SUMMARY: The blog post delves into the psychological reasons behind why some individuals believe in seemingly unbelievable political rhetoric. It discusses the illusory truth effect, the complex relationship between anxiety and right-wing populism, and the role of envy in radicalization. The post suggests that the GOP is purposefully radicalizing its base and emphasizes the importance of recognizing these forces at play. It outlines the intertwining of psychological tendencies and biases that contribute to the radicalized right and emphasizes the need for individuals to take action to protect democracy. The post concludes by encouraging readers to share, engage, and follow the blog to continue discussing these crucial topics.
KEY WORDS: Political rhetoric, Illusory truth effect, Anxiety, Right-wing populism, Envy, PsyPost, Radicalization, GOP, Biases, Heuristics, Democracy
COMMENT: We’ve all heard the contradictions that conservatives of every stripe spout from their asses, I’d love to hear your favorites, in the comments!
Understanding the Mental Tomfuckery: Why People Believe the Unbelievable
As a nation, I think we’ve all been scratching our asses and wondering how MAGA can get it so fucking wrong all the fucking time. Not like Maddog Greene and Paul Gopsychosar pretending that the FBI had approval for use of deadly force from Joe Biden in the Merde-a-Lardo raid. You know those assholes know perfectly well that they are lying straight out of their asses. I’m talking about the rank-and-vile who BELIEVE such painfully obvious bullshit.
Well, here are three articles from the much esteemed PsyPost that will help us understand the mental Tom Fuckery that entraps them in such crap. Me, personally, I could never get past that part of it has to be willful on their part. They know — they have to know, right? — that the whole stolen election thing is wrong, they know I2I4 is just a buffoon, right?
On the other hand, according to Arlie Horchschild, they believe big international chemical refining plants don’t need government regulation because it is in their best financial interest not to pollute and that they actually bring jobs to their areas when they install their big polluting plants and that their getting cancers and dying horrible painful deaths at a young age is the sacrifice they need to make for America to be number one. So, yeah, these folks can and will believe anything.
It’s me. I just can’t believe it. I can’t. It just makes no sense. None of it does. So, let’s see if psychology can help.
The Illusion of Truthiness
The Scientific Basis of Illusory Truth and its Implications for Political Beliefs
We’ve known since 1977 or so that becoming aware of something, even a nonsensical group of letters that only occupies a small area of your visual field, can produce the sensation of truth and importance. This is effect is known as the illusory truth effect or as I like to call it, the illusion of truthiness, with apologies to Stephen Colbert.
Now we get some additional information from Felix Speckmann and Christian Unkelbach of the University of Cologne that will help it all make sense… only not really because none of this shit seems humanly possible, yet it, obviously, it is.
They have evidence that not only do you think that something is true after repeated exposures to it, you believe you knew it “before” it was repeated, and you have a source for it. You create a false memory of having read it somewhere or been told it by someone or some goddamn thing.
Wait, what? Participants were exposed to twenty-five of trivia statements, some true, some not true. Then, they were shown the same twenty-five mixed with a new set of twenty-five for a total of fifty. The experimenters asked them whether they knew the information in each of the fifty statements prior to the study. The participants were more likely to believe they knew the repeated statement prior to the study.
Another group of participants went through the same design, but this time with patently false statements, Golf used to be known as mintonette. The participants were asked whether they knew each of the fifty false statements to be false. These folks reported that they believed that the repeated false statements were false BEFORE they got to the study!
False Memories and the Endurance of Repetition Effects
Worse, when asked to specify a source, participants attributed their knowledge of something they couldn’t have had knowledge of to a source.
The inability to distinguish recent information from well-established knowledge in memory adds an explanation for the persistence and strength of repetition effects on truth. The truth effect might be so robust because people believe to know the repeatedly presented information as a matter of fact.
Illusions of knowledge due to mere repetition in Cognition by Felix Speckmann and Christian Unkelbach
It is a pernicious effect compounding the illusion of truthiness. Once you start down the road to believing something is true, you almost can’t escape it. It’s got its hooks so deep into you, you’re creating a memory of where you might coulda learned it from. Your favorite drunk uncle doesn’t stand a chance when faced with Trump’s explosive diarrhea of falsehood spewing across the mediaverse.
