psychology

719 disamb node

this is about conservative psychology, mostly the eternal mystery about why they vote against their own interests and believe climate BS?

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an 8 26

Supporters of President Donald Trump have made it clear that, for the most part, they will not turn on their champion even when he raises their prices, sends their soldiers to die in unprovoked wars and profits from his office to the tune of $2 billion. Instead they direct their hate toward groups that have never systematically harmed them — racial minorities, immigrants, women, gay people, transgender people, Muslims, Jews, leftists, Democrats, academics, scientists and the media.

To understand why, I turned to Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist and professor of cognitive science at the University of Bristol who has written extensively about the psychology behind Trump's movement. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

MATTHEW ROZSA: I've noticed with a lot of Trump supporters that they seem to take joy in causing pain to their perceived adversaries. For instance — and I'm going to get personal for a moment — as a liberal journalist, I get a sense that there are a lot of people who want to, quote, "own" me. "Own the libs" is a common expression. Why? And where does this — for lack of a better word — sadism come from?

DR. STEPHAN LEWANDOWSKY: Well, um, I can — that's a very good question. I have partial answers, but only partial. This is, you know, something we don't fully understand. First of all, if you look at internet trolls and their personality profiles, you find that they score very high on what's called the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and — I forget the third one.

ROZSA: Narcissism?

LEWANDOWSKY: Yeah, probably. The dark triad — that's what it's called. So we know that trolls take pleasure in trolling, which means getting other people upset. And I think that's what we're observing here — this is basically trolling behavior. So would these people score high on the dark triad? I would think yes, but I don't know of any data that's done a personality profile specifically of MAGA voters. We do have it for trolls, though — I have data on that. People have published research on it, and the similarities are just overwhelming. So I'd be very surprised if these were well-adjusted, nice people.

ROZSA: The question then is, why do these same people demand sympathy when they are suffering?

LEWANDOWSKY: Well, why are people the way they are? Why would anybody be a sadist? I can't fully explain that, other than to say: of course they want sympathy when they're in pain — it's just that they have no empathy to extend to other people.

ROZSA: To give you an example — and this is a British citizen, I'm sure you know who Andrew Tate is —

LEWANDOWSKY: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

ROZSA: Andrew Tate and his supporters are whining that he's in jail, but he literally bragged about sex trafficking women. How do you think those women felt? They probably felt like prisoners too. It just galls and astonishes me that they demand sympathy for Tate being in prison but withhold that empathy for his victims, who were also imprisoned. How do you, as a cognitive scientist, explain this disconnect?

LEWANDOWSKY: Well, in the same way I'd explain why the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg felt incredibly sorry for themselves but never, in 12 years, had any empathy for their victims. These are pretty special people — not like the rest of us, I would argue. Certainly in a case like Tate's — I can't diagnose a person from a distance, but it certainly has all the hallmarks of sociopathic behavior, just looking at what the guy's doing. So, (laughs) you're talking about some pretty special people here.

ROZSA: I agree, but — and now I'm going to push further — while Tate has a relatively small following, Trump has a very large one, and the same behavior exists with them. They complain about being censored, and to an extent I agree — they complain about cancel culture — but then they're literally throwing Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert off the air for making jokes about the president. Or take farmers, for example: farmers are among the most pro-Trump groups, and they're very angry when anyone else gets welfare, but they want subsidies for their own economic suffering. There's a clear hypocrisy at play. And even though you say they're "special people," there are millions of them — there are entire states where this is a majority, in some cases an overwhelming majority of voters. How do you explain that?

LEWANDOWSKY: I used to live in Oklahoma for five years, so you can imagine — I'm familiar with farmers and that mindset, though that was a long time ago (laughs). Look, human beings do all sorts of things, and sometimes you just look at it and think, "What on earth?" Being hypocritical — feeling pain for yourself but not making the connection that maybe this other person is also in pain, and maybe we should support each other rather than throwing welfare recipients under the bus so I can have my subsidy — different people come to different conclusions about that.

There's so much tied up in this. There's latent racism. There's religion. There's the general conservative idea that poor people are — it's their fault, they're just lazy, everybody is responsible for what happens to them… except me, because I'm a farmer, and therefore I'm not lazy, and I've tried everything, and I deserve a subsidy.

There's a lot of attitudes and underlying currents tied up in this that are difficult to disentangle. But, as you said before, there is an angle of racism that I think is underlying pretty much all of this misogyny. If you sort of give an instrument to people that measures their racism and misogyny, well, it tells you about who they're gonna vote for and all that kind of stuff pretty well.

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AN 5 26

The Internet is full of conspiracy theorists who, knowing the stigma associated with the “conspiracy theorist” label, try to conceal their tendencies by seeming reasonable. Yet a new study reveals a simple tell that these conspiracy theorists have — and it may not be what you think.

“Exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary (e.g., deception, government), a disproportionate use of sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity,” explained the authors of a recent article in the scientific journal PLOS One. “These results suggest that conspiracism may emerge more readily at the lexical level rather than through fully structured narratives. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives.”

In other words, conspiracy theorists like to gussy up their arguments with ornate language and seemingly-sophisticated forms of analysis, all of which serve to conceal from the public whether their ideas are provably connected to demonstrable facts.

“If so, we recommend comparative research on online vs offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories emerge spontaneously from genuine beliefs or are constructed strategically, detached from genuinely held beliefs,” PLOS One concluded.

To learn this, the study authors asked participants to watch an apocalyptic thriller, Leave the World Behind,which is notable for its ambiguous ending. When the nearly 400 study participants were asked to write essays interpreting the movie’s vague information, the scholars — using AI to break down the statistics — found that conspiracy theorists use complex language to make their ideas seem more credible. The use of this language, and the fact that it is consistently untethered to any kind of concrete evidence, is the tell.

“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the study’s lead author, told PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”

This is not the first study to determine how cognitive processes influence people believing or not believing in conspiracy theories. In February 2024, The Conversation released a breakdown of numerous studies that traced individual thinking styles to one’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.

“Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” The Conversation explained. “The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.”

The Conversation added, “One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.” Overall “what you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as ‘I enjoy problems that require hard thinking’ were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs.”

The article added, “It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.”

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AN 4 26

A new study featured in Political Psychology revealed that exposure to opposing political views on social media can paradoxically increase polarization by backfiring, as people double down on their beliefs when encountering disagreement. The research, based on a field experiment with Democrats and Republicans on Twitter, shows that financial incentives to follow bots sharing counter-attitudinal content still led to the reinforcement of partisan attitudes rather than moderation.

Eric Dolan at PsyPost cited the study, noting that identifying those who believe in conspiracy theories can also predict whether an individual endorses specific political rumors, but primarily when those rumors attack their political rivals.

Dolan explained that in previous research, there were two separate ways to predict such beliefs. One is "conspiracy thinking" while the other is belief in their own political wing.

"They usually accept theories that blame their political rivals and reject theories that accuse their own side. The researchers designed this study to see if these two separate factors actually interact with one another," wrote Dolan.

Those who buy into conspiracy thinking have a stronger tendency towards belief when the conspiracy also aligns with the person's own political bias.

"People naturally want to protect the reputation of their own group while assuming the worst about their opponents. Because of this natural bias, the researchers expected that people who are highly prone to conspiratorial thinking would eagerly accept rumors about their rivals," said Dolan.

Study author Omer Yair explained that he has an interest in conspiracy theories within political sects.

“And over the last few years I have read many articles showing that both political preferences, such as party identification, and 'conspiracy thinking' (AKA conspiracy mentality), i.e., people’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, independently explain belief in partisan conspiracy theories," he said.

So, he began researching whether a combination of the two could help explain why partisan conspiracy theories became more popular.

"A short search in the literature found no empirical support for such an interaction, so we gathered data from several surveys and found consistent support for our interaction hypothesis," said Yair.

The researchers compared data from six studies, two of which were from the United States political system. It resulted in a sample size of nearly 11,000 participants.

There were 61 conspiracy theories that individuals were asked about, and approximately half were about politics, while 31 dealt with issues like aliens, etc...

The studies all examined a level of conspiracy thinking on a four-question scale. They were asked to rank their agreement with statements such as, "a group of unknown people secretly controls the country," or "major events are the result of hidden plots."

They then used the level of belief in specific theories, combining all of the data to test the relationship between the two.

"The researchers found that general conspiracy thinking strongly predicts belief in political conspiracy theories, but this relationship depends heavily on political alignment. When a theory accused a person’s political rivals of wrongdoing, their underlying tendency to believe in conspiracies strongly activated. In these situations, highly conspiratorial individuals were very likely to believe the rumor," summarized the report.

So, when a conspiracy theory challenges the person's own political party, they're less likely to believe it.

:{Yair said that there could be future research done that examines ideas in a more social context that looks specifically at race, gender or nationality.

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AN 4 26

MEH

FUturism reports “a tranche of psychological studies found something startling about Donald Trump’s most loyal soldiers: they each turn to a grim coping mechanism to make sense of the real estate mogul’s laundry list of lies and documented sexual abuse.”

Three separate research papers, published together in the *Journal of Social and Political Psychology*, each point to the same conclusion, say analysts. Psychologists surveyed 128 U.S. adults in October 2019, who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct, over half the group said they relied simply on denial and chose to not believe the charge.

“Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president,” reports Futurism. “This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the topic to Trump’s policy decisions. In that study, the majority of supporters denied the accusations outright, while 15 percent declared they simply don’t care.”

Meanwhile, the most recent study, a 2022 survey taken immediately after Trump was arraigned for his role in the January 6 riots, found that of 187 participants, over 60 percent felt the accusations against the president were a lie, despite video footage of the violence at the Capital being readily available.

“While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance,” said Futurism.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences,” said study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University. “I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

Harmon-Jones says she is also interested in cognitive dissonance outside the Trump-related breakdown.

“Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested,” she said.

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context

New research shows Trump voters got a mental health boost — but Democrats paid the price - Alternet.org

Even conservative Republicans warned against MAGA's new 'holy war' - Alternet.org

an 4 26

President Donald Trump supporters have stood by him despite his documented abuses of power, rhetorically violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election and numerous alleged instances of sexual misconduct. To those outside the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, this is mystifying — yet a recent study reveals the surprising reason why.

Three studies conducted between 2019 and 2022 examined hundreds of Trump supporters to establish how they reconcile negative information about him with their positive impressions, according to a recent analysis published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. The first found that a majority of 128 Trump supporters refused to believe sexual misconduct accusations against him and praised his handling of the economy, supposed competence, abnormal communication style and perceived outsider status; roughly a third said that they were so happy with his policies that they could disregard his personal behavior, while another third implied they were indifferent as to his potential guilt because they are cynical about elites like Trump.

:{The other two studies reinforced the trends in the original. One included 173 participants and the other included 187 participants, and both were taken after Trump-related legal hearings: His first impeachment, over an attempt to coerce Ukraine into discrediting then-Vice President Joe Biden, and his arraignment after the January 6th coup attempt. On the first occasion, Trump supporters again refused to accept evidence that the president attempted to force Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to obtain anti-Biden dirt in return for military aid; they similarly praised Trump’s handling of economic issues, although 15 percent admitted they did not care even if Trump had coerced Ukraine.

On the second occasion, a majority (60 percent) simply refused to accept that Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, although researchers noted participants did this with great emotion and while indicating distress at the accusations, suggesting they were motivated by a psychological reaction to unpleasant information rather than a calm dismissal of facts.}:

All of the studies found that Trump supporters use disbelief, compartmentalization and false equivalence — to resolve the mental tension between their positive views and negative reports about Trump. They also turn to their economic self-interest as a rationalization for ignoring conduct they might otherwise publicly deplore.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences. I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him,” study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at Western Sydney University, told PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan in an interview about her study.

“I also wanted to take a cognitive dissonance perspective to understanding their answers. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that when people hold beliefs that are in conflict, meaning that both ideas cannot be true at once, they feel uncomfortable. This discomfort motivates them to do cognitive work to bring their beliefs closer in alignment. I was interested in how people justify their support for Trump when reminded of the accusations against him.”

She also noted that (a) the studies reinforce the notion that Trump supporters engage in cognitive dissonance and (b) it is unclear whether this trend applies only to Trump or to other popular presidents.

“Some people might think that these findings aren’t due to dissonance and that the participants simply did not believe the information,” Harmon-Jones told Dolan. “However, in Study 3 was asked people whether the information about the accusations of Trump’s misconduct conflicted with their beliefs and if so, how bothered were they by the information. The more bothered they said they were, the more likely they were to say they didn’t believe the accusations. We interpreted this to mean that those participants were experiencing dissonance and not just coolly disbelieving the information.”

Harmon-Jones also told Dolan that “our findings only apply to supporters of Donald Trump. However, we don’t know whether this is the case. Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested.”

Scientific research also finds another motive for Trump supporters to back him: Because when he is perceived as “winning,” they feel good. Earlier this month a study by researchers Deborah J. Wu, Kyle F. Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, and Sylvia P. Perry in the journal Advances in Psychology found that mental wellness corresponds closely to believing the government shares your values.

"Across all five weekly waves (Feb–Mar 2025), Republicans reported higher life satisfaction and happiness than Democrats,” the authors explained. Specifically they noted that "Republicans increased in well-being over time, whereas Democrats showed both linear and quadratic change, as initial decreases in well-being were followed by increases in well-being."

This means that ultimately "alignment with government actions may provide short-term psychological comfort, while opposition—though vital for democratic resilience—may carry psychological costs." Hence after Trump’s second inauguration “at all timepoints, Republicans reported greater life satisfaction over the past week, in comparison to Democrats.”

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AN 2 26

Do you believe in ghosts, mind reading and witches? If you do, you’re likely a kid — or maybe a right-wing authoritarian. New research published in The Journal of Social Psychology suggests that individuals who endorse certain right-wing political ideologies are more likely to believe in paranormal phenomena.

“There have long been speculations that esotericism and beliefs in the paranormal are related to right-wing beliefs,” said Alexander Jedinger, a senior researcher at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, speaking with PsyPost. “There is much research in history and cultural studies on this topic, and of course, there are a lot of references in popular culture to Nazi esotericism, exemplified in movies such as Indiana Jones and Hellboy. However, there was little quantitative evidence on these kinds of relationships.”

Past studies have hinted at a link between right-wing political views and a susceptibility to supernatural thinking, so Jedinger and his partners explored the relationship by examining specific aspects of right-wing ideology. Researchers singled out the trait recognized as “right-wing authoritarianism,” which describes a “preference for strict obedience to authority, conformity to traditional social norms, and hostility toward people who break those norms.”

They also wanted to see if the way people process information could account for any connection. People generally employ two types of thinking: intuitive thinking, which relies on fast gut feelings, and analytical thinking, which involves slow and deliberate reasoning.

“The scientists designed their study to test if this shared thinking style was the main bridge between political ideology and the paranormal.” reports PsyPost. Researchers recruited a sample of 1,139 adult participants and used an online survey with a scale for measuring participants’ willingness to accept paranormal beliefs, including phenomena like “mind reading, witchcraft, lucky charms, ghosts, and astrology.” After separated traditional religious beliefs from paranormal beliefs, they also measured political views by asking respondents to place themselves on a left-to-right political spectrum.

“Those who scored higher in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation were more likely to endorse paranormal concepts,” PsyPost reports.

And it turned out that the willingness to believe in real witches isn’t necessarily connected to how prone you are to think “with your gut” over analysis. Kooky beliefs were more common among right-wing authoritarians, regardless of how much they relied on analytical thinking over “gut-thinking.”

