Many voters are willing to accept misinformation from political leaders – even when they know it’s factually inaccurate. According to our research, voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively, if they believe these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important “truth.”
Truthiness
- Colbert
Isn’t that exactly what religions do?
Yes. They lie and act like it’s true. It’s how they implement control. And billions of people still eat it up because of forced indoctrination from birth.
This is merely a function/mechanic of self-delusion. But, then again, I’m sure everyone here already realizes that.
I dunno. The story of George Washington and the cherry tree is surely factually false, but it is ok as a parable. The higher truth evoked is that people should be honest. The irony is in dishonestly presenting the story as fact, of course.
His teeth were not wooden. They were pulled from the mouths of healthy slaves. Before novocaine was invented.
I do know. People will convince them of whatever they want if they’re desperate enough. It’s self-delusion.
Hey, you who is reading! Yes, you! This is you too, it’s not only those wretched degenerates on that other side.
Show me the study.
In other words, many voters lack critical thinking skills. Yep, that tracks.
Isn’t that just tribalism or clubism in general?
For example, if one looks at footbal (soccer for Americans) fans, their “judgement” on the validity of faults and sanctions (or lack thereof) is entirelly dependent of whose team they support and almost invariably they side with whatever the important people of “their” team (like the coach, important players and even the club’s manager) say with zero logical analysis and if you actually bring logic into it and it goes against “their” team, the biggest fans just get angry and dismiss it all.
People with a strong emotinal bond to a “team” judge messages in that domain based on the messager and which team it favours, rather than on the contents of and supporting evidence for the message itself.
It’s kind of like this: I just want it to be possible to smoke weed and be still gainfully employed. Even if Harris gets up on stage and starts spouting bullshit about Jewish space lasers, I’m still voting for her. Even if a bunch of people get hella pissed off that jewish space lasers aren’t a smart use of tax dollars I’M STILL VOTING FOR HER because political issues that effect me are, to me, the more important ones.
In reality it wouldn’t matter even if that’s the plan. Building space lasers is still a less destructive thing to do to our society than all the utterly corrupt shit Trump and his goonlings want. I just need the bad guys to lose. We all do. Even if it’s just this once.
I haven’t read the article or study yet. But I wonder if the observation is one of “probably approximately correct learning” (PAC learning) in action. There’s a book of that title by Les Valiant proposing that all biological learning works that way.
to me this is just ex-post-facto justification for motivational reasoning or confirmation bias. people just look for the easiest possible way to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Why do you post an article you haven’t even read?
It looked interesting and that was good enough.
Because even if it winds up being a bad study, it still evokes a deeper, more important “truth.”
I’m being sarcastic but that’s actually what’s going on here.
You can fool some of the people all of the time.
They’re called Republicans.
…in the past 40 years it’s changed from “some” to “most”.
