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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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:45AM
But I have seen that exact sort of logic used to try to make Sony blameless for their terrible security practices when their security was broken. "Don't tell Sony to not use demonstrably awful security; tell criminal hackers not to do bad things!" Not sure if that's political correctness or what, but it is fucked up to be defending a multi-billion dollar corporation that was utterly negligent in protecting people's data and pretending like it's just some kind old person that can barely use email.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:17AM
It's not just Sony. In the recent OPM data hack (of the US Federal government, wherein hackers got personal data for tens of thousands of government employees), the woman in charge of OPM tried to deflect blame saying they didn't do anything wrong, and that "the hackers" should be blamed.
The hackers are blameless: they were doing their job, and they did it well apparently. They were doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. (And considering they probably are in the employment of a certain foreign government, what they did wasn't illegal either, it was perfectly legal and required of them.) The OPM agency is the one that deserves all the blame, for failing at its task of keeping this data secure.
Blaming "the hackers" is always wrong. The hackers are supposed to hack into systems and steal data. That's their job. And don't act like this is a horrible thing either: the US government has its own hackers, doing the exact same thing. Who really thinks the CIA and NSA aren't hacking into other governments' systems?