“Instead, the results showed that right-wing ideology and cognitive styles independently contributed to paranormal beliefs,” PsyPost reports. “Accounting for analytical and intuitive thinking did not substantially weaken the connection between authoritarian or dominance-oriented views and belief in the supernatural.”

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AN 2 26

New research shows high-IQ men reject conservative politics: report

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AN 12 25

It’s often said that Donald Trump’s power base in the MAGA movement has contributed to the radicalization of the Republican party. Political scientists worry about the implications of this for the future of American democracy itself.

One example of that radicalization was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overturn the result. Exacerbating that radicalisation is the movement’s hostility towards much of the mainstream media. This is something that has been amplified by the US president himself, who has famously referred to the media as “the enemy of the American people”.

But how has this radical movement movement emerged from the socially conservative Republican Party? The rise of MAGA has marked an important political shift in America that has many liberal-minded people scratching their heads. Psychology studies can offer insights that can help explain the MAGA movement’s motivations.

1. Fused identity // REES DEADHEADS?

Identity is central to understanding the way MAGA holds together as a group and can also explain many of its motives. Trump has been able to mobilise his base effectively by communicating that shared identity. And it’s this sense of common identity and purpose that has been so important in the development of MAGA as a powerful political movement.

The almost absolute faith in Trump’s leadership has a lot to do with negative resentment of other groups that he singles out for criticism, particularly migrants, liberals and feminists. But it is actually a positive identification with white nationalism that is a stronger indicator of the sort of person who might identify with MAGA.

MAGA supporters unite around a shared perception of threat to their status, often related to issues of race and immigration. But it is also seen to be motivated by the desire to cultivate belonging and group pride as a way to regain lost esteem.

Some researchers also believe that even the act of wearing a MAGA hat is a sign of what is known as “identity fusion” – when boundaries between the self and the group blur. When this occurs, wearing a MAGA hat may be a symbol of who I am rather than just who I voted for.

This is significant since identity fusion is associated with reported willingness to undertake more extreme actions such as hurting people and damaging property to uphold the Trump community and to achieve his aims.

2. Moral self-righteousness

MAGA members also tend to adhere to the idea that one’s own ethnic group is more morally pure than others. MAGA ideology tends to divide America into “good” and “evil” groups, with themselves as good and out-groups, such as the ones mentioned above, cast as evil. This positions “true Americans”, the people who built the nation, patriots who have “had enough”, as part of the former.

Since it frames politics as a struggle over “right values and lifestyles”, such rhetoric heightens the risk of malignant moral superiority. When communicated by a leader, it creates in followers the sense that they have an obligation to act against these “evil” forces which threaten their group.

When this sense of superiority is threatened, it can lead to aggression, such as the assault on the US Capitol .

3. The right to dominate other groups

Aggressiveness in political groups such as MAGA is also connected to what is known as “social dominance orientation”. This relates to belief in a hierarchy – the idea that one social group has the right to dominate other groups.

Research shows people who believe in hierarchy are more likely to disregard basic democratic principles. They see society as a “competitive jungle” where groups struggle for power and dominance.

As a result, they view groups that differ from them as inferior. This justifies any actions that maintain their in-group status.

This holds true even if – as in the case of MAGA-followers – it means a belief in violence in response to unwelcome social and cultural changes. Polling has found that MAGA supporters are also far more likely to believe that there will be a civil war in the US and that violence in order to advance the movement’s political objectives would be justified.

4. Aggressive followership

There’s a scientific debate about what draws people to authoritarian leaders. Some scholars emphasise the tendency to want to submit to authority, high levels of aggression when sanctioned and adherence to conventional values such as traditional views on religion and sexuality. Others focus more on a preference for conformity over personal autonomy.

But they agree on one point: authoritarian followers submit to leaders who stress the superiority of their social group and who they consider to be capable of handling the threats they see as coming from other groups.

Research on the MAGA movement from 2016 shows that Trump supporters were more likely than other supporters of other Republican party candidates to score high on one facet of authoritarianism: the willingness to resort to aggression towards people seen to go against social norms if encouraged by someone they’ve accepted as an authority figure. But they don’t appear to score as highly on two other facets: submission to established authorities and an adherence to conventional values.

This suggests that authoritarianism among the MAGA movement has evolved into a more distinct profile, characterized primarily by a prejudiced aggressiveness towards other social groups.

History tells us that radical political movements tend to pop up when the societal context is perceived as threatening. In this process, some people have personal dispositions that make them more prone to follow authoritarian leaders. So it’s important to take both personality and context into account when trying to understand movements such as MAGA.

Magnus Linden, Associate Professor of Psychology, Lund University; Claire Campbell, Lecturer in Social Psychology, Ulster University, and Fredrik Björklund, Professor of psychology, *Lund University

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john f 9 25 see bak

malevolent vs. benevolent dispositions and conservative political ideology in the Trump era

Author Craig S. Neumann, Darlene A. Ngo

Malevolent personality traits—sometimes called “dark” traits—include tendencies such as manipulativeness, callousness, narcissism, and a lack of empathy. These traits are often captured by concepts like psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, which together reflect a general disposition toward exploiting or disregarding others for personal gain.

People with stronger malevolent traits may be more comfortable with aggression, dominance, or cruelty and less likely to value fairness or kindness. These tendencies are associated with lower levels of affective empathy (concern for others’ suffering) and, in some cases, higher levels of dissonant empathy (enjoyment of others’ pain). In contrast, benevolent traits reflect the opposite—a disposition marked by compassion, humanism, and a belief in treating others with dignity and respect.

The researchers conducted the study to better understand the psychological traits that underlie political ideology, particularly support for Donald Trump and conservative beliefs. Prior work had already linked conservative ideology with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, but the researchers hypothesized that malevolent personality traits might also play a role—especially given Trump’s rhetoric and behavior, which often display dominance, callousness, and disregard for social norms

They were especially interested in whether support for Trump was associated with higher malevolent traits and lower empathy, and whether benevolent traits might predict a more liberal or non-authoritarian outlook. The study aimed to clarify how these personality dispositions relate to political beliefs and what this might reveal about the deeper psychological dimensions of ideology.

“This paper was several years in the making, starting as a result of the 2016 election, and was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” explained study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas.

“Also, there is a large literature on personality and ideology (e.g., low honesty-humility associated with conservative ideology), but only recently have there been studies on malevolent personality (e.g., callousness, narcissism, Machiavellianism) and ideology. More critically, few studies have examined the associations between benevolent (affiliative) personality and political ideology. Finally, many studies in this area tend to statistically control demographic factors, but we sought to examine how the associations between personality and ideology might be moderated by gender or minority status.”

To investigate these links, the researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of over 9,000 participants from the United States. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website.

Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy. Political ideology was assessed through questions about general political orientation, preferences for military versus social spending, support for gun control, and evaluations of Trump’s first term as president. The researchers used structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows for the testing of relationships between multiple variables at once, while accounting for measurement errors.

In Sample 1, the researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In Sample 2, they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity, Kantian respect for others). Empathy was also assessed in the first sample, distinguishing between its emotional, cognitive, and dissonant forms.

The findings consistently showed that people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits.

In the first sample of men, all three predictors — social dominance, authoritarianism, and psychopathic tendencies — predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump, but only for white participants. Among men of minority status, psychopathic traits were not significantly related to political ideology. This suggests that the psychological pathways to conservatism may differ based on racial or ethnic identity, possibly due to different experiences with social power and marginalization.

Support for Trump was also associated with distinct patterns in empathy. Compared to those who did not support Trump, Trump supporters reported lower affective empathy (less emotional concern for others) and higher dissonant empathy (greater enjoyment of others’ suffering). These differences held even after controlling for age, education, and racial background.

In the second, larger sample that included both men and women, the researchers focused on how broad personality dispositions—benevolent versus malevolent—related to political beliefs. They found that people who reported stronger benevolent traits, such as valuing the dignity and worth of others, were more likely to hold liberal views and reject Trump. In contrast, people who reported more malevolent traits—such as manipulation, selfishness, and emotional coldness—were more likely to support Trump and identify as conservative.

While both men and women showed this pattern, the associations were stronger for men. In other words, malevolent traits were more predictive of conservative ideology among men than among women. Women in the sample tended to score higher on benevolent traits overall and lower on malevolent ones.

Those who viewed Trump favorably reported higher levels of malevolent traits and lower levels of benevolent ones. In other words, Trump supporters scored higher on traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—which reflect manipulativeness, entitlement, emotional callousness, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior—and lower on traits such as humanism, faith in humanity, and Kantianism, which reflect compassion, belief in others’ basic goodness, and a commitment to treating people as ends rather than means.

These differences were not explained by other factors such as age, income, education level, or minority status. The authors concluded that personality traits linked to callousness and self-centeredness may shape how people engage with politics—and in particular, how they relate to the Trumpist strain of conservatism.

One of the study’s most striking findings was the consistent link between empathy and political orientation. While people across the political spectrum are capable of empathy, the results suggest that those on the political right—especially those aligned with Trump—may experience and express empathy differently.

Supporters of Trump were less likely to feel concern for others’ suffering (lower affective empathy) and more likely to enjoy or be indifferent to others’ distress (higher dissonant empathy). Importantly, these differences were not found in cognitive empathy. Trump supporters were just as able as others to recognize emotions in others—they simply appeared to care less, on average.

The new findings align with earlier research showing that Donald Trump’s political appeal has been especially strong among individuals who endorse authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump supporters stood out from supporters of other Republican candidates not because they were more submissive to authority or resistant to social change, but because they were more likely to endorse the use of aggressive tactics and hierarchical worldviews that place some groups above others.

The current study builds on this by suggesting that these ideological patterns are not just political opinions—they are rooted in deeper psychological dispositions, including lower empathy and stronger malevolent traits like callousness, narcissism, and enjoyment of others’ suffering.

“Consistent with emerging research, our findings suggest a link between malevolent (aversive) personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” Neumann told PsyPost. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”

“We also found that benevolent (affiliative) dispositions were associated with a liberal political ideology. All of these findings are bolstered by the use of a strong measurement invariance approach, indicating that measurement error or bias cannot account for the results. Finally, we found the same pattern of results across two samples which were from two different historical time periods when views of Trump may have changed (pre- and during COVID-19).”

But the study, like all research, has limitations. Although the study is based on large and diverse samples, the research was cross-sectional, meaning that it cannot determine cause and effect. It is also focused specifically on Trump’s first term in office, and attitudes may have shifted since then. Additionally, the study relied on self-report measures, which can be influenced by social desirability or personal biases, though the authors used statistical methods to reduce such effects.

It is also important to note that research compares average personality trait scores between two groups of people (those who viewed Trump favorably and those who did not). While the researchers found statistically significant differences—such as higher average scores on traits like psychopathy and lower scores on empathy among Trump supporters—these are group-level trends, not absolute labels. The findings do not mean that all Trump supporters are manipulative or lack compassion, nor that all non-supporters are empathetic or benevolent. Individuals within each group vary widely, and the results reflect differences in average tendencies, not universal characteristics.

“Next papers in the pipeline employ mega-samples from across the globe to further study of the connections between malevolent/benevolent personality and ideology, as well as modeling the core domains involved in Professor John Jost’s theory of motivated social cognition (epistemic, existential, relational) and their connection to ideology in different cultures,” Neumann said.

“Political ideology (left vs. right leaning; liberal vs. conservative) is not necessarily a good or bad thing, if it involves ideas about how to productively arrange our world. However, if a given ideology is fundamentally about one group’s malevolent domination of other individuals, then we should ask ourselves if this is the type of (uncivil) society we want to live in. For instance, does taking Medicaid away from vulnerable people while also giving money to the wealthy involve political malevolence or benevolence?”

The study, “Malevolent vs. benevolent dispositions and conservative political ideology in the Trump era,” was authored by Craig S. Neumann and Darlene A. Ngo.

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PsyPost reports a new psychological study has found that people who claim favorable views of President Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits—and lower on empathy and compassion.

“Our findings suggest a link between malevolent personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” said study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”

The paper, which was several years in the making, “was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” said Neuman.

PsyPost said researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of more than 9,000 U.S. participants. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website. Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy, researchers say.

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In “Sample 1”, researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In “Sample 2,” researchers say they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity and respect for others).

The findings “consistently showed people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits,” reports PsyPost.

The report also revealed that while both men and women showed similar patterns, the associations were stronger for men

Read the full PsyPost report at this link.

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Since the start of his second term in office, US president Donald Trump has cultivated a political atmosphere that discourages freedom of thought. He also actively villainises and punishes any dissenting opinion. Worryingly, this atmosphere looks like it is spreading across other democracies.

Commentators have described Trump as both narcissistic and authoritarian. Yet, running parallel to these factors, one character trait is glaringly common among Trump supporters: sycophancy.

You just have to examine the pre-election rhetoric of Trump loyalists. One backer, Stephen Miller, declared him “the most stylish president … in our lifetimes”. Miller is now deputy White House chief of staff.

And South Dakota governor Kristi Noem gifted Trump a four-foot Mount Rushmore replica – with Trump’s face added alongside the original four presidents. Noem, who is now secretary of homeland security, epitomises the elevation of loyal sycophants over those with arguably better credentials.

Research has examined the dangers of sycophantic behaviour in the workplace, finding it reduces peer respect and morale, and leads to dissonance and lower productivity.

Other research has shown that someone who chooses to employ these tactics can enjoy improved promotion prospects, rewards such as the first refusal on business trips, easier access to company resources and a higher salary compared to their peers. But studies have also shown sycophants often suffer emotional exhaustion from the dual stresses of manipulation and responsibility.

Ongoing research I (Neil) am doing on workplace sycophancy reveals similar patterns. Interviews, spanning from junior staff to CEOs, show reduced motivation, falling team morale and declining respect for sycophants.

One participant highlighted the effect on teamwork that sycophantic behaviour can have within the workplace.

Sycophancy means raising yourself in somebody’s esteem, at the expense of somebody else, on the ladder. And so… it’s going to impact upon on the ability to be part of a team.

Another participant offered a comparison to a different deviant workplace behaviour – intimidation.

I’d say that sycophantic behaviour is coming into the same category as bullying. And it’s hard sometimes, especially with bullying and sycophantic behaviour, you are dealing with a lot of people that are manipulative, and manipulating people are quite charismatic. And when you’re charismatic, you’re more believable because you’re a storyteller.

One solution that emerges from the research is workforce education – teaching employees to recognise and mitigate a culture of ingratiation.

As an employee, many people might find it difficult not to bow to peer pressure. If the senior colleague encourages and rewards those who suck up, how do other colleagues, who do not choose to utilise such tactics, compete?

Dangerous ideas take root

Another factor to consider is the tendency for some workers to “kiss up and kick down”. What this means is that staff who are lower down the hierarchical ladder suffer detrimental treatment from the colleagues who are trying to suck their way up the same ladder.

If workforces were educated on what these tactics looked and felt like, perhaps included in corporate codes of conduct, HR departments and management could identify potential issues and deal with them.

But this is not merely an HR concern. Previous research also shows a link between ingratiation, high turnover rates and poorer performance by the organisation as a whole.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of sycophancy is the push for conformity when it comes to opinions. If leadership hears nothing but agreement, dangerous ideas can be reinforced. Things like the leader’s own skills or the competence of the organisation as a whole can become wildly exaggerated – with disastrous consequences.

When leaders are surrounded by “yes-men”, they’re deprived of critical input that could challenge assumptions or highlight potential flaws. This can lead to cognitive entrenchment where decision-makers become overconfident and resistant to change. Bad decisions then proceed unchecked, often escalating into systemic failures.

In return, this can lead to groupthink, a phenomenon where a desire for harmony overrides rational evaluation. Environments that suffer from groupthink often ignore red flags, silence whistleblowers and overvalue consensus. All of these things are damaging to an organisation’s ability to remain agile and competitive.