Anxiety and Right-Wing Populism
Exploring the Complex Relationship Between Anxiety and Political Beliefs
One of the most significant phenomena occurring right now in our politics is the way MAGA believes two contradictory ideas simultaneously. You know, like, Biden is senile and a criminal mastermind plotting the assassination of I2I4, which is illegal and underhanded, but the president is immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office including assassinating a political opponent. You know, like those kinds of utterly baffling inherently incompatible beliefs that only a black hole of cognitive dissonance can explain. Now comes a study out of Germany where they are dealing with a resurgence of bona fide Nazism in their electoral politics to help us tease the effects apart.
Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as saying MAGA is anxious so they’re suffering from mass psychosis and want a totalitarian daddy-figure to make it all better. There are two types of anxiety:
- SITUATIONAL ANXIETY is an anxious reaction to immediate social threats.
- DIFFUSE ANXIETY is a tendency towards being anxious in general.
Even more unfortunate, there are two types of MAGA assholery:
- AUTHORITARIAN SUBMISSION is the desire to be dominated by an all powerful leader. The above mentioned daddy issues.
- ANTI-ELITISM is the grievance towards a rich and powerful group controlling society, which is code for anti-semitism and anti-woke.
Balancing Situational & Diffuse Anxiety with Authoritarian Submission & Anti-Elitism
Interestingly, they mix and match much like a sinister Winnie-the-Pooh clothing collection for toddlers, but there were clear trends coming out of the study:
- SITUATIONAL ANXIETY correlated with AUTHORITARIAN SUBMISSION. Think the constant fear mongering by Fox et al. driving your favorite drunk uncle to seek a strong man to protect him from all the liberal wokeness so he can be free to spout his god-given racist misogynistic views during your Thanksgiving dinner.
- DIFFUSE ANXIETY correlated with ANTI-ELITISM. Think the skepticism of the scientists, liberal professors, experts, and everyone else with a clue that your favorite drunk uncle drones on and on about during those tense Thanksgiving dinners.
Untangling the complex relationship between anxiety and right-wing populism in PsyPost by Eric W. Dolan on“Anxiety is an element that makes people susceptible to right-wing populist agendas,” Veit told PsyPost. “Attitudes towards authority play an important, albeit contradictory, role in this. On the one hand, fear motivates submission to strong leadership, and on the other hand, anxiety can also encourage the rebellion against established authorities.”
7 May 2024
While fear of wokeism (diffuse anxiety and anti-elitism) can drive people to seek the protection of traditional authorities, like the government and established political parties, the trick is to align one of the traditional political parties with authoritarianism so that you can catch all of the anxious fish with one big oppressive net, and they’ll all be happy to be there… until they’re not.
There you have it, the Republican Party has successfully unified the anxiety of both sets of their supporters, the fear of being replaced set and the fear of the Jewish cabal allied with the woke university-educated mob.
The Role of Envy in Radicalization
Now, we have MAGA believing that they have the “truth” about what’s really going on in our country, seeking an authoritarian dictator to right all of their illusory grievances, and wanting to eat the rich, even though their dictator is from the elite class that they want to eat, all we need is a bit of radicalization to push violence in our society, so we can have a reliable force of armed useful idiots to storm the capitol building to stop the peaceful transfer of power or even to fight a civil war for the elites that are manipulating their anxiety.
What’s a budding anti-democratic pro-authoritarian political party to do? Create envy in their followers by emphasizing how the liberals are giving everything to the lazy takers (read that Blacks and Browns) and that they are losing the demographic race!
They really will replace us! The Dems are letting the illegals vote! They are flooding the border so they can win elections! There’s nothing you can do about it other than take up your guns and shoot ’em all! Shoot ’em all! Shoot ’em! All!
Unlike jealousy, envy in this context motivates individuals to alter their perceived lower status or address what they view as unjust advantages held by others. They argue this powerful emotion propels individuals towards radicalization, choosing the path of joining militant groups as a means to effect change, sidestepping more traditional routes like political engagement or community activism.
New model suggests envy fuels the radicalization process and distorts perceptions in PsyPost by Mane Kara-Yakoubian on 14 May 2024
The GOP’s Utilization of Psychological Tendencies for Political Gain
The GOP has been very busy since about 2008 demonstrating that democracy cannot and will not work and that the only solution to these grievances is to become more militant and fight like hell or you won’t have a country any more.
It’s interesting to me that there are so many psychological tendencies, biases, and heuristics, and personality clusters that come together to produce the radicalized right at this moment in our history. Knowing this makes it clear that the Republican Party is purposefully working to destroy our democracy by using the MAGA voting base and Donald Trump as their wrecking ball.
More importantly, though, it is clear that the only people that will or can save our democracy is ourselves. And, that the only path to saving our democracy is voting straight Democratic no matter what.
