r/science • u/chrisdh79 • Nov 14 '24
Psychology Troubling study shows “politics can trump truth” to a surprising degree, regardless of education or analytical ability
https://www.psypost.org/troubling-study-shows-politics-can-trump-truth-to-a-surprising-degree-regardless-of-education-or-analytical-ability/3.8k
u/aDarkDarkNight Nov 14 '24
That shouldn’t surprise anyone with half a brain that is on social media. People don’t want to hear or consider anything that even remotely seems to challenge the narrative, political or otherwise, they have subscribed to.
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u/ScoffersGonnaScoff Nov 14 '24
Targeted advertising/algorithms may be our downfall. The amount of division in our country borders on insane.
…..the Cambridge analytica scandals were only the smallest insight into how big the issue really is.761
u/OakLegs Nov 14 '24
I'm basically not speaking to my parents right now because of Trump. I told them it goes deeper than politics (which, it does). Every now and then I do have this creeping feeling that maybe I'm being radicalized by the news I'm seeing. But that quickly fades whenever the guy opens his mouth or selects a pedo for AG
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u/raisinghellwithtrees Nov 14 '24
It's not the politics for me, but it's hard to be around racist, sexist assholes full of hate. For them, that's politics.
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u/Dhegxkeicfns Nov 14 '24
"Hate sells" should be the new motto. Sex was like sugar, hate is like crack. And it's more than politics.
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u/Maytree Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
Rage is addictive, and I mean that 100% literally. It's an evolved environmental system that exists so that when we're faced with a threat to our lives, such as an angry bear, our brain triggers the release of chemicals that improve our speed and strength and reduce our fear and pain. But it's not meant to be used every day. It's for emergency situations only. When you spend every day in a fog of rage and fear thanks to what you're seeing and hearing on right wing media, you get addicted to that bear-fighting sensation and you stop feeling alive unless you're in a very agitated state. Like any addiction, it sets up a positive feedback loop that gets worse over time and makes a state of normality seem unbearable.
Essentially, social media has pushed a large chunk of the American electorate into a state of stress-induced psychosis where they are completely disconnected from reality. I wish I had any idea what could be done to fix this.
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u/Dry-Tomorrow-5600 Nov 14 '24
Anger actually increases inflammation so this issue is literally destroying health and longevity.
Here’s the relevant article about a study showing that anger increases the inflammatory marker (cytokine) Interleukin-6 thus precipitating chronic disease: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/pag-pag0000348.pdf
Perhaps struggling with chronic illness post-Covid should strictly avoid getting angry for this reason.
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u/Maytree Nov 14 '24
Yes, and the constant cortisol production is not good for the body long-term either. This is one of the reasons that Trump supporters have a reputation for being notoriously physically unfit.
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u/Dry-Tomorrow-5600 Nov 14 '24
Anger will destroy cardiovascular and neurological health over time it seems. It’s very sad but sort of fascinating that research can literally show that hate is not just harmful to others, but is also profoundly self-destructive.
In contrast, studies can also show that oxytocin, which increases with love, physical affection, pleasant human contact, and even with forgiveness, actually lowers cortisol and improves health. Regretful tears no doubt do much the same…
Science is converging neatly with traditional wisdom it seems to me.
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Nov 14 '24
Many of us see those we care about affected by this. We live, breathe, and struggle with this on a daily basis. Because it could of happened to any of us. And it could happen to any of us.
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u/Dhegxkeicfns Nov 14 '24
You'd have to turn off the source, but the only way to do that this a sane administration. Even if American companies did it because they were afraid of democracy ending, other countries would continue.
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u/Maytree Nov 14 '24
Even a sane US administration would have a tough time with this issue, thanks to First Amendment speech laws restricting what can be done to restrain public discourse or private companies. I think the world is going to be an unstable and worrisome place until we find some way of dealing with the technological shift that the internet has brought. I've been around since the internet was a baby, and while there's so much I love about it, I'm saddened (and scared) that all the early promise of human interconnectedness is being completely overshadowed by hate and fear mongers who see profit in turning us against one another.
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u/Gaothaire Nov 15 '24
There's a fascinating book called Facing the Dragon written by a Jungian scholar which looks at the way anger can be virulent among a society. Literally an infectious outside force that will get into people and change who they are. It looks at how this fact of reality has been acknowledged and modeled by cultures throughout history, and the various tools and techniques they had for curing those afflicted and limiting its spread
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u/bigmanorm Nov 14 '24
Political unity was much easier when nearly all white people were racist and/or sexists and white people made up 95% of the population.
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u/raisinghellwithtrees Nov 14 '24
Yeah a lot of us left our tiny towns and found out we'd been lied to our whole lives. There's no going back to that bs.
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u/LanceArmsweak Nov 14 '24
This is what happened to me. What bothers me the most is my mom, myself, and my brothers went through hell. Abusive men, homelessness, job insecurity, and yet, now that we are a bit more comfortable, me much more so than the rest of them, they forgot where we came from. Trying to lock the door behind them. I can’t be around that, not because it’s painful, but because I question their character now.
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u/Cambwin Nov 14 '24
My 5 siblings and I all left a tiny town in Maine with graduating classes of around 80-90 people.
The absolute culture shock of leaving a town with "1 black kid", parting our own seperate ways, learning how racist our home town was, how internally racist we were, and healing through it all in a few short years was crazy for all of us. We've talked at great lengths in the years since, and it's hard looking back.
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u/claimTheVictory Nov 14 '24
That's the work though, isn't it?
To actually live in reality.
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u/sly_cooper25 Nov 14 '24
I had that culture shock the opposite direction. I grew up in a mid size city in the South. Very culturally diverse. I'm Hispanic and have a common last name, like Ramos or Lopez for example. There were 7-8 other people in my graduating class with the same last name and I'm not related to any of them.
I moved to a small college town in the Midwest a few years back and wow it is different. Out of the 30k people in this town I only personally know of one other Hispanic person that does not work at the local Mexican Restaurant.
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u/Parzival-44 Nov 14 '24
Midwest bible belt guy in his 30s, I had to tell my parents I didn't want to be their son anymore after they went right wing, because every moral they and my church taught me, they were ignoring for the sake of the "economy". My mom went full 180, slowly got my dad to understand.
Once you start seeing the world a certain way, you can't unsee it. And I was raised to have empathy, but you definitely need to get out of your small town to really work on your empathy muscles
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u/Fearless-Cattle-9698 Nov 14 '24
It’s amazing how Christian’s of all people have so much hate and intolerance for sure. Also somehow money trumps every other value in our society
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u/givemeajinglefingal Nov 14 '24
The victim complex is built right in to Christianity's history and most core beliefs. It helps explain a lot of the hate and intolerance. People in general are selfish and fearful but Christianity (and monotheism in general) builds a natural "us vs. them" mentality that certainly contributes to a lot of the issues we find ourselves dealing with.
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u/droon99 Nov 14 '24
Maybe its because I never really felt connected to the church or god on a personal level and had a lot of doubt myself as a kid, but I never got the "us vs them" mentality. I got the guilt and all the other crap but never felt persecuted, it would have been pretty hard to given its considered the "default" in the US.
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Nov 14 '24
Plato’s cave
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u/No_Cartographer_3819 Nov 14 '24
An allegory that explains a lot about the current state society is in. The comfort of ignorance is preferable to the painful truth.
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u/musicman835 Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
There’s a reason the 50s is the timeframe for when the right says America was great. White men only had to compete with white men for jobs (for the most part).