Which brings us back to Trump. In his case this isn’t a corporate crisis. It’s a geopolitical one. At stake is not shareholder value but national security and global stability.

With sycophants backing poor decisions, the risk ranges from damaged diplomacy to outright conflict. If loyalty replaces truth, the cost could be catastrophic. Trump’s regime may ultimately collapse under the weight of its own delusions – but the collateral damage could be profound.

Neil Beasley, PhD Candidate in Business and Law, Liverpool John Moores University and Madeleine Pickles, Reader in Organisational Transformation and Teaching Innovation, *Liverpool John Moores University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How MAGA got brainwashed: The science behind the right-wing’s 50-year propaganda campaign

Thom Hartmann May 14, 2025

Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying because as a lifelong con man, it’s all he knows how to do.

He’s still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. He lied at the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as Rep. Al Green (D-TX) pointed out. Along with over 100 other lies he told that day. And now he’s lying about his trade deals with the UK and other governments. Every single day he adds to the pile of lies he’s inflicting on the American people and the world.

Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him.

Not the science of elections: the science of propaganda.

New findings from psychologists at universities in California and Georgia published in the journal Cognitive Research show that the more often a statement — regardless of its truthfulness — is repeated, the more emphatically it’s believed.

The researchers noted:

“Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. Because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness.”

While modern science is affirming this truism, it’s been in use a long time. In the past century, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called out Republicans for using what we today call the Big Lie around several issues. Running for re-election in 1944, he said:

“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself.“The technique was all set out in Hitler's book — and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

Back then Republicans were lying that Democrats had caused the Republican Great Depression (as it was called until the 1950s) and that FDR had “failed” to adequately prepare America for war with Germany or Japan (while Republican after Republican took to the floor of Congress to tell us, before the war, that “we can do business with Hitler”).

Now Trump’s lies (like about the election, immigrants, and what Elon Musk is up to) are parroted daily by Republican politicians and usually echoed in the media without pushback. After all, Trump reportedly slept with a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside: he would be fluent in Hitler’s Big Lie strategy.

Besides the addition of Trump’s lies, Republican lies haven’t changed a lot since FDR’s era, although they’re more focused and now repeated daily by thousands of rightwing websites, bloggers, podcasts, Fox “News,” and talk radio shows.

Over the past 44 years, Republican billionaires have built an extraordinary nationwide media propaganda machine. Their goal was directed towards justifying tax cuts for the morbidly rich and the deregulation of polluting industries, but now it’s been taken over by Trump acolytes promoting, among other lies, the idea the Democrats torture children and drink their blood.

The “useful idiots” in this scheme have been the American corporate and billionaire-owned media, who dutifully echo or leave unchallenged the GOP’s regular lies.

One of the Republicans most egregious lies — that America is evenly split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats and on the issues of the day — is constantly repeated on the political Sunday shows. Always without a single word of pushback from the show’s host.

While the Senate may be more-or-less split 50/50, Democrats in the Senate represent over 40 million more Americans than do Republicans. And on issues like tax cuts for billionaires, the right to unionize, access to Medicare/Medicaid, climate change, the right to abortion, privatizing Social Security, drug prices, Medicaid expansion, free college, and the minimum wage Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of Democrats.

So how did so many Americans end up believing the many lies that are daily pushed by the GOP?

In a word: repetition, just like the science shows works. Here are a few of their greatest hits, with each followed by my rebuttal:

'Tax cuts produce prosperity'

In a remarkable study published by The London School of Economics, looking at 18 wealthy OECD countries over 50 years, the researchers discovered, unambiguously:

“We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

In other words, tax cuts for the rich make the rich richer and throw the nation into debt, but otherwise have no measurable effect on the economy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been assuring us that if we just give more money to the “job creators,” they’ll use it to open new factories and raise wages. In fact, the morbidly rich simply put that extra money into their offshore accounts and money bins.

In fact, in the 44 years since Reagan started the practice of massive Republican tax cuts for the richest Americans, there has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from America’s working class into the money bins of our morbidly rich.

The idea that tax cuts for the rich and corporations would produce prosperity was a lie from the beginning and still is, but Republicans are still repeating it after nearly 50 years of disastrous experience with neoliberal Reaganomics.

...?

In fact, immigrants — legal and undocumented — are far less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. After all, who wants to either get deported or blow up their chances of becoming a citizen of the country they’ve taken such huge and often deadly chances to reach?

And the statistics aren’t even close. In a massive study funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, published by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, scientists discovered American citizens are 200% to 400% more likely to commit violent felonies against persons, drug crimes, and felony property crimes than immigrants, regardless of their immigration status.

But that won’t stop rightwing media from hyping every exception-to-the-rule when an immigrant is caught committing a crime. Lies, after all, are the coin of their realm.

The minimum wage was established in 1938 and has been raised 22 times. If there had ever been — in all that time — even a single year when inflation increases could be tied to increases in the minimum wage, every Republican in America would have the year memorized.

“You don’t want what happened in 1958 to happen ever again!” they’d warn us while wagging fingers in our faces. Except there is not even one single example of an increase in the minimum wage increasing inflation, which is why they never cite a single statistic or year.

When researchers decided to seriously dig into the topic, they found that a massive 10% increase in the minimum wage may have as much as a 0.1% — one-tenth-of-one-percent, or ten cents on a $100 product — impact on inflation, but that’s never been recorded in American history. Wages simply aren’t that large a part of the price of most goods and even most services.

This is a favorite of the multi-billion-dollar union-busting industry to roll out in their mandatory “reeducation” sessions with captive workers who are considering voting for unionization. It’s a complete lie.

Unlike workers’ actual bosses, whose compensation typically goes up with profits, union “bosses” are simply employees of heavily regulated nonprofit organizations (unions) who work on a salary. They earn just a small fraction of what the actual corporate bosses take from the companies they’re trying to unionize.

When they’re successful, however, union bosses do reduce corporate profits by forcing companies to give their workers better pay and benefits. Which is why corporations are willing to pay millions of dollars a day, in some cases, to bring in these high-powered law firms to intimidate workers.

This one depends on how you define “corrupt.” If you mean that dead people are voting or people are voting multiple times in multiple states, that’s so rare as to compete with the Loch Ness Monster for headlines.

After all, with millions of dollars and over a hundred lawyers and lawmakers, Republicans tried in 60 courtrooms (including the U.S. Supreme Court) to prove even a single case of election fraud that may have affected the outcome of the 2020 election: they failed every time.

On the other hand, if you define “corrupt” as Republican elections officials purging millions of voters — most people of color, students, city-dwellers, and the working poor — from the voting rolls, then maybe there’s some truth to it. But that’s not the line Republicans are selling.

This is one of the deadliest lies Republicans promote. A massive study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine found that having a gun in the home doubles the risk of residents of that home being victims of homicide and triples the risk of successful suicide.

Nonetheless, the big gun manufacturers and their Russian-supported National Rifle Association shower millions on Republican politicians all across America, so now guns have become the top cause of death among children here, something that’s never happened in any developed country, anytime in history, anywhere else in the world.

America now has about 120 guns per 100 people, while in most other developed countries the ratio is around 20 guns per 100 people. In many countries — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for example — it’s fewer than one gun per 100 people.

We are awash in blood and gun violence because of this Republican lie.

This lie is vigorously promoted by the Christian nationalist movement, led by multi-millionaire preachers and televangelists who are not only profiting from it but also have acquired considerable political power through it.

America, in fact, was the first democracy in the world that was founded in an entirely and explicitly secular fashion. The only prominent Founder who promoted the idea of America as a Christian nation was “Give me liberty or give me death” Patrick Henry, who was Virginia’s largest slaveholder and refused to sign the Constitution when it was finished in the fall of 1787.

Jefferson, Franklin, Rush, Washington and numerous others among the Founders didn’t even consider themselves Christians, and those who did — most notably John Adams and James Madison — were outspoken about the dangers of mixing religion and politics.

President Madison’s first veto, in fact, was to strike down a law that gave a DC church money to run a poorhouse. He said in his veto message that it would strike a bad precedent for the American government to give any money whatsoever to any church for a function that government should run itself.

Madison, who was a regular churchgoer (Jefferson attended, too, because until the Revolution the law in Virginia required church membership and attendance as a prerequisite for running for political office), was concerned that government money would corrupt the religion he loved; Jefferson was worried that if “priests” ever became politicians it would lead to the ruin of the republic.

The two debated the issue of which was the greatest danger to America regularly: it turns out both were right.

This is so facially absurd it shouldn’t even require mentioning, but there is literally not a single elected Republican at the federal level (at least that I know of) who will contradict it.

Like with the gun industry, the fossil fuel industry pays their politicians very well, and, since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, that money has worked to hold the GOP in the blood-stained clutches of the industry.

And now these Republican lies about climate change threaten all life on Earth.

So much happened during the last Trump administration that Americans can be forgiven for forgetting that Trump, in 2019, promised Chinese President Xi Jinping that he wouldn’t object if Xi brutally crushed the Hong Kong independence movement.

Trump was working on getting Chinese trademarks for his daughter Ivanka’s fashion line and other Ivanka-branded items (including coffins, voting machines, and almost any other category available) so, as CNN reported on October 4, 2019:

“The remarkable pledge to the Chinese leader is a dramatic departure from decades of US support for human rights in China and shows just how eager Trump is to strike a deal with Beijing…”

Trump’s so-called “trade war” with China was a joke. He imposed a few cosmetic tariffs that backfired and the Chinese didn’t take seriously because they were done by executive order rather than an act of Congress.

After hubby Jared got $2 billion for selling America out to Saudi Arabia, Ivanka seems to have lost interest in her business dealings in China. But in the meantime, the democracy movement in Hong Kong was completely crushed and its advocates are now dead or in prison thanks to Trump.

Every one of these lies, among others, are vigorously promoted by GOP-aligned media.

Their constant repetition has led average Republicans to fervently believe them, to the detriment of both the United States and, particularly with climate change, the future of life on Earth.

And now Trump has rolled out a new Big Lie that the media is obediently repeating: surrendering Ukraine to Russia will bring about “peace.” It’s probably the most despicable lie he’s promoted in decades.

FDR was right to call out the Republican Party for their Big Lie strategy back in the day. Tragically, he was 80 years too early for today’s Americans to realize the long, deep roots of the modern GOP’s propaganda strategy.

Over the past 40 years, our media has been largely complicit, echoing these Republican Big Lies. It’s well past time for American media to take its responsibility to present the truth seriously.

NOW READ: The single stupidest statement about Trump ever made

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When President Donald Trump a day after he crossed the 100-day mark of his time in office last month, members of the cabinet took turns to praise the president.

Although everyone offered glowing reviews, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood out by telling Trump that he was genuinely the best president of all time.

"President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you," she said during the Cabinet meeting.

In a podcast for The New Republic discussing Trump's need for constant approval, journalists Greg Sargent and Amanda Marcotte described the "over-the-top" praise he receives from his aides as feeding into his "narcissism.""Every emotion is exaggerated to the maximum. They pretend to be angry at the loudest volume. They pretend to be sad with the biggest droopy faces and wailing tears. Everything’s loud and garish and schmaltzy," Marcotte said.

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"Most of us would be embarrassed to have somebody praise us like that because we know it’s not true... But he just needs it to just be constantly coming into his ears. And it’s getting worse as he ages, for various reasons. Any psychologist will also tell you that when narcissists are feeling insulted or they’re feeling their insecurity rise up, often because their approval ratings are coming down or they’re otherwise failing, their need to be told they’re the greatest just continues to go up."

Sargent and Marcotte also analyzed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's description of the president, calling it "cultlike."

"She routinely fluffs Trump with astonishingly cultlike descriptions of him to reporters—ones that portray him as powerful, calm, and completely in command of events. But then, left to his own devices on Truth Social, Trump presents the opposite picture, erupting regularly in wild meltdowns and uncontrollable hissy fits over the tiniest of slights," Sargent said.

According to Marcotte,"the over-the-top nature of it does affect certain people by convincing them—I don’t think Trump’s voters, even his biggest fans, think he’s the greatest president ever; the person with the most integrity via all time; no person has ever been anything more thing than Donald Trump ever has."

She added that repeated claims such as, "He’s the greatest businessman of all time," unintentionally reinforce the notion that he was at least a successful businessman, which is actually false. "He was a failure. He bankrupted his company over and over and over again," Marcotte said during the podcast.

The speakers also discussed "AI-generated and real photographic imagery of over-the-top abuse" of migrants detained by the administration "and functionally kidnapped and renditioned to a foreign prison."

"And they shaved their heads. They made sure to like make their tattoos as garish as possible. They had videos of them bent over in these torture positions. And you see the effect that it has on the audiences at Trump’s 100-day rally. The crowd went absolutely nuts," she said.

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In politics, the word "ideologue" can have a very negative connotation, describing someone who has an extremely rigid set of beliefs. An ideologue could be anyone from a far-right Christian nationalist to a far-left Maoist or Marxist-Leninist.

Politico neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod addresses that type of rigidity in her new book, "The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking," which she discussed with the New York Times' Matt Richtel in a Q&A interview published on April 8.

When Richtel asked Zmigrod what "ideology" is, she responded, "It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people."

Zmigrod continued, "An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules…. Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something."

During the interview, Zmigrod described research on children.

"Liberal children," according to Zmigrod, "tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story" — whereas the "most ideologically-minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases."

"The people most prone to ideological thinking tend to resist change or nuance of any kind," Zmigrod told Richtel. "We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For instance, in one test, we ask them to sort playing cards by various rules, like suit or color. But suddenly, they apply the rule, and it doesn't work. That's because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule."

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Delusion: The mental state that drives Trump's hardcore supporters with scary accuracy

Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

ALSO READ: A funny thing happened on the way to closing the U.S. Department of Education

Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.

But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.

Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.

This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.

Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs.

Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

NOW READ: It’s science: Trump voters are dumb It’s science: Trump voters are dumb

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After Democratic nominee Kamala Harris narrowly lost the United States' 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump, many pundits argued that Trump did a better job appealing to Americans' "economic anxiety." The U.S. enjoyed record-low unemployment rates under former President Joe Biden, but Trump hammered Biden and Harris relentlessly on inflation — and it worked.

On Election Night 2024, Trump won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent (according to the Cook Political Report).

However, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on January 30, Alan Elrod (CEO of the think tank the Pulaski Institution) emphasizes that Trump's victories in 2016 and 2024 go beyond appealing to voters' "economic anxiety." Trump, according to Elrod, resonates with his "base" because of his ability to exploit "status anxiety."

Elrod explains, "Every Trump-supporting boat parade and each positive jobs report or new Dow record set during the hated Biden Administration served as a reminder that the 'economic anxiety' thesis leaves too much out of its analytic viewfinder — namely, the real motive roots of Trump's appeal, especially to those who actually live quite high on the hog…. More useful for understanding what motivates Trump's base would be a relative measure — one that could conceivably affect people in a variety of economic circumstances. The best starting point, as some observers have been arguing for years, is status anxiety.

The Pulaski Institution CEO continues, "That's because while 'status' comprises a number of signs of economic success — homes, jobs, bank accounts — it goes beyond them to include important intangibles. As Alain de Botton put it in a 2008 book on the subject, status also has to do with 'a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.' And that kind of judgment is one we can only arrive at through comparison with others."

The "status anxiety" that Elrod describes is applicable to Americans who feel underappreciated — even if they are doing well.

