Views from Crestmont Drive

As if on cue, following my past few posts, here’s a NY Times columnist today on Why Fox News Is Still in a Coronavirus Bubble. Subtitle: “Humans will do figure eights to make facts suit their fictions. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity help the faithful do that.”

The opening:

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger came up with cognitive dissonance theory, which can essentially be described as the very human desire to reconcile the irreconcilable. Our brains, he realized, will go to baroque lengths — do magic tricks, even — to preserve the integrity of our worldview, even when the facts inconveniently club us over the head with a two-by-four.

Festinger’s most famous case study was of a cult that believed life on Earth would come to an end in a great flood around Christmas of 1954. The waters never came (obviously), but the leader had an explanation: She and her followers had warded off the apocalypse with the unflagging power of their faith.

Today, perhaps the best case study of cognitive dissonance theory can be found in the prime-time lineup on Fox News, where Donald Trump’s most dedicated supporters are struggling mightily to make sense of the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis. And just as Festinger’s work predicts, they are doubling down on their beliefs, interpreting recent events as incontrovertible proof that they were right from the start.

With examples.

Even if they were to wake up one morning and realize that their thinking about this pandemic had involved some catastrophic errors in judgment, neither Sean Hannity nor Laura Ingraham seems like the type who’d acknowledge them publicly. It’s much more likely that they would quietly consign them to a memory hole. Conceding mistakes requires intellectual humility, which in both of these hosts is in demonstrably short supply; and anyway, what they peddle is certainty, cocksurety of opinion. It’s their brand.

It’s also something called the sunken-cost fallacy. Once you’ve invested so much time, social currency, and years of your life committed to a particular belief, or belief system, it’s difficult to walk away from it, admit you were wrong and you’ve changed your mind, and let go of that investment. Especially in a community environment.

And of course the increasingly wide recognition that you can’t change anyone’s mind by presenting them evidence, no matter how unassailable. People find reasons to dismiss the evidence, for one reason or another. I suppose these are two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion:

Even under the best of circumstances, we humans love nothing more than to say, “Told you so.” As Kathryn Schulz writes in “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” it’s basically a way of saying, “Not only was I right, I was also right about being right.”

But it is also through recognizing our errors, Schulz points out, that we learn, change and grow. A simple message, yes, but an impossibly urgent one right now. For those who’ve dismissed or downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, now is a good time to reconsider that position. And for those who’ve prayed for such a conversion, now is a good time simply to be thankful, and not to judge.

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Thus.

NYT: Trump May Have Covid, but Many of His Supporters Still Scoff at Masks. Subtitle: They echo misinformation that the president has spread for much of the year, as he has sought to minimize the threat of the virus.

WP: The common link in the torrent of Trump news: His disdain for rules.

Slate: Trump, Laboring to Breathe, Says He’s Fine and Everything Else Will Be Too if You Just Believe Him.

And millions of people will! They’ll believe anything fearless leader tells them!

The Atlantic: Il Donald. Subtitle: The president knows what Mussolini knew: Some audiences crave images that offer false reassurance and over-the-top displays of power.

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But the other shoe hasn’t yet dropped. There’s this, apparently trending across Twitter today:

A humbling Herman Cain/coronavirus timeline

Cain kept saying he was feeling fine and getting better for over three weeks after testing positive, and then three days later died.

We’ll see. The ending has not yet been written.

Washington Post: The GOP’s coronavirus denialism finally catches up with its leaders, by traditionally conservative writer Max Boot.

He responds to a tweet, by a Republican.

“Does anyone else find it odd,” she wrote Friday, “that no prominent Democrats have had the virus but the list of Republicans goes on and on?”

You would consider that odd only if you also consider it odd that people who wear seat belts are more likely to survive car accidents or that those who jump out of airplanes with parachutes are more likely to reach the ground intact than those who don’t.

His take:

How could this possibly be? Perhaps — I’m spitballing here — it is related to the Republican Party’s rejection of science, its embrace of conspiracy theories and its transformation into a cult of personality? Having long been in denial about climate change, the Republican Party this year has also been in denial about the novel coronavirus.

And points out that

Researchers have shown that those who rely on right-wing sources such as Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh are much more likely to hold mistaken beliefs about the coronavirus than those who look to the mainstream media for information.

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Slate, Fred Kaplan: Trump’s Narcissism Is As Healthy As Ever. Subtitle: The president is incapable of understanding anything that didn’t happen directly to him.

The message is in the subtitle. This echoes my earlier comment that some people have a hard time believing anything that they cannot personally touch or see. Thus flat-earthers.

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Psychology Today: Cults and Cognition: Programming the True Believer. Subtitle: How do cognitive processes contribute to bizarre—and lethal—cult beliefs?

Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, the Comet Hale-Bopp UFO.

The obvious question: How does cult psychology work? How is it possible to persuade human adults to enter a weird cognitive landscape with no basis in reality? To enter a fantasy realm so profound that they’ll willingly die for whomever has been selected as the local Messiah?

A complete answer to this crucial question is beyond our scope or available space, so in this and the next two Forensic Views, we’re going to focus on three specific cognitive cult dynamics: dissociation, group psychology, and cognitive dissonance.

This particular column, first of three, focuses on cognitive dissonance.

It’s difficult to get away from the current crisis, and threat.

The Atlantic, Megan Garber: Do You Speak Fox?. Subtitle: How Donald Trump’s favorite news source became a language

Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.

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Salon, Amanda Marcotte: How anti-choice propaganda trained Republicans to accept Trump’s coronavirus denialism. Subtitle: Trump’s new medical adviser peddles a familiar model of deceit: Wrap lies and right-wing ideology in a lab coat.

Donald Trump didn’t like what the experts were telling him about the coronavirus pandemic, so he found a guy with “Dr.” in front of his name who will tell the president the bedtime stories he wants to hear. Dr. Scott Atlas isn’t an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology, as are coronavirus task force advisers Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he has pretty much usurped. Atlas is a radiologist and, more importantly, a senior fellow at the far-right bad-idea incubator known as the Hoover Institution (previously home to the infamous prediction that the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic would be around 5,000).

According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Atlas — who apparently caught Trump’s eye the way so many of his advisers do, by peddling BS on Fox News — is ready and willing to say all sorts of medically unsound things that just happen to align with everything Trump wants to believe about the coronavirus. So Atlas has risen rapidly as a power player and is reportedly even getting venerable institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to echo his unscientific beliefs.

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Drilling in to the key issue:

The Atlantic, Peter Wehner: Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit Who He Really Is. Subtitle: Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.

This is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.

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Still, in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat. The narrative is set; the actual identity of the nominee is almost incidental.

A powerful tribal identity bonds the president to his supporters. As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat. In the presence of such an enemy, members of tribal groups look outward rather than inward, at others and never at themselves or their own kind.

All about fear, or rather, paranoia.