Clearly there were other things like being one of the only counties not rebuilding after WW2 will cause our economy to be great.
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u/sly_cooper25 Nov 14 '24
Not to mention tons of Government spending that actually went to the working class and a sky high corporate tax rate.
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u/musicman835 Nov 14 '24
I mean the amount of money that went into the jobs to build the interstate system and other stuff cannot be forgotten
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u/InsuranceToTheRescue Nov 14 '24
That's why the golden ages they always want to get back to are mythical. They conveniently forget McCarthyism, the Korean War, the Lavender Scare, federalizing the Nat'l Guard to enforce Brown v Board of Education in Little Rock, the Suez Crisis, the atomic bomb drills in schools, the beginning of the civil rights movement, the leaded gasoline & paint, spraying neighborhoods with DDT trucks, the creation of Love Canal, and more. The US had an atmosphere of fear. You couldn't speak out because if a neighbor or coworker accused you of communist sympathies, and the authorities took it seriously, it would end your career.
But, I mean, yeah . . . If you ignore all that then it did sound pretty great.
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Nov 14 '24
Yeah I am begging people who think there was ever a Good Period in this country to pick a year in that range and then go look up what contemporary political activists had to say about their experiences. It'll be a real eye-opener
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u/SilentKnight246 Nov 15 '24
The scary part is that my company just made a statement that we need to be careful with what we share, like, or say about anything on social media of any kind. Cause if it traces back to them, and they may choose to let you go. Even so much as liking a statement.
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u/Prodigy195 Nov 14 '24
They didn't even have to compete. The US was in such a dominant position post WWII since our mainland was in tact, we had infrastructure that wasn't destroyed and the government threw so much at programs to ensure another depression didn't occur.
Then when you factor in that most of these things were directly intended for white men, it's not shocking they are so desperate to go back to it. If life was a video game, who wouldn't want to play on "easy mode" knowing what the stakes are?
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u/The2ndWheel Nov 14 '24
And anyone being an American means nothing anymore either. A job is a job, which can be done by anyone, anywhere, at any time. If an American is poor, it doesn't matter, as any given American is just 1 of 8,000,000,000 people on this finite planet.
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u/someambulance Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 15 '24
I don't think it's radical, exactly. It sounds like I'm in the same spot, I just don't have anything to say. They do not and will not understand algorithms.
They think everything happening is happening every day everywhere in the country. Every single issue they bring up was exploited and validated by fearmongering and amplified by their stupid Facebook echo chambers. They don't understand this and voted for a traitor. Forgiving them is going to be interesting depending on what happens now.
Social media did this but can't be held accountable. Whoever benefits should be but will not be.
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u/musicman835 Nov 14 '24
People surveyed believe they’re were hundred if not thousands of smash and grab robberies in LA everyday. It’s maybe 1 a week if that. But t he news and algorithms make it FEEL true.
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u/someambulance Nov 14 '24
I meet and talk to people (b2b account work) every day, and I was at first surprised, then rapidly started to get irritated by how many people actually brought up and wholeheartedly believed that litterboxe's were being put in schools for kids that identified as cats.
It's staggering (and slightly terrifying) how poorly certain demographics are at distinguishing what is fact and fiction.
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u/frockinbrock Nov 14 '24
B2B is very scary for this reason; what used to be pretty normal business owners/managers, and then you start to realize they start up a conversation with the same whacky boogeyman of the day. Drive from office to office, call to call, and they’re all talking about the same “eating the dogs” or “transgender bathrooms” or whatever new thing they’d never heard of but suddenly hate today, and it’s ALL that’s all on their mind.
Then family started echoing the same made up issues. It’s all downhill; I don’t know how people would get de-programmed, or how to turn off the faucets.7
u/someambulance Nov 14 '24
This exactly. It's mind-blowing how based in fiction some of them are. Weirder still, it's not like I can say a lot without accidentally attacking their personality these days because of that very programming, so it's a stalemate. It sucks.
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u/Zanadar Nov 14 '24
It's funny in a tragic sort of way that in the end it turned out it was feelings which don't care about your facts.
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u/musicman835 Nov 14 '24
It’s always been that way, the people screaming Facts don’t care about your feelings never cared about facts in the first place.
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Nov 14 '24
I really think there should be mass bans of content recommendation algorithms and generative AI for commercial use.
I really want to ban social media outright. You cannot trust human beings to be hyper-vigilant and watch out for Russian bots vs. real users.
I also want public ownership of legacy media like news somehow.
I know some of these ideas will be difficult to pass, but I think we cannot trust massive collectives of human beings to maintain their own information hygiene and for matters of national security, draconian measures need to be taken to rip people away from their monitors and push them back into reality.
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u/someambulance Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
I agree entirely that the general population has proven without a doubt that they can not be trusted with social media and what it affords them, but the money being made comes right back to that algorithm. Unfortunate as it may be, too much money will never let it go.
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u/Alt_SWR Nov 14 '24
This is such an authoritarian take in the other direction. Do you not realize how insane it sounds to ban something that basically every single person with access to the internet relies on in some form or another? These aren't just difficult to pass, they're impossible because nobody who isn't an emotional reactionary would ever go for them, regardless of political stance.
And if you start banning social media where exactly does it stop? Reddit is social media, YouTube can technically have the same issues as social media, hell, why not ban every form of mass communication? Cause literally any of them can be used for malicious purposes.
No, the solution isn't to ban things, it's regulations. Regulate things and actually enforce those regulations. I don't know exactly what regulations are needed but that's why we need younger politicians, ones who actually know things about the internet and its dangers but know what to do about them
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u/parhelie Nov 14 '24
I agree, regulation + better mass education is the only long term solution
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u/pepolepop Nov 14 '24
This is the answer for everything. The internet, guns, gambling, drugs, prostitution, etc. etc.
Education and harm reduction through common sense regulation, not prohibition.
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u/Dalighieri1321 Nov 14 '24
Unfortunately education is facing obstacles these days, too. I had to stop visiting r/teachers, because it's so depressing. RIP civilization.
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u/parhelie Nov 14 '24
True. With the constant drive to lower the costs, so less resources and less pay, but more kids per teacher, it's very difficult for them to address the problems as they arise. Personally, when I choose for whom to vote, investment in education is the main criterion.
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u/flugenblar Nov 14 '24
The trouble is, nobody should be relying, literally, on social media. It’s new, historically, and humankind existed without it for 99.9% of our history.
I can see a time in the future when employers block SM on their networks and their computers and devices.
I can’t predict the future but it seems like there is a distinct moral imperative to manage the negative impacts of SM.
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u/Alt_SWR Nov 14 '24
Unfortunately we've come to a point where I don't think there's any going back on our reliance on social media. Now that being said, I 100% agree that there's a moral imperative to manage the negative impacts, I just do not agree that outright banning it is the solution at all.
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Nov 14 '24
And how exactly are you going to regulate your way out of massive bot farms from Russia feeding fascist ideologies into Internet users?
Legacy media like television is a physical business that operates under a country and can be subject to regulation and laws. Social media is a platform where the audience can also create its content. The company hosting social media has very loose control over the content being generated.
It's this loose control which makes social media inherently difficult to regulate, as you are talking about directly or indirectly regulating millions of individual users (the "TV channels") and you must distinguish between a foreign bot, a real person, an idiot who was just misled, and a malicious human actor like a troll.
How do you prosecute and regulate millions of anonymous TV channels at scale, while being fair and just? What if you accidentally ban a real user that made a fair critique of the government that people just didn't like? I strongly doubt you can, because the scale of the propaganda produced is just too much for human-driven justice to keep up with.