"This is the perfect pathology for citizens of a democracy: If merit, not rank, determines social value and achievement, as is meant to be the case in our country, then your average person will be confronted every day with the question of why they haven't experienced greater success — a toxic recipe for self-righteousness, shame, anxiety, and self-consciousness," Elrod observes. "Especially when, thanks to our deranged media environment, the apparent success of others — including those we consider undeserving — is constantly in view…. Trump is the master of grievance and animus precisely because he himself is an exposed nerve of status anxiety."

READ MORE:['Live with that shame': Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump gets 17-year state prison sentence

Elrod continues, "No one articulates this sense of injury quite like him because perhaps no one is as covetous, spiteful, and achingly needy as he is. His unprecedented political debut and continuing success has not freed him from his decades-old grievances. If anything, his elevation has made him into the ultimate sore winner."

READ MORE:[GOP lawmakers staying silent as Trump 'runs roughshod over Congress'

*Alan Elrod's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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AN 12 24 THE CONV

“I am definitely not following the news anymore,” one patient told me when I asked about her political news consumption in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

This conversation happened around the time I talked with a local TV channel about why we saw fewer political yard signs during this year’s election season, compared with past ones.

I am a psychiatrist who studies and treats fear and anxiety. One of my main mental health recommendations to my patients during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles was to reduce their political news consumption. I also tried to convince them that the five hours a day they spent watching cable news was only leaving them helpless and terrified.

Over the past couple of years, though, I have noticed a change: Many of my patients say they either have tuned out or are too exhausted to do more than a brief read of political news or watch one hour of their favorite political show.

Research supports my clinical experience: A Pew research study from 2020 showed that 66% of Americans were worn out by political stress. Interestingly, those who are not following the news feel that same news fatigue at an even higher percentage of 73%. In 2023, 8 out of 10 Americans described U.S. politics with negative words like “divisive,” “corrupt,” “messy” and “polarized.”

In my view, three major factors have led Americans to exhaustion and burnout with U.S politics.

Donald Trump supporters argue with anti-Trump protesters in New York City in 2017. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

1. The politics of fear

In my 2023 book, “AFRAID: Understanding the Purpose of Fear, and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety,” I discuss how American politicians and major news media have found an ally in fear: a very strong emotion that can be used to grab our attention, keeping us in the tribal dividing lines and making us follow, click, tap, watch and donate.

Over the past few decades, many people have felt a strong push for tribalism, an “us vs. them” way of seeing the world, turning Americans against one another. This has led to a point where we are not just in disagreement with each other. We hate, cancel, block and attack those who disagree with us.

2. People live in information bubbles

It can feel like Fox News and MSNBC commentators are talking about Americas from two different planets. The same is true when it comes to different social media feeds.

Many people are part of social media communities that are closed to the world outside their homes and familiar social circles. Based on people’s political views and what they search for or watch and read, social media algorithms feed them content where everybody talks and thinks alike. If you hear about the other side, it is only about their worst attributes and behavior.

The disconnect is so wide that people are not even able to comprehend the thinking of those from other perspectives and find their logic or political beliefs unfathomable.

Many Americans have gotten to the point of believing that the other half of Americans are, at best, unintelligent and stupid; and at worst, immoral and evil.

3. People’s political opinions have become their identities

There was a time in American politics where two politicians or two neighbors could disagree, but still believe that the other person was fundamentally good.

Over time, and more so since the early 2000s, this ability to connect despite political beliefs has decreased.

The majority of both Democrats and Republicans said in a 2022 Pew Research survey that someone’s political ideas are an indicator of their morality and character.

This 2022 Pew survey also shows that partisan animosity extends to judgments about character: 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats said they believe members of the opposing party are more “immoral” than other Americans.

This is evident in day-to-day conversations of members of both political tribes: “How can I be friends with someone who wants to kill babies,” or “How can I talk to someone who is OK with women dying in a corner of a clinic parking lot”. We can no longer see someone’s political affiliation in the context of their humanity at large.

Too much news consumption can lead to people feeling helpless and burned out, research shows. iStock/Getty Images Plus

What psychology and neuroscience say

Fear as a deeply ingrained survival mechanism takes priority over other brain functions.

Fear guides your memories, feelings, attention and thoughts, and can cause you to keep watching, scrolling and reading to monitor this perceived threat. Positive or neutral news could then become uninteresting because it is not important in your survival response. That has been the key to a person’s deep engagement with the fear-based political news.

But too much fear does not keep someone engaged forever. That is because of another survival mechanism – what’s called “learned helplessness.”

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman exposed two groups of dogs to painful shocks. Dogs in group 1 could stop the shock by pressing a lever, which they quickly learned to do. But the dogs in group 2 learned that they could not control when the shock starts and stops.

Then, both groups were placed in a box divided into two halves by a small barrier, and shock was applied to only one side of the box. Dogs in group 1 – who had learned how to stop the shocks in the earlier experiment – quickly learned to jump over the barrier to the shock-free side. But dogs in group 2 did not even attempt to do so. They had learned there is no point in trying.

This experiment has been replicated in different forms with other animals and humans with the same conclusion: When people feel they cannot control the painful or scary situation, they just give up. During such experiences, the brain’s fear region – called the amygdala – is hyperactive. Meanwhile, emotion-regulating brain areas like the prefrontal cortex decrease in activity under these circumstances.

Learned helplessness also means the brain mechanisms commonly involved in regulating anxiety and depression don’t function as well.

When working with patients who have suffered from long periods of intense anxiety, fear, trauma and exhaustion, I see learned helplessness showing up in the form of depression, loss of motivation, fatigue and lack of engagement with the world around them.

The COVID-19 pandemic, more than a decade of intense political stress, polarizing social media and wars across the world, as well as public disillusionment with U.S. politics and media, have led, I believe, to many people experiencing burnout and learned helplessness.

If you feel politically exhausted, you are not the problem. Feel free to tune out from the noise.

Arash Javanbakht, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

an 12 24

In the United States, liberals and conservatives have been having heated debates for generations. But the country has been especially divided in recent years.

Following President-elect Donald Trump's narrow victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, many MAGA Republicans are delighted that he will be returning to the White House on January 20, 2025. Democrats and Never Trump conservatives, however, view Trump's incoming second administration as a full-blown threat to democracy and are slamming some of his nominees — including Kash Patel for FBI director and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary — as flat out dangerous.

Trump's supporters and detractors, many political experts have said, live in separate worlds.

But the divisions between the left and the right did not start with Trump and his MAGA movement. And research highlighted in 2020 offers insights on why Republicans and Democrats can process information so differently.

In an article published by Scientific American, journalist Lydia Denworth delved into "political neuroscience."

Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University told Scientific American, "Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses. Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a 'window' into their brains…. Neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomes — just not in a deterministic way."

Denworth noted that the differences between conservatives and liberals were on full display when the National Review's William F. Buckly famously debated liberal author Gore Vidal back in 1968.

READ MORE:[Chomsky at 96: The linguist, educator and philosopher's massive intellectual and moral influence

The journalist pointed out, however, that conservatives and liberals aren't necessarily black-and-white in their thinking, and that both can have nuance.

"To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending," Denworth explained. "Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran."

Denworth added, "Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it."

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AN 11 24

“No profanity.”

This is the one rule spelled out on a sign in Lance Walker’s barbershop in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where political discussion between clients can get heated.

Three weeks before the election, on Oct. 14, 2024, I watched as Walker interviewed Michele Jansen, a conservative local talk show host, and Don Marritz, a liberal legal aid attorney also living in Pennsylvania, in his podcast studio.

Jansen and Marritz discussed the difficulties they had faced in the preceding months as they struggled to draft a document called Declaration Rejecting Political Violence. Eventually, more than 250 community leaders and citizens in Franklin and Adams counties in Pennsylvania signed on.

This effort – part of a project focused on preventing political violence run by the nonprofit group Urban Rural Action, or UR Action – almost fell apart over an argument over including the word “insurrection.”

Indeed, words have become contentious on the American political landscape. They turn dinner conversations into battlefields. And they provide politicians with fuel to stoke the flames of polarization.

An anthropologist, I have long studied international political violence and its prevention. More recently, I have done related research in the U.S. that resulted in a 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.”

Now I’m studying toxic polarization in the U.S. and ways to reduce it. I have attended Make America Great Again events and spoken to voters who supported Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

I have also observed the work of groups such as UR Action that try to bridge political divides.

During this research, I have found that some words are often understood differently by those on opposite sides of the political aisle. As a result, misunderstandings create tension and sometimes provoke anger.

Becoming aware of how and why certain words upset those with different political views, then, is a key step in reducing polarization. Here are five that can trigger Trump supporters and further isolate them from liberal Americans.

‘Incitement’ and ‘insurrection’

The suggestion that Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol sparked the fight over the wording of the political violence denunciation.

Jansen later explained to me that she was concerned about widespread accusations that Trump incited violence at the U.S. Capitol – and that, more broadly, “people on the right are more targeted as hateful and using hate speech.”

Chad Collie, another conservative member of the UR Action declaration team, told me in an interview that Trump supporters “take offense” when the terms “incitement” and “insurrection” are used to describe Trump’s Jan. 6 rally. In their view, he added, Trump’s rally near the White House was a largely peaceful “protest” hijacked by a small number of violent people who stormed the Capitol.

More broadly, many Trump voters believe that the president-elect is the victim of “lawfare,” meaning efforts to unjustly use laws to attack political opponents.

As evidence, some Trump supporters point to the defeat of both of his impeachments and various criminal court cases brought against Trump, most of which have been paused or dismissed after he won the 2024 election.

Wokeness triggers like ‘they-them’ and ‘equity’

VID]

.”

Attack ads that feature phrases like this don’t necessarily win elections.

But gender identity was a nonstop talking point at the dozen or so MAGA events I attended ahead of the election. Speakers there constantly mocked the use of nonbinary pronouns and blasted the “radical left” for “transgender insanity.” This “insanity,” in their view, includes issues such as transgender people using bathrooms that match their gender identity and participating in sports competitions.

The word “equity” – along with related terms such as “diversity,” “critical race theory,” “social justice,” “privilege” and “DEI,” short for “diversity, equity and inclusion” – can also anger a Trump supporter.

They associate these words with a “woke” or even “communist” agenda that they think the “radical left” is trying to impose on them.

While some people think that these terms speak to efforts to recognize that groups of marginalized people, including people of color and women, have long faced discrimination, many Trump supporters think that related “woke” policies threaten their free speech and individual and family rights.

‘Racist’

Trump supporters were called “deplorables” by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But my interviews and observations show that no word, not even “fascist,” stings Trump supporters as much as being called a “racist,” an accusation that is widely used against them.

As Matt Schlapp, the head of the conservative group Conservative Political Action Committee, which runs the annual CPAC conference, laments in a book, “There is no way to escape its putrid stink.” The “racist” label, Schlapp explains from experience, shames, stigmatizes and makes a person afraid to speak.

More broadly, the use of “racist” and related terms plays into many Trump voters’ perceptions and anger that Democrats are elitist liberals who they think look down upon and even hate them.

Trump and Republican influencers frequently play on this resentment. Trump, for example, wore an orange and yellow safety vest as he sat in a garbage truck after Biden referred to them as “garbage.” Trump’s supporters soon started wearing vests and even garbage bags to his preelection events to show their support for Trump.

No one, however, wore a shirt to a Trump rally emblazoned with the word “racist.”

Words are like bees

America’s political division is intertwined with how language – sometimes a single word – can be understood differently by liberals and conservatives and trigger a negative reaction.

This reality has policy implications.

For example, when Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, an organization seeking to enhance civic and democratic life, examined perceptions of civic terms starting in 2019, they found that using certain works such as “equity” is often perceived as “liberal and college educated.” Their survey found that conservatives view terms such as “diversity,” “social justice,” “racial equity” and “activism” much more negatively than liberals.

These findings have led organizations that try to decrease political polarization in the U.S. to modify their messaging and more often use terms such as “unity,” “citizens” and “liberty,” which the civics language study found appeals to both liberals and conservatives.

Words don’t just provoke, then. They can also provide a path forward.

As the saying goes, “Words are like bees; some create honey, but others leave a sting.”

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 10 24

During his appearances on MSNBC, Stuart Stevens — a veteran conservative strategist/consultant and outspoken Never Trumper — has been arguing that when independent voters get a really good look at presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, incumbent President Joe Biden will enjoy a major surge. Stevens predicts that the election will swing in Biden's direction around October.

Polls released in June, however, are showing a close nailbiter of a race, with Trump slightly ahead in some national polls and Biden slightly ahead in others. Whatever independents ultimately decide, Trump continues to be extremely popular with his hardcore MAGA base.

In an article published by The Atlantic on June 16, Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner describes "motivated ignorance" as a key factor in the support that Trump still enjoys. According to Wehner, Trump's diehard supporters are oblivious to reality.

READ MORE: [Black Senate candidate's signs defaced with 'KKK' and crosshairs on her forehead: report

"Motivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts," Wehner explains. "It's choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity."

Wehner argues that MAGA diehards who refuse to pay attention to facts are "blind to the cultlike world to which they belong."

"Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options," Wehner explains. "It's a 'binary choice,' they say, and so, they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics."

Wehner adds, "Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote, but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives."

READ MORE:[How a '90s 'right-wing populist revolt' paved the way for Trumpism

*Peter Wehner's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

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an the conv 10 24

as TVs across Florida broadcast the all-too-familiar images of a powerful hurricane headed for the coast in early October 2024, people whose homes had been damaged less than two weeks earlier by Hurricane Helene watched anxiously. Hurricane Milton was rapidly intensifying into a dangerous storm, fueled by the Gulf of Mexico’s record-breaking temperatures.

Many residents scrambled to evacuate, clogging roads away from the region. Officials urged those near the coast who ignored evacuation warnings to scrawl their names on their arms with indelible ink so their corpses could be identified.

The two hurricanes were among the most destructive in recent memory. They are also stark reminders of the increasingly extreme weather events that scientists have long warned would be the consequence of human-driven climate change.

Still, many people deny that climate change is a worsening threat, or that it exists at all. As its impacts grow more visible and destructive, how is this possible? Views of Hurricane Milton’s damage across Florida.

One answer lies in a unique facet of human psychology – specifically, in how people manage the fear aroused by existential threats. For many people, denying the existence of a climate crisis is not only convenient, but may feel psychologically necessary.

Terror management theory

The Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Ernest Becker put it this way: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else … to overcome it by denying it in some way is the final destiny for man.”

In plain terms, he was saying that most people struggle to accept their mortality and take pains to distort their perception of reality to avoid confronting it.

In the 1980s, social psychologists developed “terror management theory,” showing the lengths people go to deny death. Hundreds of experiments have tested its implications. In a common method, participants reflect on their own death, while control groups consider less threatening topics, like dental pain. The key question: What does death awareness do to people?

After writing about death, people tend to quickly move on, pushing thoughts of it from consciousness with distractions, rationalizations and other tactics. Health care professionals see this every day. For example, people often dodge screenings and diagnostic tests to avoid the frightening possibility of discovering cancer. Skidmore College psychologist Sheldon Solomon discusses Ernest Becker’s ‘The Denial of Death’ and terror management theory in the context of humanity’s history of brutal behavior.

But here’s the rub: Terror management theory suggests that when people are not thinking about death, it nevertheless holds influence. The unconscious mind lingers on the problem even after people have used strategies to quiet the fear by pushing it from awareness.

Social psychology experiments show that people often cope with the specter of death by attaching themselves to cultural ideologies, such as religious, political or even sports fandom. These worldviews imbue life with meaning, values and purpose. And that can ease the terror of mortality by connecting people to an enduring and comforting web of ideas and beliefs that transcend one’s own existence.

When people are made aware of death, those systems of meaning become even more critical to their psychological functioning. Existential threats make us cling even tighter to the meaning systems that sustain us.

