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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: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:13PM
Unless you're making unwarranted assumptions, you don't know what my mindset is, at least not from that post. I was just relaying the conclusions of the author, which come as close to being data-based independently-reproducible facts as social science allows. I did mention, as the author does, that we are all somewhere on the RWA scale. I have no doubt that there are many on the liberal side who would find me still far too high up the scale.
The author also notes that his decades of data showed that whenever adverse events happen to any given individual or to the society as a whole, people tend to quickly climb the RWA scale, and that there is an unfortunate tendency for people to get "stuck" the higher up the scale they went. It's really quite an enlightening book, and very meaningful for the survival of democracy.
I feel it's also important to point out that his definition of "Right Wing Authoritarian" doesn't just apply to the people we refer to as "right-wingers" in our current political climate. There are plenty on the far left who are also prone to falling under the spell of a strong authoritarian leader. This is all described much more clearly in the book, of course.
Indeed. Also easily explains why Perry's ratings held steady or went up after he had a complete brain fart on stage during the Republican debates. The conservative base enjoyed the fact that he screwed up royally, "just like any normal person". It was far less important that he had no bloody idea what he was talking about.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @11:07AM
which come as close to being data-based independently-reproducible facts as social science allows.
Which isn't much. The science may be hard, but that is no reason to lower our standards and pretend that bad and/or inconclusive science is actually good.