Posted on 12/08/2016 5:03:35 AM PST by Kaslin
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance has been detested and denigrated by the social sciences community since its first formal description in 1956. As a result, a lot of what people have been taught about it is wrong -- specifically, the theory is mainly about the consequences of emotional disequalibria caused by conflicts between beliefs and reality, and only tangentially about the intellectual discomfort (cognitive dissonance) felt by those holding two opposing views at the same time.
The question Festinger was interested in was how the overwhelming majority of Germans, people who worked hard, paid their bills, and went to church on Sunday could genuinely hold Christian moral views and yet see nothing wrong about working to exterminate Jews, retardates, cripples, and the otherwise socially undesirable -- and that question reverberates today because the same behavioral pattern that has driven mob behaviors ranging in scale from Mao's roughly eighty million dead to my sister in law's insane anti-Trump rants, underlies both the production of, and the response to, much of what we think of as fake news.
Festinger's description of the processes that lead to morality denying behavior among groups of believers features multiple stages during each of which a small minority drop out of the process but a majority escalate their commitment, seek to further strengthen their belief by proactively searching out confirmatory opinion (a process that includes proselytization) and increasingly substitute emotional and physical violence for rationality in the rejection of contradictory information.
In this context, it is easy to see why people who want to free drug dealers and cure child rapists and murderers through therapy see nothing wrong with jailing climate change deniers, favor abortions for their social lessors, and resort immediately to the vilest of ad hominem attacks when their beliefs are challenged.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
the consequences of emotional disequalibria caused by conflicts between beliefs and reality
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Eggzackly what I felt when the alarm clock went off this morning!
BTTT
Fake News is not intended to be news at all. Fake News is just Persuasion — “This is what is good; this is what is bad” “This is important; this doesn’t need to be mentioned”
MSM is not in the business of delivering information. It is in the Propaganda business. Pretty much 100%. It’s all Fake News — except what you find on the internet. I consider internet commentary to be vastly superior to what you can find in newspapers and on TV: That stuff is all garbage.
The leftists I know live in a COMPLETE bubble. They get news from HuffPo, New York Times, maybe one of the alphabet soup nightly newscasts. Usually just the online places.
They really have no clue what’s going on in America or the world.
Wikileaks? Rather than read them or look at the content, they are in their bubble believing that’s a Russian hack and they can just trust CNN on it.
Trump’s win? The racist terrible middle of America reared its ugly head and got back at Obama because he’s (half) black by voting for Trump. The rubes, the fools, the Nazis!
The MSM is a coordinated propaganda machine.
Wikileaks exposed dozens of ‘journalists’ who are paid shills using their media platform to repeat the talking points of the DNC / Hillary.
Pathetic!
I work on a campus.... We had an incident where a girl reported this kinda thing.
At night, while she was walking, a person stopped their car to offer her a lift. BTW-She did not know the driver.
She got in.
You know what followed..... Was she raped?
Why would an intelligent (supposedly) mature, (supposedly) adult female DO anything SO stupid?
Mommy-when you send your daughter out into the world, PLEEEEEAASE educate her!!
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