Climate denial as a defense mechanism

Much like a terror management lab experiment – or the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – natural disasters like hurricanes Helene and Milton trigger death anxiety.

Rising sea levels, warming oceans and intensifying storms – all tied to global warming fueled by human actions – represent an existential threat.

From our perspective, it is not surprising that climate-related disasters disappear from the public consciousness almost as soon as they have passed. Google Trends data exemplifies this: Incoming storms instigated an uptick in searches for “climate change” and “global warming” in the days before Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, and Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024. Then those searches quickly declined as people shifted their focus away from the threat.

IFrame Content

Unfortunately, climate change isn’t going away, no matter how hard anyone tries to deny it.

While climate denial allows people to protect themselves from feelings of distress, terror management theory suggests that denying death is just the tip of the iceberg. For some people, accepting the reality of climate change would necessitate reevaluating their ideologies.

Terror management theory predicts that individuals whose ideologies conflict with environmental concerns may ironically double down on those beliefs to psychologically manage the existential threat posed by climate-related disasters. It’s similar to how mortality reminders can lead people to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or tanning. Hurricanes may reinforce denial and commitment to a worldview that rejects climate change.

IFrame Content

A path forward: Building new worldviews

Although denial may be a natural psychological response to existential threats, the U.S. may be getting to a point where even deniers can’t ignore the existential threat associated with climate change.

Again and again, Americans are gobsmacked by the devastation – from hurricanes to severe flooding, wildfires and more.

A terror management analysis suggests that overcoming this crisis requires weaving a solutions-focused narrative into the ideologies that people rely on for comfort. As psychologists who work on terror management, we believe the fight against climate change should be framed not as an apocalyptic battle that humanity is destined to lose, but as a moral and practical challenge that humanity can collectively overcome.

[vid] Tampa, Florida, meteorologist had the right idea as the two hurricanes headed for his community: His fact-based social media updates eschew partisan critique, encourage neighbors to support one another and emphasize preparedness and resilience in the face of incoming storms.

As Milton approached, Phillips told residents to remember his Rule #7: Don’t freak out. That doesn’t mean do nothing – it means evaluate risks without letting emotion interfere, and take action.

Shifting the narrative from helplessness to collective empowerment and action can help people confront climate change without triggering the existential anxieties that lead to denial – offering a vision for a future that is both secure and personally meaningful.

Jamie Goldenberg, Professor of Psychology and Area Director, Cognitive, Neuroscience and Social Psychology, University of South Florida; Emily P. Courtney, Assistant Professor of Instruction, University of South Florida, and Joshua Hart, Professor of Psychology, *Union College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 10 24

Donald Trump has a particular formula he uses to convey messages to his supporters and opponents alike: He highlights others’ wrongdoings even though he has committed similar acts himself.

On Oct. 3, 2024, Trump accused the Biden administration of spending Federal Emergency Management Agency funds – money meant for disaster relief – on services for immigrants. Biden did no such thing, but Trump did during his time in the White House, including to pay for additional detention space.

This is not the first time he has accused someone of something he had done or would do in the future. In 2016, Trump criticized opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured personal email server while secretary of state as “extreme carelessness with classified material.” But once he was elected, Trump continued to use his unsecured personal cellphone while in office. And he has been criminally charged with illegally keeping classified government documents after he left office and storing them in his bedroom, bathroom and other places at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

After complaining about how Hillary Clinton handled classified documents, Donald Trump stored national secrets in a bathroom. Justice Department via AP

More recently, the Secret Service arrested a man with a rifle who was allegedly planning to shoot Trump during a round of golf. In the wake of this event, Trump accused Democrats of using “inflammatory language” that stokes the fires of political violence. Meanwhile, Trump himself has a long history of making inflammatory remarks that could potentially incite violence.

As a scholar of both politics and psychology, I’m familiar with the psychological strategies candidates use to persuade the public to support them and to cast their rivals in a negative light. This strategy Trump has used repeatedly is called “projection.” It’s a tactic people use to lessen their own faults by calling out these faults in others.

Projection abounds

There are plenty of examples. During his Sept. 10, 2024, debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed that Democrats were responsible for the July 13 assassination attempt against him. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he declared.

Earlier in the debate he had falsely accused immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating other people’s pets – a statement that sparked bomb threats and prompted the city’s mayor to declare a state of emergency.

Similarly, congressional investigators and federal prosecutors have found that Trump’s remarks called thousands of people to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, encouraging them to violently storm the Capitol in order to stop the counting of electoral votes.

Trump isn’t the only politician who uses projection. His running mate, JD Vance, claimed “the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing the left has done in this country.” Critics quickly pointed out that his own family has a history of dysfunction and drug addiction.

Projection happens on both sides of the political aisle. In reference to Trump’s proposed 10% tariff on all imported goods, the Harris campaign launched social media efforts to condemn the so-called “Trump tequila tax.” While Harris frames this proposal as a sales tax that would devastate middle-class families, she deflects from the fact that inflation has made middle-class life more expensive since she and President Joe Biden took office.

How it works

Projection is one example of unconscious psychological processes called defense mechanisms. Some people find it hard to accept criticism or believe information that they wish were not true. So they seek – and then provide – another explanation for the difference between what’s happening in the world and what’s happening in their minds.

In general, this is called “motivated reasoning,” which is an umbrella phrase used to describe the array of mental gymnastics people use to reconcile their views with reality.

Some examples include seeking out information that confirms their beliefs, dismissing factual claims or creating alternate explanations. For example, a smoker might downplay or simply avoid information related to the link between smoking and lung cancer, or perhaps tell themselves that they don’t smoke as much as they actually do.

Motivated reasoning is not unique to politics. It can be a challenging concept to consider because people tend to think they are fully in control of their decision-making abilities and that they are capable of objectively processing political information. The evidence is clear, however, that there are unconscious thought processes at work, too.

Influencing the audience

Audiences are also susceptible to unconscious psychological dynamics. Research has found that over time, people’s minds subconsciously attach emotions to concepts, names or phrases. So someone might have a particular emotional reaction to the words “gun control,” “Ron DeSantis” or “tax relief.”

And people’s minds also unconsciously create defenses for those seemingly automatic emotions. When a person’s emotions and defenses are questioned, a phenomenon called the “backfire effect” can occur, in which the process of controlling, correcting or counteracting mistaken beliefs ends up reinforcing the person’s beliefs rather than changing them.

For instance, some people may find it hard to believe that the candidate they prefer – whom they believe to be the best person for the job – truly lost an election. So they seek another explanation and accept explanations that justify their beliefs. Perhaps they choose to believe, even in the absence of evidence, that the race was rigged or that many fraudulent votes were cast. And when evidence to the contrary is offered, they insist their views are correct.

Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned with Liz Cheney, right, a prominent Republican who formerly served in Congress. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

A way out

Fortunately, research shows specific ways to reduce people’s reliance on these automatic psychological processes, including reiterating and providing details of objective facts and – importantly – attempting to correct untruths via a trusted source from the same political party.

For instance, challenges to Democrats’ belief that the Trump-affiliated conservative agenda called Project 2025 is “dangerous” would be more effective coming from a Democrat than from a Republican.

Similarly, a counter to Trump’s claim that the international community is headed toward World War III with Democrats in the White House would be stronger coming from one of Trump’s fellow Republicans. And certainly, statements that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” carries more weight when it comes from the lips of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney than from any member of the Democratic Party.

Critiques from within a candidate’s own party are not out of the question. But they are certainly improbable given the hotly charged climate that is election season 2024.

April Johnson, Associate Professor of Political Science, Kennesaw State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 8 24

Psychotherapist/author Steven Hassan, an ex-member of the Unification Church, is known for his expertise on cults. And he views former President Donald Trump as much more than a right-wing politician: Hassan sees Trump as the leader of a cult-like "authoritarian" movement.

During an interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega, Hassan (author of the book "The Cult of Trump") warned that "silencing critics" will be a key part of Trump's far-right agenda this election year.

"Steven Hassan possesses a deep understanding Donald Trump's power and control over the MAGA people and the larger Republican Party," DeVega explains. "He has been warning, for at least eight years, that Donald Trump is not a normal politician, but instead, the leader of an extremely dangerous authoritarian personality cult."

READ MORE:[JD Vance suggested America should 'punish' people for not having children

Hassan didn't mince words during the interview, laying out some reasons why the United States is "in a lot of trouble."

"The silencing of critics is an example of authoritarian control," Hassan told DeVega. "Information control has several basic elements such as deception, overt lying, withholding vital information and/or distorting it. Authoritarian control also involves telling members to not talk to ex-members or critics, only believing in the propaganda and information that is approved by the leader and the cult organization. We are seeing that play out in front of us with Trump and the MAGA movement."

Hassan continued, "The attempt on Trump's life has just amplified and spread it. There are too many powerful people in too many different positions of influence in America and around the world for the MAGA movement and Trumpism to collapse. The anti-democracy movement is too widespread now for it to just dissipate quickly. It will take lots of work to do that."

When DeVega mentioned that some political pundits consider it "not polite" to describe Trump supporters as part of a cult, Hassan responded, "I would tell them that the MAGA movement is, in fact, an authoritarian cult."

The anti-cult expert continued, "It is dangerous, destructive, anti-human rights, anti-woman, racist and white supremacist, anti-gay and has many other antisocial values and beliefs. The Trump authoritarian personality and the larger anti-democracy movement are very dangerous. People tried to stop these evil forces in the 1930s and 1940s. We can learn from them and rise to the challenge today. It is the very definition of being responsible to tell the truth about these dangers."

*Chauncey DeVega's full interview with Steven Hassan for Salon is available at this link.

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Some Donald Trump supporters are dismissive of arguments that the former president is a would-be dictator, claiming that Democrats, via "wokeness" and "cancel culture," are the real authoritarians.

But other Trump voters have flat-out said they would welcome a strongman leader, and they aren't offended by Trump's praise of far-right authoritarian leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And members of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that has become increasingly MAGA in recent years, have argued that liberal democracy is failing the United States.

In an article published by The New Republic on July 18, journalist Susan Milligan details reasons some Americans believe that rejecting democracy would be a good idea.

The "very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth," according to Milligan, is that "a big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader." The journalist notes that 32 percent of Americans favor a military regime or authoritarian leader for the U.S.

"Why would people want to live under an authoritarian's thumb?" Milligan writes. "It's rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security — real or perceived — and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group — especially if it is the 'right' group whose interests will be protected."

Joe Pierre, a health sciences clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco's Weill Institute for Neurosciences, told The New Republic that people who favor authoritarianism believe it will be used against others rather than against them.

Pierre told The New Republic, "For those of us who value representative democracy, the fact that some of our fellow citizens might prefer authoritarianism can be surprising or even unfathomable…. Authoritarianism and a 'strongman' leader who's willing to trample over civil rights can sound like a very appealing solution. In turn, democracy — which tells us that our ideological opposites deserve to be heard or should be given equal voice — can sound like the root of the problem."

Kets de Vries, who teaches business at INSEAD in Paris, had similar insights.

De Vries told The New Republic, "Human beings are actually very primitive. They are looking for a father figure to take care of them. They are willing to be blind to all the defects of Trump. He appeals to their most primitive instincts."

*Read Susan Milligan's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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an 7 24

Jeremy Sherman

July 06, 2024

The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant.

Fundamentally it has nothing to do with ideals, values or visions of the future. It’s a fight between decent people and sociopaths.

Psychopaths are congenitally shameless. Born, that way, they are neurologically deaf to the inner nag of empathy.

Sociopaths aren’t born but made. Some are brainwashed but many are not. Many are motivated sociopaths because being one is tempting, satisfying, efficient and effective.

Sociopaths learn how to be shameless. We underestimate the appeal of shamelessness. Shame constrains us. Shamelessness is a liberation. If you learn to be absolutely shameless – even shameless about your shamelessness, you grant yourself the ultimate dream come true, a reliable feeling of perfect freedom and perfect invincibility, as though you can do anything and whatever you do beats all. Sociopathy is like being granted a wildcard/Trumpcard.

Learning to be absolutely shameless is easy. It takes no study and very little practice before you get the hang of it. Whatever path you’re on has easy detours down to the haven of motivated sociopathy.

There are many ways to learn it. They all boil down to learning to blurt words as if you really mean them, without you thinking about their meaning at all.

What words? Any words that declare you the winner. No matter what you do, you can always find words to blurt that will do the trick and if you don’t care which words you use, but use them with intense conviction, the trick will work – so long as other people misinterpret you as meaning your words

Once you’re getting away with it, it’s smooth sailing. Even if people say “shame on you!” you can just blurt more shameless words that make you feel like a winner.

Once it’s smooth sailing your conscience just atrophies. You don’t need it anymore and it only gets in your way. Eventually you become a proud, deaf shameless sociopath blurting whatever makes you feel invincible no matter what you do.

People become proud motivated sociopaths by many routes. Some just get fed up, say “Aw, hell no! I’m tired of being pushed around” and start blurting cliches they get from popular culture. For example, they can say “just deal with it” to people who are already dealing with it by challenging them. And weirdly the people back down. If they grab a cliché that works, they’ll use it more.

Some people fall into a patch of such cliches all clustered around some brand-name ideology which enables them to make a crusade out of proudly, shamelessly insisting that they’re the winners. It could be any brand, left, right, spiritual, religious, philosophical, whatever.

As a cluster, the words are hypocritical ways to play god or a god or demagog’s humble servant lording it over everyone.

Omnipotence: “I’m heroic because I’m winning/I’m heroic because I’m losing.”

Omniscience: “I know everything/I don’t know about that, so it’s irrelevant.”

Omnificent: “Shame on you for not living up to my moral standards/Moral standards are for losers”

Motivated sociopaths take shameless pride in their hypocrisy. Still, they’re consistent about one thing: “I never contradict myself and no matter what happens, it proves I’m right, righteous and heroic.”

Sociopath simply means “socially-sick” – pretty vague. There are vulgar names for them too, also vague. I call them Trumpbots – lowercase “t” not after the Donald though he fits the description perfectly as would a leftist parroting the same cliches.

The word “trump” means both fake as in “trumped up” and “beats all.” A Trumpbot robotically plays fake trump cards. Again, it’s a tempting lifestyle that one can fall into from any angle, left, right, center, religious, spiritual, philosophical. One can become a Trumpbot for anything or nothing. Once one falls into this tempting lifestyle there would be no reason to leave so long as one can get away with it.

So how can we keep them from getting away with it? How can we make motivated sociopathy costly? How can we honorably shame the absolutely shameless? How can we humbly humble people who will say anything to avoid humility?

The answer is simple and obvious and yet consistently overlooked in our culture wars: Expose and flout their Trumpbot formula; taunt and flaunt the alternative.

Expose and flout their trumpbot formula:

Flout: Care about their words as much as they do: Not at all. You’ve been taught to listen, value and be open to everyone’s ideas. That’s wrong. Do that with decent people but with trumpbots it’s as enabling as listening to a psychopath.

Expose: If you have to deal with a trumpbot, simply declare over and over that they’ll say and do anything to pretend they’re right and righteous. You know what they’ll do in response? They’ll confirm your diagnosis. They’re one trick phonies. They’ve got nothing else. When they trumpbot at you in response, say “there he goes again.” Again and again. They’ll give up and declare themselves the winners but you will have cost them, especially if you do it in front of others.

Taunt and flaunt the alternative:

Taunt: What’s the alternative to being a trumpbot? Being human, trying to guess what best to do. Experiencing ambivalence and being brave enough to show it. Trumpbots want you cornered, wincing at your moral failings. Trying to prove your morality to them is deadly. They don’t care about morality. They’ll shame you for immorality and then laugh at you for caring about morality. So be yourself. Stand your ground without trying to prove it. Your power lies in taunting them with brave honest humanness while they’re robotically playing God.

