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posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the That's-what-they-WANT-you-to-think dept.

In the Salon

There seems to be a lot of science being thrown at the "Trump Phenomenon." Salon covers yet another, and interviews the author.

A new paper, recently presented at the American Political Science Association's annual convention, suggests a widespread motive driving people to share fake news, conspiracy theories and other hostile political rumors. "Many status-obsessed, yet marginalized individuals experience a 'Need for Chaos' and want to 'watch the world burn'," lead author Michael Petersen tweeted, announcing the availability of a preprint copy.

Truth, in such a worldview, is beside the point, which offers a new perspective on the limitations of fact-checking. The motivation behind sharing or spreading narratives one may not even believe can help make sense of a variety of threatening or confusing recent developments in advanced democracies. It also sheds light on disturbing similarities with outbreaks of ethnic or genocidal violence, such as those seen in Rwanda and the Balkan nations during the 1990s.

Preprint of the paper available at PsyArXiv, here. [DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6m4ts]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:43AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:43AM (#733971) Journal

    It's a particularly facile brain that can take psychology discussion of fairly specific psychological phenomena with assloads of research related to them: motivated reasoning, right wing authoritarianism, conspiracy acceptance(and ideation), and reasoning skills, and manage to jump to facile totally unrelated subjects: gender difference in voting patterns, emotionality, and think they've addressed the point at all, much less rejected the primary thesis. Just utterly facile in the extreme.

    No more facile that the bullshit you just spewed. Note that motivated reasoning, for example, is a emotion-based response and hence, part of the behaviors of emotionality. It's quite relevant to discuss such things.

    Second, I notice a glaring warning sign in "The Authoritarians", namely, it's about a particular subclass of authoritarians (the "Right Wing Authoritarian") rather than the whole lot. It takes a bunch of motivated reasoning and a bit of chutzpah to give a book a more or less universal label and then have it be about attacking ideological opponents. The sciency theater is pretty, but it doesn't change the underlying bias.

    You've kinda blithley pointed at emotionality and decided it represents bad reasoning skills.

    If you're depending on emotional behaviors to reason, then yes, you have bad reasoning skills. It's a given. Keep in mind the point of emotional behaviors. We are cognitively limited in a variety of ways. Emotions allow us to react quickly to changes while not having to add modules for each mode of operation. The brain changes its behavior on the fly to better fit the situation. That's great for survival/conflict situations where quick response is far better than reasoned but delayed response. It completely blows up however when you're in a situation where it is productive to deliberate for a long time. There are many such problems where coming up with an answer in seconds is completely useless. You're not in a race and your emotions aren't a great guide for finding useful answers.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:57AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:57AM (#734062)

    I notice a glaring warning sign in "The Authoritarians", namely, it's about a particular subclass of authoritarians (the "Right Wing Authoritarian") rather than the whole lot.

    Yes it's a subclass but not what you think. Altemeyer writes

    Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-
    wing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in
    Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct,
    doing what the authorities said. (And when someone did the lawful thing back then,
    maybe the authorities said, with a John Wayne drawl, “You got that riht, pilgrim!”)

    John Dean, who loves words the way I love pizza, pointed out this early meaning of “right”
    after pinning me to the wall on how come I called this personality trait right-wing
    authoritarianism. I’ve always called it right-wing authoritarianism rather than simply
    authoritarianism in acknowledgment that left-wing authoritarianism also exists. An
    authoritarian follower submits excessively to some authorities, aggresses in their name, and
    insists on everyone following their rules. If these authorities are the established authorities
    in society, that’s right-wing authoritarianism. If one submits to authorities who want to
    overthrow the establishment, that’s left-wing authoritarianism, as I define things.

    May I suggest you read the book, it's fairly interesting and funny too.

    • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:53AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:53AM (#734165) Journal

      Yet another warning sign, pilgrim. Humor to disguise ambiguity of the crucial definition.

      An
      authoritarian follower submits excessively to some authorities, aggresses in their name, and
      insists on everyone following their rules. If these authorities are the established authorities
      in society, that’s right-wing authoritarianism. If one submits to authorities who want to
      overthrow the establishment, that’s left-wing authoritarianism, as I define things.

      Most such definitions are based on what people believe, not on what their external political landscape looks like. And the definition of right wing authoritarian is pretty useless now since any authoritarian can be one, their authority just needs to be in charge.