Neat. Pizzagate is the theory that Hillary Clinton is involved in a satanic pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor. A Right wing extremist went there with an assault rifle to ‘investigate’ recently.
I was reading up a bit on Identity-Protective Cognition and cultural cognition. People do not use cognition and reasoning to find objective truth, we use them to obtain the results we need to obtain to justify our existing beliefs, and to maintain status within our social group.
It seems this is a major problem. Is there a solution? I mean, if you take a scientific issue that causes people’s values and sense of identity to come up (creationism, climate change) people will use their critical thinking skills to come to the conclusion they need so they can maintain their identity. But if you bring up a scientific concept that is not tied to their identity or values (seat belts, nuclear fusion) this isn’t an issue.
I guess I don’t know what I’m posting. My point is that is there an answer or is this just who we are as Americans, and who we always were? I know there have always been conspiracy theories about the jews controlling everything, about how JFK was going to take orders from the pope, etc. Maybe this is just who we are.
No matter how many times i read something like this, or about young earth creationists, or flat earthers, I assume they must not really believe. The opposite is too scary.
Actually, for the oil company climate change deniers, I think they’re privately counting on it to be real. So they can drill in the Arctic in the near future. (Prove me wrong! I think JFK is orchestrating the whole thing from the moon we didn’t land on!)
Kind of like how the tobacco CEOs testified before congress that they thought cigarettes were safe and non-addictive.
That a large segment of the population will believe the damnednest fucked shit is old news. I think recent events just made them feel they have social permission to admit they do.
I have a hard time buying that half of Trump voters believe Hillary was actually engaged in child sex ring based in a pizza shop basement. I do believe they’d be willing to endorse any negative option in a poll about her, however.
If a pollster asked me if I believed Trump had tiny fingers, I would agree in an instant.
I think you bring up a lot of really good points about protective cognition, but my first reaction reading this OP was, “Well, this shows how unreliable polls are.” Seriously, almost nobody believes that for real.
Well, not quite. The actual question wasn’t whether “Hillary Clinton is involved in a satanic pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor”. The question was (if you go to the source article):
52. Conspiracy Theories – Leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse - what some people refer to as ’Pizzagate’.
Still an pretty “out there” CT to believe in, but not quite the same as claimed in the OP.
The gist of the article is quite interesting, though, and there has been a lot of research lately on how political beliefs shape reaction to news stories (whether fake or real). Our brains seem to release dopamine (or something like it) when we encounter news stories that reinforce our biases. Could be the basis of a new type of bar-- no need for cocaine, just read some position papers from ThinkProgress or The Cato Group!!
No, it really is true, it’s just that the precise number of ignoramuses is hard to quantify. But there are lots of interviews with Trump supporters and, earlier, with Tea Party types that demonstrate an appalling lack of knowledge about just about anything, and lots of random man-in-the-street interviews that demonstrate much the same thing. Out in the hinterlands of the Interwebs lots of feeble but determined efforts are being made to justify, say, the flat-earth idea or the (only slightly more subtle) young-earth idea.
Here is a thread in which the poster asks how he can refute his friend’s stupid ideas about heart function and heart disease (which apparently is caused by negative ions from the earth, being touched, and something about being hit by sunlight without being grounded, or something). I think the best answer is that the poster needs new friends, because that one is beyond the reach of reason. It’s in the same realm as anti-vaxers and believers in mystical healing. Ignorance is everywhere in abundance.
On the spectrum of plausibility, Russian interference ranks well above child sex-trafficking in basement of a restaurant that doesn’t have a basement.
I’ll have to read your cite more carefully later on, but the text suggests the poll questions allow gradations (i.e. something is “definitely true”, “possibly true”, “possibly not true”, “definitely not true”) but the results are divided starkly into “true” vs “not true”. If 50% of Clinton voters though Russian interference was “possibly true”, that’s far better than 50% of Trump voters saying pizzagate is “definitely true”, for example.
The willingness of USAians to believe patent horseshit, from Christianity to UFOs to conspiracy theories a toddler could debunk, is cultural. I believe it stems from the actual class stratification of our “classless” society; the lower classes know they are outranked and thus invent realities that make them superior in their own minds.
Right. I have not read any leaked emails that support the theory, but as I understand it the conspiracy theory is that there were people talking about pizza in ways that normal people do not talk about pizza, and that the particulars of how they talked about pizza make it sound like the thing they were actually talking about was underage prostitutes.
The guy going after an actual pizza parlor was a Zoolander-level idiot even if the conspiracy theory was true.