Flaunt: If they accuse of you of violating some moral code (that they don’t care about) don’t deny it. For example, if they shame you for shaming, say “Of course I shame, like everyone, like you just did, trying to shame me for shaming. I try to shame where it’s deserved whereas you pretend you don’t shame while shaming.”

It is our civic duty to make motivated sociopathy costly.

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an 2 24

voss

you can tell a lot about a people from the monsters they use to frighten themselves.

During the height of the Red Scare, Americans feared a communist conspiracy taking over the world — converting their friends and neighbors, staffing U.S. institutions with secret enemies. So their entertainment was filled with extraterrestrials who could mimic humans.

Notably, some of those monsters — such as the “body snatchers” and “The Thing” — reappeared just as the Cold War between Communist Russia and Reagan’s America was about to heat back up.

The late 1980s brought new threats: the scourge of drugs, the AIDS epidemic, contaminated needles. Who better to scare and entice Generation X than vampires – a monster that symbolizes corruption of the blood and stands for appetites that, once fed, might prove irresistible? The vampire genre rose from its coffin.

Trying to identify a monster who embodies the Trump Era gets tricky, because so many things frighten Republicans today.

I don’t solely mean that GOP politicians whip up fears, because Democrats do that, too.

I mean: You should take pity on any conservatives in your life, because they occupy a world much scarier than where everyone else lives.

People who see the world as a hostile place are more likely to lean rightward. Show a video with something lethal, like a snake or spider, and conservatives focus more on the threat. Make a loud noise; they’re more likely to react. Show a yucky photo and their gag reflex kicks in faster.

With so many fears and aversions to encapsulate, it might be tempting to give up on identifying one creature that haunts Republican nightmares – instead settling on a show like “Supernatural,” which sent brothers Sam and Dean careening across the flyover states to battle a rapid rotation of beasts.

But no, one monster did enjoy special cultural resonance leading up to Trump’s presidency: Zombies!!!

It began with a handful of surprisingly popular zombie movies during the Bush years. The Resident Evil franchise — which combined infected former humans with a sinister deep-state conspiracy — also kicked off then, reaching its “Final Chapter” immediately after Trump’s inauguration.

Most obviously, “The Walking Dead” first aired in 2010 and achieved the height of its popularitybefore Trump’s election.

Created by two Kentuckians and overwhelmingly popular in culturally conservative areas — most notably Appalachia — that show’s central characters were a lawman, a redneck hunter, and a former housewife. Threats included a former high-school staffer, a collectivist artist and, amusingly, a Center for Disease Control scientist.

Zombie entertainment, the non-comedic sort, portrays a constantly threatening setting that demands toughness and favors strongmen. It’s a Trumpian fantasy.

View today’s GOP as though it’s fending off a zombie apocalypse, and disparate policy initiatives suddenly fit together. It’s only partly a tongue-in-cheek observation to note that conservatives see zombies all around them.

A zombie horde shambles toward the southern border, carrying foreign diseases (like drugs and terrorism) with them. Let’s build a wall and send troops!

City-dwelling zombies clamber on top of each other, colors blended until they’re a uniform gray, making metro areas dangerous as they satisfy soulless hungers. Let’s dispatch more cops and militarize them! Let’s make it easier for property owners to run them off and root out their hives!

Big institutions to which citizens are vulnerable — government, corporations — are staffed by inflexible and heartless zombies, bound by rules that ensure nothing gets better. “You can’t even get a human on the phone.” Let’s elect an unpresidential president who ignores the rules and shakes everything up!

Conservatives teach their children, including their daughters, traditional values. But when they’re sent off to school, teachers infect them with a progressive virus that makes them part of the zombie hive. They lose their faith, their self-control, their gender, their identity — returning home uncommunicative (if not hostile), hypnotized by flashing smartphones as they sullenly shovel food into their mouths.

So let’s help keep kids out of public schools! Let’s limit funds for education, try to control teachers and librarians! Let’s ban TikTok and confiscate student phones! Let’s politicize school-board elections and encourage school prayer!

Zombies want nothing except to eat. So maybe that explains the conservative inclination to starve programs that feed people, not just food stamps but also free school lunches and even a program intended to improve nutrition for pregnant Women and Infant Children.

And conservatives envision streams of zombies who know little about government — they vote for Democrats, after all — mindlessly casting ballots (or passively allowing their ballots to be “harvested”) on behalf of the wicked conspirators who set this apocalypse off in the first place.

So their impulse is to make voting harder. Aren’t zombies less likely to surmount small barriers? And in places where Democrats dominate, let’s make elections nonpartisan so it’s harder to cast a brainless party-line vote.

That’s where Republicans lose the plot.

Until now, my zombie analogy has just been a playful way to represent a sad truth about the culture war. Whether progressive or right wing, ideologues view their positions as obviously correct — and so morally superior that opponents must be mindless, soulless, or both.

But at least the policies conservatives usually pursue to combat “zombies” have some hope of beating back their rivals. They’re not irrational.

The same cannot be said for voting restrictions, such as the attempt to gut what remains of early voting in Kentucky or the ongoing effort to make elections in Louisville nonpartisan.

Interfering in Jefferson County’s election rules is unlikely to help conservatives. As I explained to town leaders in Hopkinsville recently, when they brought me in to summarize research on nonpartisan elections, they rarely prevent party-based voting. Usually, a light hint or two is sufficient for almost everyone to identify the “Democratic” candidate and vote accordingly.

To the extent going nonpartisan keeps voters from following their herd, expecting Democrats to struggle reflects an outdated conception that their side relies on, well, zombies.

Listen to what campaign workers out in the field are saying. They’ve never seen Democratic voters so attentive, so fired up (or so networked by smartphones and social media).

Look at the numerous disappointments Republican politicians have suffered since 2018. Educated voters are switching sides.

Note the consistent Republican underperformance in special elections, most recently New York’s.

It’s grassroots Republican supporters who have become listless, unfocused, and unmotivated. Making it harder to participate, such as by hiding who the GOP’s candidates are, just increases the odds their party is the one like a dead man walking.

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.

an 2 24 ah

Many frustrated supporters of President Joe Biden, now 81, have complained that they are sick of hearing so much discussion of his age and his mental acuity when his likely rival in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump, is 77 and has had more than his share of verbal stumbles.

Biden's gaffes, they argue, are overreported — especially in light of Trump's rambling speeches. During a recent campaign speech, Trump confused former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (the only Republican other than Trump left in the 2024 GOP presidential primary) with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

But The Atlantic's McKay Coppins, in an article published on February 16, lays out some reasons why Trump often gets a pass while Biden doesn't.

Coppins makes his point by describing an interview he conducted with Trump for BuzzFeed in 2014 — an interview in which Trump, the journalist stresses, sounded a lot like he does now.

Trump, according to Coppins, hated the article (which BuzzFeed published on February 13, 2014) and, true to form, railed against him on social media.

"On social media and in the press," Coppins observes, "countless detractors have speculated that Trump is losing touch with reality, or sliding into dementia, or growing intoxicated by his own conspiracy theories. The sense of progression is what unites all these claims — the idea that Trump is not just bad, but getting worse."

The reporter continues, "To test this theory, I went back and listened to the recording of my hour-long interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2014. Half-convinced by the narrative of the former president's worsening mental health, I expected to find in that audio file a more lucid, cogent Trump — one who hadn't yet been unraveled by the stresses and travails of power. What I found instead illustrates both the risks of returning him to the Oval Office and the futility of trying to prevent that outcome by focusing on his mental decline: He sounded almost exactly the same as he does now."

READ MORE:[Trump hits Jack Smith in latest SCOTUS plea ahead of immunity ruling: report

Trump, according to Coppins, "sounded crazy" in 2014 and still sounds "crazy" now. And the journalist lays out some reasons why Biden and Trump are unfairly held to different standards.

"Biden ran for president on a platform of stability and competence, and that image is undermined by suggestions of mental decline," Coppins argues. "Accusing Trump of going crazy doesn't work because, well, he has sounded crazy for a long time. The people who voted for him don't seem to mind — in fact, it's part of the appeal."

READ MORE:[Judge delivers double trouble in hush money hearing after Trump declares 'we want delays'

*Read The Atlantic's full reportat this link (subscription required).

===

alternet 2 24 no lnx

Scientist explains why Trump's supporters won't believe any evidence

Bobby Azarian

andRaw Story

February 04, 2024

When delving into the perplexing world of politics and the enigmatic figure of Donald Trump, we often encounter a peculiar phenomenon amongst his supporters: a staunch refusal to accept any criminal allegation or felony charge against him, no matter how compelling the evidence.

There are many neurological and psychological reasons for this irrational behavior. But today, we will focus on the mental phenomena I feel are most urgent to explore ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

First, a disclaimer: I am not a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist — I am a cognitive neuroscientist with a research focus in clinical psychology (in particular, anxiety’s effect on attention). In fact, much of my published work has appeared in psychology journals. As a science journalist, I have been covering the psychology of Trump and his supporters since he emerged on the political scene in 2015.

Now that Trump is running for president again while facing 91 felony charges, I feel a moral responsibility to illuminate all the mental factors that are driving Americans to support a man who is a master manipulator, and incapable of telling the truth. Unfortunately, these are qualities that are too common among presidential candidates, but Trump is a particularly egregious example, and therefore we must be vigilant. This article is meant to inform but also to warn voters of what is to come.

Cognitive challenge of disbelief

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems.

Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world.

ALSO READ: How Trump could run his campaign – and the nation – from behind bars

What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?")

Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play

Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health.

ALSO READ: Trump is embracing five ‘fake news’ outlets he supposedly hates

For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs.

Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions.

In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains.

Imagine these neural pathways as trails in a forest. The more one traverses the path of unquestioning belief, the clearer and more entrenched it becomes. The path of skepticism, however, grows over with doubts and becomes difficult to navigate. This cognitive reshaping primes individuals to accept, and even defend, far-fetched statements and suggestions presented by manipulative politicians.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

This cognitive bias occurs when individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their capability. Translated to the context of understanding complex legal matters, some Trumpists might believe they have a superior grasp of the former president’s predicament and dismiss expert opinions, thinking they're immune to being misled.

The Dunning-Kruger effect becomes especially concerning in the context of polarizing issues, such as climate change. A research study from the University of New Hampshire in 2017, for example, revealed that a mere 25 percent of those identifying as Trump supporters acknowledged the role of human actions in climate change. This is in stark contrast to the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists on the issue.

This troublesome cognitive bias could be making it easier for Trump to deliver unchallenged falsehoods to his more uneducated followers. In some cases, not only are these individuals uninformed, they are unlikely to seek new information on their own. In their minds, they have nothing to learn because Trump and his acolytes have already told them what they need to know.

Reevaluating our cognitive reflexes

It is important to state that these phenomena are not exclusive to Trump supporters or any particular political group; this article serves as a broader reflection on the cognitive shortcuts that our brains favor.

If we aspire to build a society less susceptible to misinformation, we must embark on a paradigm shift. Our educational approach should pivot from passive acceptance of supposed “facts” to the exhilarating pursuit of questioning authority and healthy skepticism (as too much skepticism can also lead to irrational thinking). Recognizing that belief, in many ways, is the brain's default mode rather than a conscious choice, can serve as the first step in this cerebral revolution.

In conclusion, the unwavering belief in Trump, despite the felony charges against him, is not solely a political matter but, for some, a manifestation of our brain's intrinsic tendencies. Understanding this cognitive dynamic is pivotal in addressing the challenges posed by misinformation and fostering a more critical and discerning society.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

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an 11 21

astrology // narcisism?

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yet again

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/scientists-establish-link-between-religious-fundamentalism-and-brain-damage/

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an 7 22

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown thatreligious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.

Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.

NEW: [How the 'unprecedented' Supreme Court leak made efforts to lobby conservatives on Roe 'all but impossible': report

Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.

To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.

Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.

Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.

These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.

The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.

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10 22

"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver focused his main story Sunday on "problems" that Republicans create so that they have something to solve.

Republicans are desperately trying to take over the House, Senate and a slew of offices that allow them to control elections in an effort to usher in restrictive election laws to put in more Republicans and eliminate any policy delivered by a Democrat for the past century.

Republicans pledged for almost ten years that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced, only to be outed for being unable to come up with the replacement. They have placed judges in top posts to eliminate the personal freedoms and medical privacy of women. They invented an idea that Kindergarteners are being taught they are evil for slavery and were convinced that any mention of LGBTQ should be banned from schools in Florida and other states that have followed.

Oliver focused on another top issue for the GOP: transgender sports. While there are many, many issues facing Americans, indeed the world, Republicans are concerned that one or two transgender people could bring down sports.

He began with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who ran a campaign ad claiming that she personally saved girls' sports in the state. There was one trans student about ten years ago in South Dakota, but Noem zeroed in on the possibility that one person ten years ago could one day be millions of trans students in the sparsely populated state.

Oliver pointed out that there were more girls playing sports in the Noem ad than there were trans kids in all of South Dakota sports. So, while Republicans like Noem complain about failures around inflation, healthcare and other problems they blame on Democrats, their solutions are focused on transgender sports.

Noem isn't the only one. A whopping 18 U.S. states have spent the past few years passing legislation to regulate who can urinate in a stall next to each other. While most people simply enter a bathroom, do their business and get out, in the mind of Republicans, restrooms are nefarious places where liberals are ushering in a plot to bring down society. They have yet to find any evidence of it, but they can't stop their minds from turning to anarchy as a result of a kid using the restroom.

The positive piece of Oliver's report is that he first reported on transgender rights nearly a decade ago and things have gotten a lot better. The crisis for the right-wing is that the American public has decided that they are accepting of same-sex marriage, eliminating a key issue that they have desperately clung to for years. Trans rights have now taken over that same desperate attempt to create a villain, make people afraid of himand then pass laws to protect children from him.

See Oliver's full segment in the video below:

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see narcissistic, interesting that it is contagious?

strong man I alone can fix it = fascism

also // psychopathy sociopath

capitalism / libtard /ayn rand self-ish

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7 22 an salon

famous British writer Samuel Johnson once criticized a political opponent's self-described patriotism by memorably pointing out that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Although Johnson lived before the advent of psychology and modern brain science, his observation has been at least partially vindicated by experts in subsequent centuries.

This does not mean there is anything wrong with celebrating the 4th of July with fireworks, good movies and learning about the founding fathers (even when it includes some ugly details). Feeling good about one's nation and your place in it is patriotism. But these days, many conflate patriotism with its more extreme cousin nationalism, which is predicated on superiority and competitiveness. You cannot merely be proud, but you must be proud of your nation's dominance – which means that you think in terms of winners and losers, friends and enemies.

Nationalism, because of its inherently tribal nature, can be as dangerous as the most potent illicit drug if the sentiment is used improperly.

One of the most famous early intellectuals to articulate a conclusion along these lines was Benedict Anderson, an Irish-American historian and political scientist. In his influential 1983 monograph "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism," Anderson observed that nations are "imagined political communities" in that the nature of the community itself is, in a literal sense, rather arbitrary. Prior to the Middle Ages, people derived equivalent identities from things like their religious affiliations or loyalties to particular monarchical lines.

This changed during the Enlightenment period for a number of reasons: Latin was replaced among political leaders by their local vernaculars, capitalism cultivated a new class of business leaders that wanted to control the state, the Reformation weakened the power of the Vatican, royal governments were on their way out as democratic movements popped up everywhere, and the printing press allowed people to feel kinship based on common languages and geographical landmarks. Even the Western world's collective sense of time shifted from a theological to a more secular perspective, particularly as literacy became more prevalent.