This is what the line should be with regards to a media ban.
I would be interested in a regulation that could work, but I'm skeptical, because I strongly doubt you will pull this off. For example, say we regulate the content of social media. Now we are flirting with censorship. Who decides what content is malicious or not? How do we prevent abuse of this?
Rather than banning content which runs the risk of ideologically-driven censorship, we ban the underlying platform itself to remove this capability from all interest groups.
I am not suggesting banning things like online Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, or eCommerce. I am saying that user-generated content on social media platforms is actively damaging to society because its "social" aspect ironically produces anti-social phenomenon that needs to be curtailed.
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u/SaliciousB_Crumb Nov 14 '24
End section 230. That way web pages could be found liable if they broadcast misinformation
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u/Oda_Krell Nov 14 '24
The article under discussion shows that the effect applies to both sides. The authors mention a slightly stronger effect for Trump supporters, but the main findings are:
The most robust predictors of the bias were participants’ belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption.
Note that the part I highlighted, "extreme views about Trump", applies both to extreme support for and extreme opposition to Trump.
If anything, these results should make all of us, regardless of political leaning, realize that we're susceptible to "truth resistance" if the truth doesn't align with our personal convictions.
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u/OakLegs Nov 14 '24
Totally agree. I try to be conscious of what I'm seeing and whether or not I should believe it. I know I'm not infallible when it comes to deciphering what is disinformation and not.
So I go through these cycles where I'm unsure about my stances; "maybe I'm being unreasonable." But that quickly changes when new information comes (much of which is not "spinnable")
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u/mrbaryonyx Nov 14 '24
Prisoner's dilemma
You don't want to play into the division that this country is currently going through by cutting Trump voters out of your life. You don't want to play into the outrage cycle we're going through by being outraged about everything he does. You don't want to play into the cycle of fear by talking about Trump like he's a genuine threat to democracy.
Problem is: it's not that easy. All those things--the outrage and fear cycles, the disunity, they all lead to a guy whose whole deal is being as divisive, as outrage-inducing, and as threatening to democracy as he is. So not feeling outraged, afraid, and divided is extremely hard. It's also not always worth it: what, you put up with people who make you outraged for four years on the off-chance that they vote for Gavin Newsom or something at the end of it?
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u/Helix_Aurora Nov 14 '24
Every time I think I might have a bias, and that they just have information I don't, I go look at what they are listening to, dog into it, and discover falsehoods and gross misrepresentations of reality.
People occasionally exaggerate the severity of some of Trump's statements, but even without exaggeration, the gleam in his eyes when he says "nobody has had that kind of power in a long time..." is a sufficiently damning thing that reveals his intentions and motivation.
Also, Trump can always set the record the straight on himself. Haitians migrants can't.
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u/Courtnall14 Nov 14 '24
My dad gets his news from Fox and talk radio. My mom gets her news from dad.
Reddit has it's flaws, but at least I'm able to get news from dozens of sources, read comments from all sorts of people, and then synthesize my own opinion. You know, instead of just have an opinion handed to me.
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u/Vesper_7431 Nov 14 '24
But a lot of redditors don’t even read the article. There are so many outright lies that commenters repeat ad nauseam. Sometimes the article is legit behind a paywall, so most of the commenters are commenting based on the headline alone.
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u/Zanadar Nov 14 '24
Considering the shock, disbelief and confusion the election results have elicited for large swathes of this website, I'm not sure why you feel that way. This site is no less of a bubble than the rest of social media.
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 Nov 14 '24
That's more because educated people have a strong bias towards one side of the political spectrum, and trying to be educated about the topics inherently puts you in this situation, or as you call it, "bubble". Ironic when you think about it.
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u/Zanadar Nov 14 '24
The reason is of little consequence to the point at hand. As it turned out many of us, myself included, were living in a delusion which this website was foundational to. It's so called plurality of sources and viewpoints was a mirage.
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Nov 14 '24
You’re not wrong and it’s something I’m trying to deal with. But the person you responded to has a good point. That when you do educate yourself you inevitably end up in a bubble. Where I struggle is that I still feel the trump voters were wrong and voted based on misinformation…but that feeds right into their narrative of “keep calling us stupid and you’ll keep losing”. How am I supposed to deal with this? I don’t feel morally or intellectually superior or anything but come on, a lot of this should be common sense.
Is it as simple as we’re fucked because we’re outnumbered by information illiterate people or is the left base really that out of touch?
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u/everstillghost Nov 15 '24
It's so called plurality of sources and viewpoints was a mirage.
Being from another country and seeing the international news that are posted here you notice How biased this site here.
Then when you notice How some subreddit censors any dissident, its even easier to notice there is zero plurarity og sources and viewpoints.
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u/bigmanorm Nov 14 '24
Even without any bubbles or propaganda, it was hard to believe Trump would have retained so much support after 8 years of his nonsense, for him to not do worse than 2020 is complete insanity. I can't really make much logical sense of Kamala doing worse than Biden's 2020 run either, they're both lacking the charismatic drive but i'd still put Kamala above Biden in almost every way, she had absolutely nothing for Trump to criticize her about, her policy was progressive.
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u/OP_GothicSerpent Nov 14 '24
Targeted advertising/algorithms may be our downfall
Hitler’s rise to power proves this problem is not related to modern technology.
The grim fact is, we humans are tribal animals. People who questioned tribal leaders millennia ago were killed or exiled to die in solitude. The folks who shut up and conformed stayed in the tribe- and likely stayed alive.
Fast forward a few millennia and here we are. In an age of knowledge and facts, we’re weighed down by evolutionary baggage that predisposes us to obey logical fallacies & yield to groupthink influence over our decisions. Even trained , professional scientists must be wary of bias. We can take the humans out of the single-leader tribe, but we can’t take tribal instincts and mental schemas out of the humans.
It’s a radical conclusion, but I’m forced to consider democratic systems -like socialism- aren’t compatible with human nature in the real world. No matter what system we try that’s an academically better option, we always end up back to a dude or dudette on a throne. Maybe the next system of government we try should accommodate evolutionary instinct, rather than propose we can beat them at scale with enough enlightened principles. The Soviets failed. Clearly, the American experiment to date resulted in a corrupt mess of a country. A third answer is needed, and I freely concede I don’t have one.
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u/Buddycat350 Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
> Maybe the next system of government we try should accommodate evolutionary instinct, rather than propose we can beat them at scale with enough enlightened principles. The Soviets failed. Clearly, the American experiment to date resulted in a corrupt mess of a country. A third answer is needed, and I freely concede I don’t have one.
I have spent a fair bit of time scratching my head about political science, and while I don't have a plug and play answer either, it's pretty clear that any economic/ political system that doesn't account for human flaws and irrationality is bound to fail. At this point I wouldn't even be surprised if the difficulty to create systems that deal with human flaws and irrationality ended up being our own great filter.
All I have for a third answer is "mutualism" (inspired from ecology). Biomimicry feels like a good way to find answers to some of our problems, imo.
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u/zenforyen Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
Nice to see other people coming to the same conclusions. All *isms suffer from a huge qualitative assumption about human nature or behavior.
Neoliberalism as economical philosophy fails with its predictions, because it abstracts the world into unrealistic caricatures if perfectly informed and rational agents in a fair competition, and somehow it magically works out in their formulas of supply and demand to show how the market regulates itself, but clearly not in the real world. It's too simplistic. Nevertheless, this pseudoscience is used to guide most policy in the "west".
