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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the tell-it-like-it-is dept.

Melanie Tannenbaum has written several interesting blog posts about ambiguity intolerance and its connection to the early popular support Donald Trump is currently enjoying. Roughly speaking, people who are not comfortable without a plan of action or a path forward are said to have more ambiguity intolerance.

What may be surprising, however, is the research showing that people high in ambiguity intolerance feel so profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of uncertainty, they will often prefer a slightly negative yet certain outcome to a potentially-more-positive, uncertain one. In other words, people may find Donald Trump to be disagreeable, abrasive, or downright unlikeable. But because of his reputation for "telling it like it is" and "being honest to a fault," they also feel certain that they can believe Trump when he says he's telling the truth.

Tannenbaum points out that despite a record of Trump making contradictory comments in the past, people tend to believe his convictions on what he says because nobody would say those "non-normative" things if they really didn't believe it.


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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:38AM (#224857)

    That you are playing weirdly passive-aggressive games rather than stating your thesis further cements my belief that you are being intellectually dishonest. You've made it about asserting your intellectual superiority rather than make a convincing argument.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:13PM (#225032)

    (diff AC here)

    Why is this marked offtopic?

    It is SPOT on topic. It strikes to the core of why people do PC. They want to win an argument but use word tricks to do so. That is not winning. That is being intellectually dishonest.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:26AM (#227444)

    The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The SJW had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.