When combined, each of these factors led people to crave a new sense of community. Hence we have the popular notion that one should feel a sense of community with others based on being part of a common "nation," which by definition is imagined because members have a sense of "horizontal comradeship" even though they have never met and often come from radically different backgrounds.

In theory, this may seem harmless, but as the bloody nationalistic wars that have marred human existence since the late 18th century prove — World War I perhaps most prominent among them — people are willing to kill for, and die for, their nations.

Even when the behavior is not seen as that extreme, nationalism can still bring out the worst in people. Take President Donald Trump, who psychologists noted has stimulated narcissisticbehaviors in his followers by virtue of creating a cult of personality around his own seemingly narcissistic traits. While Americans were justifiably alarmed at that phenomenon, Trumpism is hardly alone or novel in tapping into collective narcissism. And what this leads to is not encouraging.

Writing for the journal Political Psychology in May, a group of American and British researchers examining Polish politics found that "national collective narcissism" tends to go hand in hand with nationalism, and additionally winds up being a strong predictor of whether a given person will hold nationalist sentiments. They concluded that "our analyses thus provide evidence that nationalism may be rooted in narcissistic exaggeration of the greatness of the national in-group rather than non-narcissistic national in-group satisfaction" — in other words, people are likely to hold nationalist views if they're already susceptible to narcissistic political styles.

Therefore, nationalism – which was created to form a sense of community – can bring out toxic traits in people. In addition, it is fueled by humanity's deepest insecurities and fears. (Hence the nationalist furor whipped up by a pandemic.) English author and psychology lecturer Steve Taylor PhD expressed a similar perspective in a 2020 article for Psychology Today.

"In my view, it makes more sense to explain modern day nationalism in terms of psychological factors," Taylor wrote. "There are some clues from the psychological theory of Terror Management. This theory — which has been validated by many studies — has shown that when people are made to feel insecure and anxious by being reminded of death, they tend to become more concerned with identity values such as nationalism, status and success."

To be clear, these sentiments do not only fuel nationalism. Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist from Wayne State University, further elaborated on the downsides of nationalism in a 2019 article from The Conversation:

"Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts," Javanbakht wrote. "Some examples are Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages. The typical pattern is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept." Nationalism, while not the only manifestation of this tendency, is certainly one of the most prominent.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/anna-delvey/

psych vuln grift

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an 1 22 corrob

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/scientists-establish-ink-between-religious-fundamentalism-and-brain-damage/

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.

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nice pix sign: evil vaccine agenda]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/personality-traits/

a new study explains how a number of dark personality traits are connected to the ideology of conspiracy theories. According to PsyPost, a study recently published by Personality and Individual Differences was conducted by Sara Hughes and Laura Machan. It indicates that "Machiavellianism, primary psychopathy, and collective narcissism" are traits that appear to coincide with the beliefs of those who buy into conspiracy theories.

Science Direct reports that the study, which focused on 406 participants from the United Kingdom, was based on an assessment of a number of personality measures. It also delved into individuals' "susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs and the mediating role of Covid related conspiracy beliefs on links between personality and intentional dissemination of Covid-19 conspiracies and willingness to obtain a Covid-19 vaccine."

The study focused on the characteristics of those who possess the dark triad traits and how they have a tendency to hold more hostility toward other groups. Participants completed a questionnaire to assess conspiracist ideation where they had the opportunity to provide their opinions with answers like: "There is no hard evidence that COVID really exists."

"To assess intention to be vaccinated against Covid-19, participants were asked what they would do if a vaccine were tested and approved and they had the opportunity to be vaccinated next week," the study indicates.

READ: 'You were gullible': Federal judge torches Trump's election lies — and a rioter who believed them]

Per PsyPost, their findings indicate the following:

"Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and collective narcissism have been previously linked to conspiracy mentality. Machiavellianism is concerned with the strategic manipulation of others. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness and lack of emotion, while secondary psychopathy is characterized by impulsivity and antisociality. Collective narcissism refers to an inflated sense of superiority extending to one's in-group."

Their research also highlights three potential limitations.

"First, rather than obtaining behavioral measures, participants were prompted to provide self-report ratings of their intentions to disseminate COVID-19 conspiracies. Second, given participants' knowledge relating to COVID-19 was not assessed, it could be the case that those with greater beliefs in Covid-19 conspiracies were lacking in factual knowledge. Lastly, given the cross-sectional nature of this work, the researchers do not make causal inferences about their findings."

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an 10 21

It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday's most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like it's a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox "News" and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

When Joe Biden was elected president the Republican Party and their joined-at-the-hip rightwing media did a sudden about-face from praising Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" to encouraging their followers to remain unvaccinated so President Biden would struggle to get the economy back on sound footing.

That, they figured, was their best bet to take back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, and they've stayed on-message ever since Biden took office on January 20th. As I noted in considerable detail back in July, death is their political strategy.

And now, as if to put a punctuation point on it, the headline at Raw Story warns: Fox News host uses Colin Powell's death to launch anti-vax rant: "Fully-vaccinated are dying of Covid."

Almost 750,000 Americans have died of Covid and recent research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that at as many as half of the 45 million Americans who've been diagnosed with the disease will suffer long term consequences, the main ones being dementia, exhaustion and damage to the heart and kidneys.

It used to be in American business that you knew where the psychopaths were: tobacco. It's an industry producing a product that, when used as directed, kills around a half-million Americans every year.

Being able to comfortably fall asleep every night knowing that the product of your workday had killed another 1,300 people is a rare competence that typically requires the mental illness of psychopathy.

About 1% of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: as many as 12% of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15% of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he's quite literally the only "true human being" on planet Earth.

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath's life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn't have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not "real people" like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths "lack the ability to feel empathy." Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and politics, as well as in criminal and prison environments.

Thus, the CEO of Fox "News" — the network that daily spreads vaccine misinformation leading to deaths that are tearing apart American families — tells the Hollywood Reporter that she sleeps "well at night." Just like the tobacco CEOs.

Meanwhile, people who watch Fox and all its imitators across various media are taking the implicit advice of Fox's primetime hosts and avoiding vaccination…and getting sick and in some cases dying.

They're embracing quack cures promoted on the network and across rightwing media, including hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, giving their viewers the false sense of security that if they get sick with this awful disease there's a ready cure at hand…so there's no need to get vaccinated.

Even worse, consumers of this media are doing their best to disrupt rational public health efforts like mask and vaccine mandates by harassing public health officials, school boards, and elected representatives across the country — all leading to even more disease and deaths.

When Americans realized, mostly as the result of massive lawsuits in the 1990s, that the CEOs of the tobacco industry were knowingly killing people (and even reaching out to addict children) we took action.

We limited access to this death-dealing product, from outlawing television advertising to limiting placement of cigarette vending machines and strict enforcement of age-limited retail sales. We also required that the product be honestly labeled: "Tobacco kills."

This isn't an option for media, and rightly so because of our First Amendment protections of the press (including this article). And nobody wants to take those freedoms and protections away.

But the most important and effective campaign our nation embarked on to cut tobacco use was the nationwide campaign to educate people about the dangers of tobacco use. We taught adults and schoolchildren alike how the industry was trying to addict them and showed them the consequences of using that deadly product.

Now that rightwing media has arguably caused more Americans to die in the past year than has tobacco, it's time to consider a similar strategy to balance the lies and misinformation streaming out of them every day.

If we can't rely on the news and social media industries' content producers or executives to stop spreading death-dealing misinformation, we can at least wake people up to the dangers of their products.

#RightwingMediaCausesDeath

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/

no lnx

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

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It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptomscan spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/right-wing-science-denial

no lnx grafx

The psychology behind right-wing authoritarians' denial of science

The Conversation September 17, 2021

by Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University

Vaccine refusal is a major reason COVID-19 infections continue to surge in the U.S. Safe and effective vaccines have been available for months, but as of mid-September 2021, only 65% of eligible American adults are fully vaccinated. In many areas, a majority of eligible adults haven't taken advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated.

In the U.S., polling on intent to get vaccinated shows a massive political divide. Counties that went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election show higher vaccination rates than counties that went for Donald Trump. Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee's summer meeting cheered the fact that the U.S. didn't meet Biden's July 4 vaccination goals for the country.

Politically motivated denial of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness tracks with a dramatic politicization of trust in science itself. In a survey conducted in June and July, Gallup found that the percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal" or “quite a lot of" trust in science is down, shockingly, from 72% in 1975 to only 45% today. Over the same period, confidence in science among Democrats is up from 67% to 79%.

Scientific institutions have never been perfect, but overall they have a tremendous track record of success – both in basic research and in applied sciences like epidemiology and immunology. The vast majority of expert opinion on, say, antibiotics, radio waves, orbital mechanics or electrical conductivity is accepted without complaint by the general public. Evidently people are satisfied with applied science in almost all walks of life.

So why is confidence in science so malleable, and what does a person's political orientation have to do with it?

The rejection of scientific expertise with regard to COVID-19 vaccines appears to be standing in for something else. As a philosopher who has studied science denial, I suggest that this “something else" includes factors like distrust in public institutions and perceived threats to one's cultural identity.

Ideologies that mesh with science denial

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Identifying as a Republican is very strongly associated with embracing central tenets of conservative ideology. A 2021 public opinion study confirms that endorsement of conservative political ideology is currently the dominant predictor of anti-science attitudes.

Another recent study of anti-science attitudes identifies several tendencies particularly associated with conservative ideology. People who hold anti-science beliefs tend to be sympathetic toward right-wing authoritarianism – that is to say, they are conformists who defer to selected authority figures and who are willing to act aggressively in the name of those figures.

They also tend to support group-based hierarchy, with “superior" groups dominating “inferior" groups. Political psychologists call this “social dominance orientation" and see it in, for example, attitudes about racial or gender equality.

Indeed, social scientists looking at the causes of science denial have increasingly narrowed in on two contributing causes. Certain personality traits, including comfort with existing social and cultural hierarchies and a predilection for authoritarianism, go along with a skepticism for science. So do closely related aspects of identity, such as identification with a dominant social group like white evangelical Christians.

Conservative traditionalists from the historically dominant white Christian demographic in the U.S. have had the most reason to feel threatened by science.Evolution by natural selection is threatening to many doctrinal religious traditionalists.Climate science threatens the economic status quo that conservatives seek to conserve. The whole concept of a public health mandate runs counter to the “small government" individualism of political conservatives.

Further, because COVID-19 has been starkly politicized since the beginning of the pandemic, public health measures have become directly associated with the political left. Rejection of such measures has consequently become a signal of political and cultural identity.

Other recent studies on science denial have shown that people who don't have a lot of confidence in the honesty and reliability of others, as well as in social institutions like government, academia and media, tend to deny the dangers of COVID-19. Low social trust tends to track with conservative political orientation – in particular, withsupport for Trump. His supporters are much more likely to say that scientific inquiry is driven by political considerations.

Grasping for a sense of control

Increasing economic inequality and racial and ethnic diversification are also part of the science denialism mix.

One school of thought in psychology, called compensatory control theory, holds that many social phenomena – including ideological science denial – stem from the basic human need for a sense of control over one's environment and life outcomes. According to this theory, perceived threats to one's sense of personal control can motivate denial of scientific consensus. [koch afp grn police ad]The idea is that due to a combination of economic insecurity, demographic changes and the perceived erosion of cultural norms favoring whites, some people feel an existential threat to the white supremacy they've long benefited from – which in turn spurs them to deny government warnings about the dangers of COVID-19.

I believe this compulsive defensiveness plays a big part in the phenomenon of science denial, once trusted elites like politicians or news media hosts trigger the inclination to oppose some particular science-based public policy. You can't control the coronavirus – or inequality, or a changing culture – but you can control whether you take the vaccine or wear a mask. This sense of control is implicitly but powerfully attractive on a deep, emotional level.

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The need for control may also explain an attraction to politicians or media figures who promise to give you your power back by endorsing unproven, alternative home remedies.[horse rx v big pharma?]

Denial feeds on political polarization

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As I discuss in my book, “The Truth About Denial," I think that science denial, including COVID-19 vaccine denial, is probably best seen as the result of vicious feedback loops. Factors like economic pain, white Christian identity and low social trust play off one another in populations experiencing relative social and informational isolation. This denialism can take hold more easily in people who have chosen to limit their experiences to relatively homogeneous geographic areas, social contexts and news media environments.

In the short run, the failure of a society to vaccinate enough people to get COVID-19 under control will dramatically change life for everyone for years to come. The larger issue is the way science itself has become politicized in ways never seen before. This development endangers the ability of organized society to respond effectively to pandemics and other existential threats, including climate change.

Is there any hope of depolarizing the issue of COVID-19 vaccination, or trust in science itself? I'd say probably not until leaders in conservative politics, media and religion exert a concerted effort to change the narrative.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/far-right/

bobby Azarian and Raw Story August 05, 2021

Do not be alarmed, but consider this article a prediction and a warning. Actually, it's okay to be a little alarmed, because recent events—like the storming of the Capitol—are certainly cause for concern. Let's call it what it is; Donald Trump has created a cult and radicalized its members. QAnon also shares a large part of the responsibility, whoever they are. We may not be able to see it because Trump has been banned from Twitter and Q conversation cleaned from social media, but behind the scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers.

How do we know that it is as serious as I say; that this is not just more fear mongering? Well, for one, people have died. Heather Heyer, a counterprotester protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. Last year a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. On the day of the Capitol riot, a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. In addition to these troubling events, many others who will go unnamed have been the victims of hate crimes that can be traced to the alt-Right, pro-Trump movement.

But the causalities have not only been on one side. Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt was fatally wounded by a cop as the mob tried to breach a door, another frightening moment caught on video. The point I'm making has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified—though saying that level of force was necessary strikes me as uncomfortably close to Right-wing apologists who defend cops that shoot unarmed black men. The point is that the violence is escalating, and there's every reason to believe that escalation will continue. To use Newton's third law as a metaphor—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, what does this mean for the future of America?

Since aggression provokes fear, and fear promotes aggression, a dangerous feedback loop has been established, dividing the nation to such a degree that something like civil war seems imminent. It may be a "cold civil war," but there will still be violence, destruction, and death. There will also be more gridlock in Washington, which makes any kind of progress impossible. It is hard to calculate the suffering that could have been avoided with a functional Congress, but we can be sure it is substantial. And if the division gets too severe, which is where we are headed, there will be a point of no return. Social chaos and economic collapse will follow, the United States will lose its status as a superpower, and life as we know it, will cease. If the pandemic showed us anything, it is that despite how advanced we are technologically, we are not protected from disaster, and our way of life can change overnight.

The good news is that this gloomy future is only inevitable should we choose not to intervene. But we do have to make a conscious effort to avoid catastrophe if we want any chance of being successful. I'm not talking about compromising, or forgiving, or forgetting—because we should do none of those things. I'm proposing something altogether new, something radical to stop Right-wing radicalism. But to understand the solution, and why it is necessary, we first have to get a clearer understanding of the problem, and of the predictive power of science.

The Predictive Power of Terror Management Theory

To those skeptics who consider a civil war of sorts an unlikely scenario, just ask yourself how likely any of the events mentioned above would have seemed in the pre-Trump era. Imagine taking a time machine back to 2014, and telling people that the reality show star Donald Trump would be our next president. That alone would sound ridiculous. Now imagine telling people that thousands of his supporters would storm the Capitol—many armed—in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. It would sound like some zany plot for an over-the-top comedy. Now imagine that after such event, and after trying to get his vice president killed, Trump would still own the Republican party and all of conservative media. On the surface, this outcome seems so improbable that it makes one doubt our ability to predict the future at all.