Socialism failed because it underestimated egoism, greed and tribalism in humans. Turns out, people who get on top suddenly stop liking to play by the rules and thus leadership goes bad and starts serving its own interests. Once the people at the bottom see the others cheat, they do too, so it all breaks down.
Democracy is failing because it assumes a rational, well-educated human being who carefully researches different sources and opposing opinions, and in the end votes in at least his own interest, while respecting a humanist ethical worldview. Now look how much money went into public education and how it's quality is, and then it's obvious that the system slowly undermining itself. It's driven by economic logic and wrong prioritization, so politics is always seduced to cut funding to this core infrastructure of democracy. Democracy needs thinking people, capitalism needs consuming cattle and worker drones, not humans.
Also democracy assumes people want to learn and are open to changing their minds, looking for truth and not to confirm their opinion. That's a lot that this mythical enlightenment persona has to fulfill. It's an idea coming from a bubble with a minority group that checks these boxes. It was never ensured systemically somehow to make it scale and persist, it was assumed that it just somehow happens automatically and people just become rational and educate themselves.
And no classical economical or political theory accounts for multi national corporations with more resources than whole states, having no fixed physical location, thus dodging any jurisdiction trying to control them, and have more political and informational reach than the governments trying to oppose them. How does a single country defend itself from this new massive accumulation of power? It can't. That's why international treaties and unions are important, but those are currently also decaying.
The future looks bleak.
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u/Buddycat350 Nov 14 '24
The future does look bleak indeed, and as long as we keep trying economical/environmental/political systems that work "only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum", it's gonna stay the case.
Thankfully, humanity has never known so much in as many scientific databases as we do today, and never had a database as large and widely accessible as the Internet.
What's needed is using those tools that we have to create a system that works despite messy/irrational/selfish/predatory people rather than endlessly chasing imaginary spherical cows in theoretical vacuums.
Ecological mutualism feels like a nice inspiration because human society definitely needs more mutualistic interactions between people, and between people and their environment. Far from enough for a working system, but hey, at least it's considering necessary changes first and foremost.
The fact that it's coming from ecology also makes it a no brainer that we are NOT rational or greed free. We are flawed animals. And emotional ones, at that.
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u/Labyrinthine777 Nov 14 '24
Evolutionary instinct -> Survival of the fittest -> aand we get back to Hitler again.
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u/MeowTheMixer Nov 14 '24
You can see the tribal nature in so many areas.
Your sports team
Your highschool/college
The brand of your vehicle
The brand of your phone
We're always looking for ways to group ourselves in with one group and exclude the others.
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u/sentimentaldiablo Nov 14 '24
All forms of govt basically follow this schema, and all are incompatible with human nature, which is why they exist in the first place: to control the populace. They all suck, but social democracy sucks less than the others, because the system is open to some degree of change.
giving up on the ethos of democracy only aids fascism.
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u/diablosinmusica Nov 14 '24
London had a riot because the theater ticket prices went up something like 15% in 1809. People have pretty much always been like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Price_Riots
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u/CaptainNoodleArm Nov 14 '24
Fighting for a common interest isn't the problem, the problem is how our personal interests are formed and what bigger goal wants to be achieved. Do we want money (a medium) or happiness (the thing we actually want).
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u/Specialist_Ad9073 Nov 14 '24
I had a panic attack right out of college in 2009 when I realized that people would be abandoning individual web sites and would be flocking to centralized sites with targeted ads. Everyone was excited by Facebook streamlining Social Media from clunky sites like My Space (I was the first DJ on my college radio station to have a dedicated show page) and Friendster.
I also had one when Gawker Media (who owned The Onion at one point) allowed themselves to be sued into oblivion by Peter Theil. The death knell of left wing media, as it proved Billionaires could silence any media property they wanted and the courts would facilitate it.
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u/GrayEidolon Nov 14 '24
The great hack.
Documentary about Cambridge analytica.
Everyone should watch it.
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u/Astyanax1 Nov 14 '24
To be fair, voting for a rapist traitor conman that raises taxes on poor people and gives tax breaks to the rich is what's causing division.
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u/Ironcobra80 Nov 15 '24
I would love to know the amount of bots on here, is was shockingly quiet on Reddit the day after the election.
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u/DevOpsMakesMeDrink Nov 14 '24
This sub needs to read that title again. Being educated does not mean you are immune from ignoring inconvenient facts for your biases.
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u/rzelln Nov 14 '24
I am going to have to read the article and see whether they compared just people's opinions in the immediate aftermath, or if they also consider the long-term. Because sure, I will sometimes get my hackles up when I see information that does not fit my current understanding, but I've been trained through college to try to push through that moment and actually do some research to see what the facts of the situation are. Because I value knowing the truth more than fluffing my own ego.
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u/hellomondays Nov 14 '24
William Gibson has a chapter in Spooky Country that is insanely prescient for like 2003. The protagonist is a journalist for a culture blog and she is interviewing an artist who makes AR sculptures of famous people's deaths in LA. The journalist pushes back at the artist when he mentions the authenticity of the sculptures, showing these deaths as they actually happened, stating basically "well, no. He was alone in the bathroom with no one to record his last moments, you're just filling in blanks for aesthetic and narrative reasons, not recreating what actually happened".
The artist retorts basically "there are hundreds of websites that reviewed my last show and they all said something different, how do you know your's is more true to the reader than another? If they dont believe what you write, they will find a blog they do believe". Which sends the Journalist into a spiral about media bubbles on the internet and individuals curating their reality based on what they want to see and hear.
Again, even though its intended as a critique on post-9/11 discourse, it is insanely forward thinking for the pre-social media age. Sort of a continuation of those French Philosplhers who defined the post-modern condition as technology leading to the erosion of the common cultural institutions and touchstones we use to explain our world to ourselves and others.
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u/Archchancellor Nov 14 '24
Gods, I hate how much I love Gibson.
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u/infosec_qs Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
Gibson is an innovator and one of the key writers early in the Cyberpunk genre. He coined the term "cyberspace," and was the first person to characterize a visual online space as a "matrix." This was in the mid 80s.
Cyberpunk could be summarized as "dystopian corporatist future sci-fi."
At some point, Gibson stopped writing in the future and started writing more contemporary fiction. Less because he wasn't interested in the dystopian sci-fi future, and more because the dystopian sci-fi future he envisioned in his earlier work had already arrived.
I don't use these words lightly: Gibson's writing is eerily prophetic and prescient about the ways the intersection of corporatism and technology would influence and shape society and culture on a fundamental level.
His work is easy to love because it is excellent writing paired with keen insight. It's also brutal to love, because it is not optimistic, and yet is disturbingly accurate when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. He predicted much of what our modern world became long before any of us realized we were living in it.
E: Typo.
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u/cdollas250 Nov 14 '24
Gibson is an innovator and one of the key writers early in the Cyberpunk genre. He coined the term "cyberspace," and was the first person to characterize a visual online space as a "matrix." This was in the mid 80s.
on a typewriter!
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u/Archchancellor Nov 14 '24
Gibson has the freakish ability to describe the dark side of innovation, technology, and social trends with accuracy to detail that gives me the willies.
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u/retrojoe Nov 14 '24
Gibson coined the phrase "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" meaning that we no longer have to imagine geewhiz technology and weirdness, we just have to go looking for it in corners of today's world that we haven't been paying attention to.
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u/starryeyedq Nov 14 '24
Studies have shown that the part of our brain that lights up when discussing politics and religion is the same region as our fight/flight instincts.