If you enjoyed this application of recent political psychology findings to our current political situation, please consider doing one or all of these:
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Image Attribution
This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, A political cartoon illustrating the radicalization of the political right
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Categories: Political Psychology
The Psy of Life 
Calico, why did you wipe my post? Can’t handle the truth? If you open yourself to comment, you have to be able to handle it.
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It’s my blog. I post what I like for the reasons I like.
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Hi Jack- Do you notice how much fear and anxiety mongering takes place in mob scene settings?
It’s not enough to believe such lie trash yourself. It becomes contagious primarily among the less educated populace it seems. Trump flew over NASCAR race car speedway yesterday to cheering fans is a good example.
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Howdy Usfman!
Mob mentality is frightening. It is why Madison (?) warned against mob rule. And, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who wrote “Strangers in Their Own Land” about her five year first person observer study of rural white Christian Louisianans, said that her informants tell her in the Trump years that they feel like they are majority because they see so many people at his rallies. Groups are always more radical than individuals, science fact. So, all that fear mongering grows exponentially when you get groups of MAGA getting together either at rallies or online. It is what leads to radicalization.
Huzzah!
Jack
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“action to protect democracy”.Calico, I am not sure what democracy is any more. In it’s simplest terms I thought it was ‘ government for the people, by the people’ but that no longer seems to apply!!
Russia holds elections, America holds elections, is there any real difference?
Does the ruling party or person have any long term impact on the individual?
Is the two party system any better than the one party system, methinks not. Sadly, history seems to support my view.
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Howdy Jon!
The only way out is through. You have a lot of criticism and unsupported claims, but, sadly, no solutions other than passing some vague laws to fix the system.
We save democracy by using democratic institutions, starting with the vote. Using the institutions, strengthens them.
This blog is about more than just carping about what is wrong. It is analysis of the psychology behind what we’re doing, which leads to suggestions for ways to improve the situation. So, please tell me more about the history that supports your view. Why doesn’t government for the people, by the people seem to apply? How is American democracy like Russian democracy? How is it different? How much impact has the “ruling” party had on the individual? How much did Trump’s term affect the individual? How much did Biden’s? These are great questions. I’d love to hear your answers with supporting details.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Calico, your response surprises me! Pick any “Democratic” country you like and the tell me, do the have the same degree of freedom they had had 50 years ago?
Have you ever noticed that a two party system is little deferent to a one party system? In our two party systems, the two parties unite to thwart any attempt by a third party to get up and running, added to which legislation past by them supports the two party system.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, has a nice ring about it, doesn’t it? But we have an ex President who refuses to accept the findings and excites his followers to show their disapproval of the election results.
As for your last point, you tell me how any government really impacts on the man/woman/child in the street?
Calico, you ask for facts! The facts are staring you in the face.
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You know, Jon, you need to support your arguments a little more thoroughly.
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That ability to not only believe the false statement, but to come to believe that you already (or, always) knew it has another name, “Common Sense”, a truth so obvious and basic as to be beyond question, a fact of nature. It gets incorporated into the unconscious level of world view. Then, it becomes impossible to entertain the idea that anybody could possibly honestly think otherwise, and any denial of that self evident fact can only be nefarious and hostile. That is the completion of the radicalization process.
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Howdy Bob!
It is comforting to know that we once thought police and fire fighters were only men and teachers and flight attendants were only women and now, we don’t. Even though, the first word I come up with for flight attendant is still stewardess, but I’m old. Those gender roles used to seem self evident, and we are living through the backlash by those who consider the change as nefarious and hostile.
The envy part of the story really got me. It dovetails with the feelings of being at the bottom of the ladder that lower socioeconomic level whites have. Seeing People of Color be financially and socially better off than them is a huge narcissistic wound. LBJ was right, a poor white man will not only give you his wallet, but his life and that of his family if he can feel superior to the most well off Black man. It is what keeps Louisianans happily living in Cancer Alley.
Right now, Biden is suffering because of the repeated exposure we’ve all had to Republican fear mongering over immigration, crime, and the economy, all of which are much better under Biden than they have been under nearly any other president. It is the overwhelming power of repetition and its ability to create the feeling of truthiness and common sense that is at work here. Overcoming it is what is difficult. Counter messaging is nearly impossible.
Huzzah!
Jack
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If counter messaging is ineffective, then perhaps the answer is to let some keep thinking things are bad and get across to them how much worse the other guy plans to make them.
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