Despite how unlikely this general scenario might have seemed, I'm going to argue that it was in fact predictable with a high degree of statistical certainty, if one had the proper theoretical framework through which to understand those events as they were unfolding. That framework is called Terror Management Theory(TMT)*, and this paradigm from social psychology will be our sense-making lens in a time where nothing seems to make much sense.*

Armed with the logic of Terror Management Theory, and an understanding of the relevant neuroscience, I was able to predict the rise of Trump, the white Nationalist movement that put him in office, the Q problem that led to the Capitol attack, and the refusal to accept the results of the election by Trump and his supporters—many months in advance. These predictions will be explained later in the article. No, I am not a psychic, but I did have a crystal ball called "science."

Karl Popper, the father of the philosophy of science, said the riskier the prediction made by a scientific theory, the more convincing it is when that prediction comes true. And you can be sure that when I was making such predictions, in articles for websites like Raw Story, Daily Beast, and Psychology Today, they seemed to describe highly unlikely outcomes. That is, if one were getting their analyses from mainstream news media and professional statisticians unfamiliar with the effects of "mortality salience"—in other words, making people think about death, or making them feel that there is a looming existential threat. I bring up these predictions not to say "I told you so" or for bragging rights; rather, it is a plea for the reader to take the predictions of the theory seriously.

To understand how Terror Management Theory can be used to predict the collective behavior of a society when existential threat looms—whether that threat is ISIS, Right-wing terror, or the pandemic—a brief introduction is in order. If you are already familiar with the theory and its relevance to Trump supporter psychology from past articles published at Raw Story, know that this piece presents new insights and ties up many seemingly unrelated features of cognition in a way that illuminates precisely why everything happened the way it did. The Trump loyalist is a mystery we are about to unravel, and in doing so, we come to see that the average MAGA maniac had little choice over their behavior.

Cultural Worldviews are Death-Anxiety Buffers

Terror Management Theory, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book from the 1970s called The Denial of Death, has been supported by hundreds of psychology and neuroscience studies. According to the theory, most of human behavior is driven by our subconscious fear of death. Unlike most if not all other animals, we have an awareness that one day we will inevitably die, for reasons that are beyond our control. This realization leads to an existential fear that is always bubbling beneath the surface. Without any way to cope with that cold hard fact of life—or fact of death, I should say—it can be difficult to get up in the morning, and to go on living, knowing it is all in futility.

How do we deal with our fear of death and unrelenting existential angst? Through cultural worldviews.

According to TMT, as a way of dealing with persistent death anxiety, humans created cultural worldviews—like religions, national identities, and political ideologies—to ease our fears and distract us from the fact that we will soon be gone, and probably forgotten. These worldviews make us feel safe and permanent by providing paths to immortality.

Through the concept of an afterlife, religions make literal immortality possible, while political ideologies and national identities give us symbolic immortality. In other words, they make us feel like we're part of a group and a movement that will outlive the individual. Worldviews also give life a meaning and a purpose. Whether we identify as Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, we all belong to a tribe. Some tribes are just more ideologically extreme than others, and less accepting of outsiders. This applies even to atheists and anarchists, who are often just as ideological as the ideologies they are trying to escape.

So, worldviews are a double-edged sword: on one hand they give us direction and comfort, on the other they divide us into in-groups and out-groups, turning fellow humans into spiritual or political enemies. The unfortunate result is tribalism. Racism can be thought of as a specific type of tribalism, as tribalism proper would include other types of prejudice, like bias against people of other nationalities, religions, and political parties.

Tribalism, or loyalty to one's social group and aggression toward outsiders, is bad enough when times are good, but when there is an atmosphere of existential fear lingering over society for whatever reason—terror attacks, political incompetence, or a pandemic—tribal behavior gets turned up to eleven. In response to mortality salience, we double-down on our beliefs and try to force them on dissimilar others, and if they resist, we try to punish them. Whether the purpose of this punishment is to enforce fairness or to get revenge is largely in the eye of the beholder.

Understanding racism as emergent from tribalism can make sense of many confusing things. For example, during the Capitol riot, footage from Fox News showed more than a few black protestors in the audience. CNN cameras showed practically none, and we will probably never know whether Fox was selectively focusing on the minorities in the crowd, or if CNN was selecting them out of shot, though we can reasonably assume the truth is probably somewhere in between. While the minorities appeared to be safe in the crowd of QAnons and Trump soldiers, Nancy Pelosi would have undoubtedly gotten mauled by the mob. This of course does not mean that many of the Alt-Right rioters were not racist—it simply means they interpreted the minorities in the crowd to be tribe defectors, and as long as they show allegiance to the Nationalist movement or conspiracy theory mindset that signals they belong to the right tribe, the white tribe, they are accepted.

While the Alt-Right is mostly composed of Christians and Republicans, their Christian-American worldview has evolved into the more-extreme philosophical framework outlined by the tribe leaders—Donald Trump, Q, and conservative talk show hosts looking to boost ratings. At the same time, theseinfluencers are monitoring social media and gauging sentiment on the ground [quantifiable instant feedback A/B test?!], so the views of the tribe members and leaders evolve together, and this coevolution is guided largely by the atmosphere of existential fear, which is enhanced by the fear mongering coming from the top. And then, Trump's reassuring words, and Q's perceived righteousness, provide scared and confused human beings with a philosophy that gives them comfort and purpose. It is difficult if not impossible to reach these people with reason alone, as reason is not going to make them feel safe or comforted or inspired. And if the reasoning is perceived as being based on principles from an opposing tribe's worldview, they will flat out reject that logic on principle alone. That is not to say these people are completely unreachable—it's just going to take a lot more than reasoning with them.

Predictions Come True

What were the sources of existential threat that created the conditions that would put an opportunist like Trump in the most powerful position in the world? In 2016, I wrote an article for the website Aeon titled How the Fear of Death Makes People More Right-Wing, which argued that the Brexit and Trump movements were catalyzed by existential fear created by the string of ISIS attacks that had recently rocked the world. Prior to that essay, in January—almost a year before the election—I wrote an article for Raw Story called Donald Trump Has a Mental Disorder That Makes Him a Dangerous World Leader, which over the course of his presidency would receive upwards of 30 million views, making it the website's most popular article ever published. In July of 2016, when all the pundits and statisticians were predicting a blowout by Hillary Clinton, I published another article titled A Neuroscientist Explains Why Trump is Winning, and one month later another piece titled The More People Think About Death, the More They Think About Voting for Trump, which directly linked Terror Management Theory to Trump's rabid support. A 2016 Daily Beast article along the same lines, called Why Do Some People Respond to Trump? It's Biology 101, issued a warning for voters in its concluding paragraph:

"The rise of Trump has defied almost all logic. But he isn't appealing to logic. He is appealing to our most basic survival instincts. Those include fear and the natural tendency to thrive and conquer. This presidential election will be an important test for our nation. We will see if we are evolved enough for our logic to overcome our instincts."

Apparently we were not. Over the next few years, I would write more than a dozen articles on Trump-related psychology for Raw Story and Psychology Today that would receive millions of views, and land me offers of representation by fancy literary agencies, and media requests for appearances on popular web shows like the Young Turks' and the. In these interviews I described how Trump would respond as he began to lose power, based on insights from Terror Management Theory and the neuroscience of narcissism. Again, I deserve no special credit for these predictions; had I not been introduced to Terror Management Theory by a colleague, I would have been just as clueless as the pundits and statisticians. However, Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist who wrote The Denial of Death, and, the psychologist who turned Becker's idea into an actual testable theory, are prophets in my book. Prophets of death, I guess you'd call them.

A more recent article, posted in September of 2020 at Psychology Today, titled How Trump and Media Allies Target the Mentally Vulnerable, had another clear warning. The teaser text read, "We can expect that conspiracy theories will be weaponized this election (again)." In it I explain how Trump and Q targeted people with schizophrenia and related disorders, by exploiting their heightened sensitivity to patterns (which are often not actually there).

In another article published around the same time, I warned that the division was getting so bad that we could expect the election results to be rejected by half of the country. Despite these dire predictions being widely broadcast, the future that the science was foreshadowing seemed to be unavoidable. Why? Because unless we can learn to mentally override our fears and biases, they will completely control us, and they will make us tribal. But we are not totally hopeless—if we understand the neuroscience underlying these phenomena, we can fight back.

The Prefrontal Cortex is the Source of "Free Will"

The kind of person who is likely to be a Trump extremist is also likely to have impaired or suboptimal brain function in an important region known as the prefrontal cortex. A healthily-functioning prefrontal cortex is what allows one to override their primitive instincts, to think rationally, and to respond to stressful events in a controlled manner, rather than being controlled by fear and reflexive behavior. It does this by arming the conscious agent with a higher form of self-regulation and control, known as cognitive control, executive control, or effortful control.

To be clear, impaired cognitive control is not just a problem we see with Right-wing radicals. It is connected to ideological extremism more generally, so poor prefrontal activation is a concern for Left and Right-wingers alike. In fact, this cognitive profile is also associated with stimulant and alcohol addiction, as well as mental illness, like schizophrenia. And in super stressful times, like during a pandemic, we all become mentally ill in some way (anxiety, depression, etc.), and therefore less in control of our biases and behavior, which limits our ability to act freely. Why? Because the cognitive mechanisms that normally allow us to do so dissolve, leaving us with only preprogrammed behavior.

While some people will claim that they have no racial biases, or any biases for that matter, a famous experiment called the implicit bias task reveals that almost all of us do, and there's plenty of data to prove it. This bias affects how we process information and perceive the social world around us. However, this bias is subconscious and not easily detected with the naked eye. This has the unfortunate result of making it easy to ignore. Whether or not our implicit racial bias leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically the amygdala, which lights up when we experience something we perceive to be threatening, and the prefrontal cortex, whose job it is to regulate and suppress that fear response and the associated behavior. But if the prefrontal cortex isn't working right, it can't do its job.

Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display a stronger implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in the amygdala.An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden sensation of feeling scared. In people with healthy functioning brains, the fast amygdala response activates the prefrontal cortex, which is slower and plays a regulatory role. When the fear system is triggered, prefrontral areas work to assess the situation rationally, calming the mind and curbing fear-evoked behavior. Thanks to specific neural regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain exercises cognitive control, suppressing the tendency toward tribalism.

The problem is, not everyone has a properly functioning prefrontal cortex, and these people are the ones whose biases control them. They cannot reason those fearful surges away because they lack the mechanisms that make that kind of high-level reasoning possible. Since alcohol and amphetamine addiction can exacerbate this problem, Fox News viewers with such vices will be more vulnerable to the effects of fear mongering, and if they are given a "call to action" by a tribe leader like Trump or Q, more likely to act aggressively in an effort to push their worldview on others. Most supporters will stay home, but with many millions of followers tuned in, it is not surprising that a few thousand showed up to storm the Capitol.

So now that we understand the root cause of it all, perhaps we should view Trump and Q followers differently. They are not normal supporters, but more akin to cult members who have been radicalized by fear, their fates determined due to a lack of free will—which refers to our ability to override our primitive programming and tribal instincts. They are, in a sense, victims. They have been duped and brainwashed by rigid ideologies almost from the time of birth, and those ideologies have been weaponized by divisive politicians like Donald Trump. Does it make more sense to want to punish or fight these people, or to recognize them as agents who've lost their autonomy and ability to reason effectively?

The enemies are the influencers intentionally deceiving these vulnerable people, stoking their fears and fueling their biases. You may say some were racist, crazy, or ignorant before Trump, but we now see how that got that way. Politicians create fear and hatred for votes, Alex Jones does it for clicks, Fox does it for ratings, and QAnon does it for…chaos, I suppose. These are the people we must not let win. The actual followers are pawns in their game.

So, what can we do to release these people from the grips of their psychological captors?

The Path to Deradicalization

The solution is multi-faceted, and change won't happen overnight. One major goal would be to alter the worldview and belief structure of the extremist, and another would be to strengthen their prefrontal cortex, so that the agent is in control, rather than being controlled by the primitive brain.

Fortunately, one fascinating feature of the brain is its plasticity—or ability to rewire itself in response to new information and experience throughout life. Through exposure to new stimuli, new synaptic connections can be formed, creating neural pathways that can promote a restructuring of old and rigid belief systems. To facilitate cognitive restructuring, meditation and attentional exercises can train the prefrontal cortex to attenuate a hyperactive amygdala and control those bad instincts. A campaign to make these kinds of practices commonplace should be a goal of scientists and educators. It is not easy, but it is certainly possible to reverse biased and even racist tendencies through cognitive interventions. Counterbias training has proven effective in making police officers more aware of their implicit biases, though enhanced awareness does not always immediately translate into changes in behavior.

That could require more extreme therapeutic measures, such as pharmacological treatments to reset the brain. Psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms, or LSD, supplemented with talk therapy could be an effective way to alter rigid worldviews and dissolve biases. In a 2016 article, I suggested LSD therapy for Donald Trump, and although the title may make one chuckle, I seriously believe it would be the most effective way to get Trump to understand the effects of the division he's sowed. Psychedelics work by relaxing belief structures, so that the agent can "achieve a healthy revision of pathological beliefs," to quote psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris. Unfortunately, this remedy would require that the extremist be open-minded enough to give such an experimental treatment a try.

Given that the average Q follower is all about "waking up" and seeing reality as it is, it is not unreasonable to think that a psychedelics campaign could catch on in those communities. Studies have shown that the use of psychedelics is associated with a decrease in authoritarian political views and an increase in views associated with liberalism, like open-mindedness and empathy (though one could argue some "liberals" today have neither of these). These drugs work by dissolving the ego, making one feel more connected to nature and to others.

But the real problem is that our most popular worldviews—the major religions, political ideologies, and national identities—divide us into tribes, and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and shared human interests. If Terror Management Theory is correct, then the obvious solution is a new cultural and political worldview that unites us all under a common existential goal: the continued survival, progress, and eventually, the outward expansion of humanity. This worldview is called the Cosmic Perspective, and I have outlined it in a Psychology Today blog post titled, Could a 'Cosmic Religion' Unite a Divided Nation?:{ You can learn about how the Cosmic Perspective naturally emerges from Terror Management Theory in this YouTube video on my channel (Road to Omega), } Trump Divided America—Here's How We Heal :{.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.}:

Part of being liberal means being compassionate, but this is just as much about practicality as it is empathy. There's really no other choice than trying to make things better. I'll be playing my part by creating more content aimed at coming together—call it propaganda for a psychedelic revolution. Coming together does not mean meeting in the middle—as extreme centrism can be just as counterproductive as any other kind of extremism. We need radical solutions that push us forward, and we cannot go forward if we're at war.

If you'd like to be part of the solution, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, Road to Omega, which is a project aimed at fighting misinformation, healing division, and redistributing wealth and power in America. The project will be tokenized with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and token holders will benefit from the project's success, so there is value in participating.

Simply stated, Road to Omega is an effort to save the world with science and epistemology. The plan entails:

healing the division in America and abroad by fighting tribalism

fighting misinformation with a

decentralizing wealth and power with blockchain technology

creating a new political party

unifying the sciences with a new kind of "Theory of Everything"

dissolving the boundary between science and spirituality

developing a "religion for robots" that provides a code of ethics for AIs

If you'd like to read more about Road to Omega before subscribing, check out the first Substack newsletter—a plan to save the world with science and epistemology—here. This post lays out the plan in detail and tells you how you can get involved. Alternatively, you can read the much shorter About page.Aside from the newsletter, I will be continuing to publish articles at Raw Story along the same lines, so stay tuned!

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian

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