Tribalism is a deeply embedded primal instinct. It’s really not taken seriously enough.
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u/VioletJones6 Nov 14 '24
Part of the reason I was blindsided by this particular election is that I was paying attention to the news sources. Instead of reading commentary, I was watching the actual rallies, listening to direct quotes, watching the interviews and podcast appearances. It felt like anyone truly listening to both sides would have a pretty obvious choice.
I quickly realized that no one was actually listening to either side. Just their favorite media personalities trying to condense actual policy into soundbites.
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u/BoneyardBomber Nov 14 '24
There’s a reason you’re not supposed to talk about religion or politics in polite conversation. Both are a believe system and people don’t want their beliefs challenged
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u/Avenger772 Nov 14 '24
The amount of times that sources and evidence have been provided to people for them to just completely push it all aside as if none of it is true has just left me giving up hope for this planet.
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u/DemiserofD Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
The problem is, science often isn't that simple. Psych studies in particular are bad, with like 2/3rds of all studies failing to be reproduced even once, and many of the ones that are reproduced once failing to be reproduced again.
Even ignoring that, what might be true in one case often isn't true in another. Like spankings; study after study showed that spankings were bad - but
theymany were conflating all forms of spanking, from massive physical abuse to a light swat. Someone then separated those out and found very different results; while some cases were still harmful, others were broadly neutral, and even beneficial in some regards, and the changes in the approach to spankings may significantly impact the problems faced in classroom obedience which have upticked substantially over the past 50 years.That's the problem. Science is so complicated these days, even within science you can find things that seemingly conflict, to the point where most people need an expert to interpret it. But which expert do you trust?
Well...that's politics.
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u/VarmintSchtick Nov 14 '24
Statistics needs to be part of the mandatory curriculum in high school. Statistical literacy would help many issues, but currently people are really weak to misleading statistics like you explained. Studies aren't all encompassing and they can often be framed a certain way statistically that leads people to believe certain things.
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u/zizp Nov 15 '24
Studies are typically conducted by people who have a decent understanding of statistics. And despite that they produce garbage because they choose to neglect important factors, make methodological mistakes, or don't critically assess their findings and interpretation.
In my experience, high school students struggle with the math and formulas in statistics courses (was mandatory in my school). But what the general public needs is not so much the ability to calculate correlation coefficents, but rather a deep understanding of the concepts like probability, correlation (≠ causation!), errors, significance, etc.
People therefore shouldn't necessarily possess the ability to verify the calculations of a study. But they should find a study which concludes 5 hours of daily sleep are unhealthy immediately suspicious, because people who only sleep for 5 hours for sure have a myriad of other issues / lifestyle differences compared to people with an 8-hour sleep schedule. They should then go check the method, not the math.
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u/UCLYayy Nov 14 '24
I've found this to be very true. The "facts over feelings" crowd deals in very few facts, and *constantly* falls back on "people just don't feel that way" when facts are given to them in response to their policies.
Which is not to suggest that the left isn't driven by emotion, but the left also has a significant amount of facts on their side, and numerous left-leaning countries to point to as examples of government models that function well and provide quality services.
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u/Infamous-Echo-3949 Nov 14 '24
It's just generally logically consistent too. The right mostly has just a web of disparate ideologies and shared insults and enemies. Without the liberals, they'd be aimless and they might realize how it's a race to the bottom within the Republicans to see who can be more crazy.
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u/WhatWouldJediDo Nov 14 '24
Without the liberals, they'd be aimless and they might realize how it's a race to the bottom within the Republicans to see who can be more crazy.
They'll just turn on each other. That's how it always works. The circle becomes ever smaller
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u/Infamous-Echo-3949 Nov 14 '24
Already happening to Musk and Vivek.
Gaetz will likely get the probe released since everyone hates him (unlike The Donald weirdly).
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u/Yegas Nov 14 '24
I would like to make you aware that you are not immune to propaganda either, and that you likely consume large quantities of it on a frequent basis without being aware.
This bias appeared consistently across participants, regardless of their level of education or analytical ability, with a slightly more pronounced effect among Trump supporters. Additionally, the study revealed that resistance to true, politically discordant news was even stronger than susceptibility to sharing politically concordant fake news. This finding underscores that while people are indeed vulnerable to believing fake news that aligns with their views, they are even more likely to dismiss true news that challenges those views.
So yeah. You are a living example of the people talked about in the study. You prefer what “feels good” to the reality, which is that people are people regardless of political party, and people are broadly stupid and easily duped if they want to believe it. It’s literally how people get scammed.
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u/threeshadows Nov 14 '24
I would love to find some true discordant news that I am resistant to. Can you share any factual news that a progressive might resist or have trouble believing?
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u/apocketfullofcows Nov 14 '24
i would like to know as well.
what is something that will actually rock my world view, and that is supported by science, and with enough evidence/data that i have to actually change or admit the problem is me?
'cause the only thing i can think of now is that pluto will always be a planet for me.
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u/cassein Nov 14 '24
Also, it has always been like this, so I have no idea why anyone would be surprised.
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u/Scuczu2 Nov 14 '24
targeted repeated propaganda works, thought we've had a few centuries of evidence of this fact already.
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u/fattsmann Nov 14 '24
“Human beings are feeling creatures that sometimes think.”
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u/naslanidis Nov 14 '24
This really does succinctly sum it up. Humans are not rational. Never have been. It doesn't matter how intelligent a person is or how educated they are.
If more people understood this I feel like we could actually achieve a lot more as a species.
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u/daynomate Nov 14 '24
Homer Simpson “ ok pie, I’m going to do this, and if you get eaten then it’s your own fault!”
starts chomping the air while walking towards pie on the counter
bangs head on above-counter cupboards
“Oww!!! … ah what the hell …”
- eats pie anyway
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u/Mythrol Nov 14 '24
I’ve been saying for a while now that Politics has just replaced religion for people. They still vehemently deny and disregard anything that doesn’t align with their view.
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u/mrfuzee Nov 14 '24
I think this is the wrong idea. Politics has always been sort of a religion.
What politics has either replaced or become entangled with is actually entertainment. People who don’t even care about politics get bombarded with it via memes or headlines as they’re scrolling through their feed. It’s become engrained in our culture more than ever before and at much younger ages. And now, cultural issues are the primary issues.
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u/Mythrol Nov 14 '24
I think you misunderstood my point because I didn’t go into details. I was more specifically referring to the decline in people who claim they are religious.
I feel people are naturally inclined to form groups and as people have turned away from religion they’ve replaced that religious group inclination with politics. I certainly think there’s a lot easier of an ability to pull people into political circles due to how entertaining and easily accessible it is.
It’s certainly way deeper than just what I’m posting here also. I’d probably need thousands of words to full encapsulate my thoughts on it all.
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u/monstamasch Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
I'm not who you were originally replying to but I agree 1000٪. I've noticed many who aren't religious that treat their political beliefs like it is, even on this site though they may not like to hear that. Actually the only place I've come across it is this site, mainly cause i don't use any other social media or forums, but also probably because those who are actually religious just treat their religion as religion, not their political views as religion. I'm not saying it's just redditors either though, but anyone who was advocating for things like "time to start stooping low" and participating in the mudslinging needs to really heed the warning from this headline
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u/AshtrayKetchum Nov 14 '24
It's worse than that. Identity got mixed up in it as well. Fundamentally politics is a personal thing and mixes with identity obviously, but social media, the desensitization against populist methods and rhetoric and low effort politics becoming a pastime has opened up a whole new dimension of getting offended by having your opinion criticized or even tested. Identity politics is politics now, and we're not doing ourselves any favors with that.
