy in these situations is to announce the reason for the change up front. Failure to do so may insult the intelligence of key stakeholders.

Posted in Joshua M. Bentley, Politics | Comments Off on Representations of reliability: The rhetoric of political flip-flopping

Decoding White Dudes For Harris (7-29-24)

01:00 Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=121464
15:00 NYT: Harris vs. Trump Is Taking Shape. And Then There’s Vance., https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/opinion/kamala-harris-trump-2024.html
22:00 Decoding Kamala Harris, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156656
32:00 Secret Service incompetence in Trump shooting
36:00 Dooovid joins to talk about conspiracy theories
39:00 Richard Hofstadter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter
55:00 Does Dooovid fear white identity?
59:00 Jury reaches partial verdict in Samantha Woll murder trial
1:04:45 White Dudes for Kamala
1:07:30 Professor Ashley Jardina’s book on white identity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn0-e7U3VWc
1:09:00 Vox: White identity politics is about more than racism, https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18306125/white-identity-politics-trump-racism-ashley-jardina
1:13:00 August 5, 2019: Ashley Jardina

Posted in America, Kamala Harris | Comments Off on Decoding White Dudes For Harris (7-29-24)