Category: Psychology & Anthropology

A restaging of the presidential debates upended expectations.

In this experiment, Donald Trump became a female candidate named Brenda King and Hillary Clinton became a male candidate named Jonathan Gordan. The actors who played King and Gordon not only replicated what the real-life candidates said during the debates, but also mimicked their posture, gestures, tone, and facial expressions.
…
when the performance was staged in the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in January, the audience reacted in unexpected ways.

Source: If Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump swapped genders, would they become less or more likeable? — Quartz

For some of those immersed in virtual worlds, everything loses its meaning – even racism and fascism.

Several people have explained to me that it was all just fun; he didn’t mean it. Which, to my mind, is exactly the problem. When the Holocaust, nazism and racism are so abstracted from reality that they become just another expression of ironic detachment, when moral norms collapse into knowing laughter, our defences against offline horrors disintegrate.

Source: Screened Out – George Monbiot

This mental trap has always existed in the human mind, but now there is an actual infrastructure of information that caters to it, reinforces it, and solidifies it. It is not only the pathologically delusional that can fall into this trap. Now anyone who wanders even a little into the badlands can be consumed by it.

The central problem with conspiracy thinking is that it is self-contained, immune from external reality. Any information can be made to seem as if it supports the conspiracy. Any missing information is being suppressed by the conspiracy, and any evidence against the conspiracy was manufactured and is therefore proof of the conspiracy. If you disagree, you are a dupe, or you are part of the conspiracy.

Higher standards of everyday journalism would help.

One problem, however, is that there is an inherent tactical advantage to not caring about the truth at all. The truth is constraining, and if you are free to make up whatever bullshit serves your narrative, this will make you more nimble in the misinformation wars. It is as if one side is using biological and chemical weapons while the other side is limiting itself to conventional weapons and the Geneva Convention.

This is the problem to which I cannot find a solution. The inherent problem is that it is critically important for society to be free and for the media and speech to be free. How do we simultaneously defend free speech while opposing the abuse of that speech to spread targeted misinformation? The usual answer is, to use your own free speech to spread accurate information. But that just gets us back to the fundamental asymmetry.

Source: NeuroLogica Blog » The Misinformation Wars

Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.

Most middle school students can’t tell native ads from articles.

Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them. … Many high school students couldn’t tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook.

Most college students didn’t suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group. … Most Stanford students couldn’t identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.

The project began before the recent uproar over the prevalence of fake news online. But its relevance is immediately clear.

Source: Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability : The Two-Way : NPR

Democracy cannot work as it is meant to; human nature does not allow it.

Democracy for Realists, published earlier this year by the social science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, argues that the “folk theory of democracy” – the idea that citizens make coherent and intelligible policy decisions, on which governments then act – bears no relationship to how it really works

we act politically not as individual, rational beings, but as members of social groups, expressing a social identity.

This is not to suggest that it has no virtues, just that they are not the principal virtues we ascribe to it. It allows governments to be changed without bloodshed, limits terms in office, and ensures that the results of elections are widely accepted. Sometimes public attribution of blame will coincide with reality, which is why you don’t get famines in democracies.

This is not to suggest that the folk theory of democracy comes close to reality anywhere, but that the situation is not as hopeless as they propose.

Persistent, determined, well-organised groups can bring neglected issues to the fore and change political outcomes. But in doing so they cannot rely on what democracy ought to be. We must see it for what it is. That means understanding what we are.

Source: What We Are | George Monbiot