{"id":13059,"date":"2017-11-24T16:06:20","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T22:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=13059"},"modified":"2017-11-24T16:06:20","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T22:06:20","slug":"your-strings-maestro-manipulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/11\/24\/your-strings-maestro-manipulator\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Strings, Maestro Manipulator"},"content":{"rendered":"

On WaPo<\/strong><\/em>, Professor John Bargh of Yale describes<\/a> a recent experiment conducted online, and how invoking imaginary superpowers can modify political feelings:<\/p>\n

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal \u2014 their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans\u2019 attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before \u2014 it had turned conservatives into liberals.<\/p>\n

In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.<\/p>\n

This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable \u2014 recall FDR\u2019s famous Great Depression era reassurance of \u201cnothing to fear but fear itself,\u201d echoed decades later in Barack Obama\u2019s final State of the Union address \u2014 and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although I’m always a suspicious of Internet-driven data collection, and humanities experiments are always worth replicating, I have to say this falls right into my thinking, both intuitive and from multiple sources, such as the still unfinished The Persuaders<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. His conclusion?<\/p>\n

Our study findings may have a silver lining. Here\u2019s how:<\/p>\n

All of us believe that our social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival. Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent feelings of fear and of safety.<\/p>\n

Instead of allowing our strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are actually easier to change than we might think.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, yes, yes! Stop and think and question and wonder about the language used by the communicator. But of course I love this conclusion … because I may have confirmation bias!<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On WaPo, Professor John Bargh of Yale describes a recent experiment conducted online, and how invoking imaginary superpowers can modify political feelings: But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal \u2014 their positions on social attitudes were much more like the \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13060,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13059\/revisions\/13060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}