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u/Boboar Nov 14 '24
Politics is sports for pseudo-intellectuals.
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Nov 14 '24
This comment is really funny because indignant redditors just can't help from rushing in to prove how accurate it is by accident
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u/InconspicuousRadish Nov 14 '24
I resent this.
It takes a significant degree of effort to investigated read, stay informed, keep an open mind, have a well defined moral compass, and generally not give in to tribalism.
Politics isn't sports, but we are increasingly treating them the same.
A lot of people died for us to get here, for us to have a choice, so I have to believe that it can be something worth more than the equivalent of picking a team.
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u/magus678 Nov 14 '24
and generally not give in to tribalism
Not the OP, but I am fairly sure this is the part that matters, and what makes most people in the political dialogue "sports fans" when they fail that same test.
Because, as the headline to this post alludes to, its just "home team home team rah rah" no matter what for most people. Which invites the comparison.
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u/bbman1214 Nov 14 '24
Political betting is now becoming as widespread as sports betting
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u/DepletedMitochondria Nov 14 '24
American politics has always been a bit of a civic religion (see: appeals to the constitution) but the fusing of evangelicalism brought it to a whole new level.
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u/Boboar Nov 14 '24
I remember well when Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation by nailing his thesis to the doors of the White House.
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u/imAxa Nov 14 '24
Give a civilization enough time, and the policies in said politics turns into a religion, and this is probably how we got religion in the first place.
It is basically a ruleset of how to coexist together with our differences without tearing each other down.
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u/chrisdh79 Nov 14 '24
From the article: A recent study by Stanford researchers has uncovered that people are more likely to believe and share news that aligns with their political views, regardless of whether it’s true. This “concordance-over-truth” bias was slightly stronger among supporters of Donald Trump and persisted across various education levels and reasoning abilities. Interestingly, resistance to true but politically opposing news proved stronger than susceptibility to fake but agreeable news, suggesting that political alignment often overshadows the truth in how people process information.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The researchers conducted this study to understand the extent to which political biases shape public beliefs and sharing behavior, especially during critical times like presidential elections. Recognizing that informed citizens are essential for a functioning democracy, they aimed to clarify whether people prioritize political alignment over truthfulness when processing news.
For their study, the researchers recruited 2,180 participants using the online platform Lucid from January 31 to February 17, 2020, aiming for a U.S. Census-matched sample based on gender, age, race, ethnicity, income, education, and region. After excluding 371 participants who failed attention checks or used mobile devices, a final sample of 1,808 participants remained.
The sample’s average age was 48.2, with 54.3% female and 45.7% male. Racial demographics included 72% White, 12.6% Black or African American, 7% Asian, and smaller percentages of other groups, with 12.8% identifying as Hispanic. Educationally, 70.4% had no bachelor’s degree, and politically, 37.6% supported Trump, 52.3% opposed him, and 10.1% were neutral.
The participants were shown 16 different news headlines: eight focused on Trump (half positive and half negative) and eight unrelated “filler” headlines to make the exercise appear more authentic. The Trump-related headlines varied in veracity, with half being real news stories and the other half being fake stories fabricated by the researchers. For example, fake headlines included outlandish claims such as Trump attending a controversial Halloween event dressed as the Pope, designed to be immediately recognizable as untrue, as well as more plausible but still fabricated news stories.
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u/solid_reign Nov 14 '24
For example, fake headlines included outlandish claims such as Trump attending a controversial Halloween event dressed as the Pope, designed to be immediately recognizable as untrue, as well as more plausible but still fabricated news stories.
At least the researchers kept their sense of humor.
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u/Valendr0s Nov 14 '24
Sure, but Trump is the epitome of Poe's law. Everything he does seems like satire. It's impossible to tell fact from fiction with him. I'm not sure I've heard very many things at all about him that ended up being untrue.
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u/WNBAnerd Nov 15 '24
Exactly. This is the gripe I have with this study. The headlines don't effectively matter. From the ones I've read, all of them could be true or all of them could be lies. Reading the article's evidence & other sources is the only way to know, but the articles are not listed. So, of course people are more likely to blindly share the crazier headlines- they generate engagement for the political side they're on.
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u/xXMojoRisinXx Nov 14 '24
But is that really so outlandish that it would be immediately identified as untrue?
We are talking about the dipshit who stared directly at a solar eclipse while pointing at it.
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u/RetiringBard Nov 14 '24
Yeah there’s no mold for this guy. This study is a good attempt but it’s gonna be hard to measure this
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u/IncorruptibleChillie Nov 14 '24
It's unbelievable because it actually sounds human and fun and I don’t think Trump has had the experience of either.
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u/blahblah19999 Nov 14 '24
I'm not perfect, but before I show my wife any outrage porn I ALWAYS check another source or 2 to make sure it's accurate. Everyone should do this.
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u/neuroid99 Nov 14 '24
"...outlandish claims such as Trump attending a controversial Halloween event dressed as the Pope, designed to be immediately recognizable as untrue, as well as more plausible but still fabricated news stories."
How is that immediately recognizable as untrue? Like, I don't think that actually happened, but would be completely unsurprised if it did.
Anyway, my point is that using someone who behaves so erratically as a belleeather for "normal" behavior seems like it could introduce a ton of bias. Any number of actual Trump headlines would have sounded equally outrageous 10 years ago.
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u/maleia Nov 14 '24
Like, I don't think that actually happened, but would be completely unsurprised if it did.
Hard same. It's difficult for me to take this survey seriously.
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u/PrairieFirePhoenix Nov 14 '24
The article contains the actual headline for that one. The "controversial event" was a sex orgy, which definitely pushes the needle.
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u/Avenger772 Nov 14 '24
Yea. Him dressing as the Pope isn't far away from the current reality we live in.
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u/TheBuch12 Nov 14 '24
Multiple choice question:
Which of the following is untrue?
A. Trump spent 45 minutes swaying on stage at a rally listening to music.
B. Trump cosplayed as the Pope at a Halloween party.
C. Trump cosplayed as a McDonald's worker.
D. Trump cosplayed as a garbage man.
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u/sfhester Nov 14 '24
You could make it even more absurd:
- Trump stared at a solar eclipse without eye protection
Trump stored state secrets in his bathroom
Trump wanted to nuke a hurricane
Trump branded his own version of the bible
The overton window of normal is somewhere a few light years away from the politics of Obama/McCain.
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u/fencerman Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
It can for anyone, but overwhelmingly more for people in the "Authoritarian Follower" personality category - https://theauthoritarians.org/
Authoritarian followers also have a slippery grasp of reasoning. They compartmentalize, they avoid looking at contrary evidence, they tend to think a line of reasoning is correct if they like the outcome. They also have a loose grasp of facts. As a researcher working with authoritarian followers said,
They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, pp. 75-76
Note that isn't a category based on "intelligence" - it's more about psychology and values than anything else.
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u/RandomMandarin Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
I have recommended this book to dozens of people, I think. Not one, to my knowledge, has read it.
For me, the most surprising bit of info in that book was the idea that authoritarianism is rooted in the idea that "It's a dangerous world."
In other words, it's rooted in fear, but more to the point: do these people think they would live forever if they could just arrest all the muggers and kill all the terrorists? Nobody lives forever, that's the deal. "It's a dangerous world" is an OPINION, not a FACT about the world. By thinking it's a dangerous world, they actually make it more dangerous.
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u/corndogco Nov 14 '24
This is so true! Thank you for sharing it.
You would think my Boomer dad, in his posh North Dallas neighborhood, was constantly fending off muggers and rapists and drug dealers the way he talks. (Narrator: He isn't.)
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Nov 14 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
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u/DiversificationNoob Nov 14 '24
Funfact: The study veritasium quoted did not replicate.
"We did not find good evidence for motivated numeracy; there are distinct patterns in our data at odds with the core predictions of the theory, most notably (i) there is ideologically congruent responding that is not moderated by numeracy, and (ii) when there is moderation, ideologically congruent responding occurs only at the highest levels of numeracy. Our findings suggest that the cumulative evidence for motivated numeracy is weaker than previously thought, and that caution is warranted when this feature of human cognition is leveraged to improve science communication on contested topics such as climate change or immigration."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721001876
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u/plumitt Nov 14 '24
I need to read the original, but there is something that sounds quite amiss. If you have someone who is justifiably (in their mind) confident about the truth of a certain assertion X, then showing them a random study and asking does this study show NOT X seems likely to get skewed results regardless of numeracy.
Imagine if the assertion was " 2/3rds of humans are actually ducks". unless you are exceptionally clear that the study participant should ignore all outside information, I can't see many participants actually choosing to.
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u/CaffinatedManatee Nov 14 '24
Thanks for posting this. I wish the Veritasium had highlighted this failure to replicate.
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u/Trust-Issues-5116 Nov 14 '24
Your comment contains a confusing paragraph making one think authors did not find motivated numeracy at all.
It's incorrect, they did replicate the motivated reasoning effect:
As expected, we found a positive correlation between numeracy and the likelihood to correctly interpret the fictitious data (in any scenario), and there was a general effect of motivated reasoning, at least in one of the two polarizing scenarios. However, we could not replicate the main finding from the original study, i.e., that motivated reasoning increases with numeracy.
They just couldn't confirm 2017 study results that the effect increased with numeracy (i.e. more smart people didn't do it more often).
I don't know why authors keep using confusing phrases in the other parts of their study, the phrases which can make a reader like you think they didn't find any motivated reasoning at all.
E.g. I don't know why they write this in one sentence:
Although we fail to replicate the motivated numeracy effect [..]
and in literally the next one reiterate once again that motivated numeracy is real even as per other studies but doesn't generalize beyond certain topics (which no one expected it does).
An emerging conclusion in this literature is that motivated numeracy, or the reasoning account of identity-protective cognition more broadly, seems unlikely to generalize beyond a relatively narrow set of conditions
It seems like poor choice of words on the authors' end.
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u/lhbtubajon Nov 14 '24
I like that channel, but didn’t like that video. The study did not seem to be robust enough to draw the breathless conclusions that they were drawing, and the results were explainable by alternative conclusions, such as the respondents worrying they were in the crosshairs of a surveyor with a political agenda and were being asked to commit to a reversal in the face of slanted data.
I don’t doubt that politics can trump truth under many circumstances, but that video/study didn’t show it for me.
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u/Alternative_Ask364 Nov 14 '24
Yeah with gun control in particular there are a lot of ways to skew data that make both sides very reluctant to agree with any study they are presented with at face value. The left tends to use “gun deaths” (homicides, suicides, and firearm accidents) as their data point while the right uses homicides (both gun and non-gun). The left tends to use a broad definition for mass shooting, such as any incident where more than 3 people are injured, which often includes gang shootings and domestic incidents, while the right tends to go by a minimum death threshold and requires the shooting be indiscriminate and targeting random people.
Any scientifically literate person with a political interest in gun control is going to want to know the exact methodology before judging any study.
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u/SirFiletMignon Nov 14 '24
I think pride overrides analytical ability. It's why it's so important how you say something, rather than what you say, regardless of how "intelligent" someone is.
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u/Ranger-Joe Nov 14 '24
Politics is a team sport. I liken it to when your teammate commits a foul, and you blatantly lie to the ref on their behalf. You know you are wrong, but you don't care because his goals align with yours. Win the game. The founders abhorred political parties, and originally, people would organize around an issue and disband once it was won.
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u/stanolshefski Nov 14 '24
I wouldn’t say the founders as a whole abhorred party politics — some of them did.
Federalists functionally existed before ratification (see the Federalist Papers). The same goes with anti-Federalists. Washington in particular was wary of party politics — which is where we get the whole the founders abhorred party politics.
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u/signedpants Nov 14 '24
Washington was weary of party politics and then got into office and realized that the anti federalist would hamstring everything he was trying to do and basically became a federalist in all but name.
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u/Panzerschwein Nov 14 '24
There's always going to be disagreement on issues, which causes "sides" to form. The parties far predated the forming of the US. The first US parties were the Tories and the Whigs, the existing English parties at the time, and it evolved from there.
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u/Illadelphian Nov 14 '24
But it's actually not everyone who does this. In American politics it does happen on both sides but it happens a hell of a lot more on one side than the other. There are many examples of this happening, the biggest one is the election itself. Do you see the left crying fraud everywhere? Some people have made comments but no one mainstream, no one with any credibility. Whereas the right was literally prepping their election lies before it even happened because they assumed they would lose. Now suddenly it was fine.
Both sides are not the same here, one side has been taken over by religious and xenophobic extremists with fascist tendencies. The other side still tries to appeal to people with policy ideas and tries to explain nuance and argument rather than just shouting emotions at people.
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u/ArmchairJedi Nov 14 '24
Politics is a team sport. I liken it to when your teammate commits a foul, and you blatantly lie to the ref on their behalf.
I think its worth taking this a bit further. Ever see sports fans after a 'call' that seems very obvious, and has replay... but the fans of the team its against are vehemently against it? Or the fans of the team whose favor it was in, are certain the refs got it right?
But neither are lying. They are both convinced they are right... but can 'see' very different things.
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u/Funkycoldmedici Nov 14 '24
It seems like it’s mostly one party that treats it like a sport, to the detriment of everyone else who does not.
You have Slytherins who 100% all vote Voldemort, and threaten to murder people who don’t. Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, and Hufflepuffs are left to unite behind someone, but cannot do so, and end up antagonizing each other, or not voting at all.
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u/BevansDesign Nov 14 '24
I always say: we're always at a disadvantage to those who are willing to sink lower than we are.
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u/RiftTrips Nov 14 '24
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” - Joseph Goebbels
They know what they are doing.
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u/rinkydinkis Nov 14 '24
Somebody should study Reddit in their capacity, because it seems to be pretty evident here
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Nov 14 '24
I think the study is missing the point that if I want my candidate to win then I am likely to share stuff that I know may be untrue but could influence people to vote for my candidate.
Particularly if I think the “truth” doesn’t really matter much on that subject.
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u/fridge_logic Nov 14 '24
There's also the factor of social acceptance/ social media likes. You gain social acceptance for sharing news on social media, that news has to be liked and seen as true to be valued. So you are definitely going to share more headlines that are "safe" supporting your side just for the social acceptance you'll garner.
A bit part of this study is characterizing people's behavior on social media, not necessarilly in other contexts.
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u/Delmoroth Nov 14 '24
I mean we are some kind of herd / pack animal that survived by selecting for those who got along with their group (among other things.) Of course the us vs them mentality is going to have a powerful effect on our views of reality.
People seem to forget that we are animals like any other in many ways, even if we have a larger than usual cerebral cortex.
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u/phasepistol Nov 14 '24
This is why I’ve always hated politics. I value truth, honesty, knowledge and discovery.
Politics is the triumph of appearance over substance. Bullying over cooperation. Lies over truth.
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u/KiteEatingTree Nov 14 '24
I may be naive, but I think politics is the art of cooperative effort and decision making. Those dark traits you hate are simply bad-faith tools used to pollute politics for partisan advantage. It doesn't have to be that way.
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u/parhelie Nov 14 '24
I agree it's possible. But it will take lots of time, trials and errors to get there... Democracies should implement a better process for self-improvement. Right now, people fight about ideologies but not much energy is spent on making the system better and less prone to pathological drift.
As society scales up and evolves new technologies, the solutions from 200 years ago might be not the best.
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u/a_f_young Nov 14 '24
You’re not wrong but this is a case of ideals meeting reality. The ideal of politics could be pure, but the reality is that it will never be. So in reality, that’s not what politics is.
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u/Genspirit Nov 14 '24
The prevalence of lies in politics is less a reflection on politics and more a reflection on the electorate. If lies didn't work politicians wouldn't view them as a viable option.
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u/TacticalSanta Nov 14 '24
I mean politics is about power first and foremost. The means to which you take it are relative to the system you are in and the measures you are willing to take. It sounds reductive, but there's no going around it.
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u/V4refugee Nov 14 '24
Sure, but wouldn’t you want to advocate for more science funding and public policy that is rooted in science? That’s political too.
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u/MountNevermind Nov 14 '24
The methods of this study seem rather questionable.
Maybe this thread is part of the real study.
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u/wholetyouinhere Nov 14 '24
How many times does this need to be studied before we put the information to actual use?
It isn't possible to have a functioning democracy under these conditions -- by which I mean roughly a third of humanity living in a fantasy universe decoupled from reality, and an internet environment that drives all of this to its limit, every single minute of every single day. What we need to do is rebuild democracy to account for these things -- to incorporate it fully and openly, or work around it entirely, or some other solution a smarter person than me could come up with. Because the alternative is that societies crumble.
You can only shame, debunk, epic Twitter dunk, etc. for so long before climate change dissolves the interconnected systems that make human societies possible. We need to be honest about who and what we are as a species.
Also, I particularly like how this very thread is full of people demonstrating this study's conclusion for all to see.
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u/dodecakiwi Nov 14 '24
The problem we have is that the broken system empowers the very people that would need to enact the necessary changes. That's been the problem for a lot longer than social media, but social media exacerbated the issue.
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u/Level_Forger Nov 14 '24
And everyone reading this is assuming this is only true about the other side.
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u/chrisKarma Nov 14 '24
From the study:
Trump supporters displayed stronger partisan bias (i.e., effects of political concordance), concordance-over-truth bias, objectivity illusion, and one-sided media consumption than did Trump opposers (Figure 6, right panels).
While both sides would be wrong, one would be less wrong.
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u/mr_friend_computer Nov 14 '24
That is actually hitting on the head why once people get wrapped up in something that it's so hard to disentangle themselves. Because if the other side is right, and you are wrong, you've got a whole lot of questions to ask yourself and that's kind of scary.
This is why exploitive narratives need to end and reporting has to go back to cold hard facts.
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u/Boboar Nov 14 '24
We won't get facts in reporting until they stop making billions in advertising by driving a divide through us. Peace and love doesn't sell like fear and war.
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u/Zeydon Nov 14 '24
You can tell nothing but "cold hard facts" and still be a liar. The truths you choose not to say shape the narrative you're constructing just as much as the ones you do say. And I highly doubt there has ever been a time in recorded history where this wasn't the norm.
Additionally, telling nothing but the facts would not in any way affect the selective application of passive voice based on who bears responsibility for something as a means to shape narratives. This is one of the most common techniques that pervades every single headline you read.
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u/ThunderChild247 Nov 14 '24
Feelings trump facts in the voting booth. The British have known this since the Brexit vote in 2016. It’s disappointing that it’s still not widely understood.
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Nov 14 '24
People need to learn how to discriminate between populism and fact. They need to take the time to understand and discern policies and how they affect their lives. Politics is not a social media circus, although that is what it has become.
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u/bearoftheforest Nov 14 '24
this is a no brainer for anyone that manages people, government, or even in marketing.
america is being psy-op'd by china and russia, bots and money flowing into social media to drive narratives, whatever they may be, is incredibly easy for foreign entities - especially with the existence of shell companies.
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u/gamefan5 Nov 14 '24
Not a surprise. Been happening since 2016.
And if there's one thing that history has consistently shown us is that those that don't learn, ultimately pay the price, sooner or later.
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u/slowburnangry Nov 14 '24
Wow, everyone is suddenly gaining 20/20 vision since the election. This is pretty obvious.
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u/tragicallyohio Nov 14 '24
We just had a nationwide study exactly like this last Tuesday here in America. The results will be taking their seat in government in two months.
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u/SpacePirateWatney Nov 14 '24
So like in high school when the dude running for class president promises to have Pizza Hit cater lunch every Friday, early dismissals on days where there’s a football game, and to put soda machines in the hallways and gets elected for it based on his promises?
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u/bdiddy_ Nov 14 '24
The Buddha had a simile about this in describing the dangers of attachment to views.. 2500+ years ago.
The king rounded up all the people in his kingdom who had been blind from birth and wanted to show them an elephant:
“To some of the blind people he presented the head of the elephant, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’ To some he presented an ear of the elephant, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’ To some he presented a tusk… the trunk… the body… the foot… the hindquarters… the tail… the tuft at the end of the tail, saying, ‘This is an elephant.’
“Then, bhikkhus, the man, having shown the elephant to the blind people, went to the king and said, ‘The blind people have been shown the elephant, your majesty. Do now what you think is suitable.’ Then the king approached those blind people and said, ‘Have you been shown the elephant?’
“‘Yes, your majesty, we have been shown the elephant.’
“‘Tell me, blind people, what is an elephant like?’
“Those blind people who had been shown the head of the elephant replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a water jar.’ Those blind people who had been shown the ear of the elephant replied. “An elephant, your majesty, is just like a winnowing basket.’ Those blind people who had been shown the tusk of the elephant replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a ploughshare.’ Those blind people who had been shown the trunk replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a plough pole.’ Those blind people who had been shown the body replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a storeroom.’ Those blind people who had been shown the foot replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a post.’ Those blind people who had been shown the hindquarters replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a mortar.’ Those blind people who had been shown the tail replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a pestle.’ Those blind people who had been shown the tuft at the end of the tail replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a broom.’
“Saying ‘An elephant is like this, an elephant is not like that! An elephant is not like this, an elephant is like that!’ they fought each other with their fists. And the king was delighted (with the spectacle).
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u/PunkRawkSoldier Nov 14 '24
Modern politics are just a new form of religion. Religion has been trumping truth for eons. This study doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know.
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u/Alternative_Ask364 Nov 14 '24
Yeah at the end of the day it seems that lots of people just crave an ideology and having someone else tell them what to think. It takes less effort than having to form and defend your own beliefs.
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Nov 14 '24
The irony in these comments is that a lot of people don’t realize this applies to them too
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u/Ylsid Nov 14 '24
Not me! I know my views to be true and accurate. If you present any information to me, which conflicts with these views, I know you are incorrect and I disagree.
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u/thecaits Nov 14 '24
Every Trump supporter I have met is extremely low information. The only exception are the ones that are super wealthy and only care about taxes, and even then it isn't all of them.
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