The Big Picture: Strategies They Use to Confuse

This post builds on my introduction to the topic of propaganda by going into a bit more detail on the sociological and psychological forces that brought us QAnon, All Lives Matter, and more. Settle in and think about what you've read about social problems like immigration, climate change, and violent crime. 

Got it?

Our Minds Work Against Us

We like to think of ourselves as rational and independent thinkers largely unburdened by nonsense, superstition, and silliness. This is not true. Sorry. Our minds lead us astray in several ways. There is really far too much psychological research to even summarize in a couple of posts, but there a few concepts in psychology that can be super useful in understanding how and why we misunderstand social problems. You may recognize some of these so-called cognitive biases from other things you've heard or read. 

Confirmation Bias - We like to think of ourselves and rational and perceptive people guided by logic and common sense. Common sense is not a useful concept but never mind. What really happens is that we tend to hold positions based on habit, emotion, and personal experience. Then we try to reinforce those positions by looking for evidence that our hard-core attitude toward illegal immigration is correct, for example. 

The Recency Effect - Things you experienced or learned about recently tend to loom larger in our minds than things further in the past. Something you learned about the effectiveness of gun control weeks ago, might be overshadowed by a case of a homeowner defending himself from armed intruders a couple of nights before. 

So, yeah, those cognitive biases are more than abstract concepts psychologists talk about to make themselves feel important. 

Other People Work Against

I've mentioned availability entrepreneurs in other blog posts. To review, an availability entrepreneur is an activist, vlogger, talk show host who focuses on making sure his or her audience is aware of certain behaviors that paint a certain picture that appeals to the audience. Conservatives share stories of feminists or environmentalists or Blacks behaving badly. Liberals share information on gun owners accidentally shooting the wrong people, Trump supporters being nasty, and so on. 

These things don't paint an honest and accurate picture of reality. Rather, a steady stream of those stories just reinforces whatever worldview or perspective the availability entrepreneur wants to present. If you are already biased in the direction of thinking gun owners are cavemen or Blacks are less evolved than Whites, then these stories tend to stick. This is how belief bias works. Belief bias is like the smug intellectual cousin of confirmation bias. 

Politicians are good at oversimplifying and misrepresenting. 

The straw man or woman gets dragged out at every debate and in almost every online discussion. Conservatives attack a non-existent liberal plan to ban guns. Liberals attack a nonexistent conservative plan to end all regulations on gun ownership. Neither side really has the claimed position. Liberals don't want to ban all guns or pay for ALL abortions with tax money. Conservatives don't really want to end environmental regulations or destroy unions. But, attacking straw men is easier than attacking real arguments. 

Moving the Goalposts - Most of us have done this and all of us had this done to us more than once over the years. 

Social Forces Work Against Us

Pundits online, on the radio, and on television tend to be rewarded for keeping people tuned in. The more attention they get, the more money their networks can charge for advertising. If you support your YouTube "news" channel with ad revenue, you are going to work hard on getting attention. Sorry to say, but getting lots of attention is antithetical to sharing valuable information and analysis. 

Modern life keeps people busy. This is not a criticism of the modern world. We get tons of benefits from our technologically advanced, capitalist society. We also have less time than we might like for thinking about things and researching things. We naturally look for shortcuts. Sometimes those shortcuts mislead us. 

How to Protect Your Mind, An Introduction

The political sphere is full of nonsense and deliberate obfuscation. This is the first of a series of posts that focus on, well, on propaganda. Not on how it works or why the MSM is propaganda or anything like that. This series is about the ways that politicians and pundits mislead people with a variety of shady tricks. 

Beware of Availability Entrepreneurs

For every issue, there are groups on both sides misrepresenting the opposition and elevating marginal voices to where they seem to represent mainstream views. 

These people are called availability entrepreneurs. They are the dope dealers, "get rich quick" hucksters, and law of attraction kooks for the social world. They feed us what we want to hear and give us evidence that:

• gun control causes crime
• the patriarchy sucks
• feminists are stupid
• liberals hate America

Many people buy these lies and misrepresentations because they don't know how to spot the lies and misrepresentations. Many people, for example, don't know there is a difference between a theory in science and a theory in common usage. Many people don't know how to use rates, proportions, and statistics to understand a social problem. 

Internet Comments Teach Us About...Not Much

I don' know who needs to hear this...but Internet comments are not a valid survey of public opinion. It can be tempting to read comments and conclude Republicans are evil or Democrats are stupid. Insert the group of your choice there, and nothing changes. You can't learn anything about a group by reading some comments on a news story.

The comments on political stories and questions and videos are mostly nonsensical ranting and raving. You have no idea if the posts are from mainstream conservatives or liberals or feminists or gun owners. You just get the views of people who could be bothered to stay on that page and opine. 

It gets worse. Others will jump into the discussion and pretend we've learned about the "liberal views" or the "Republican view" when we really only know the opinions of people who bothered to share. And we have to assume they are honest to even say that. Some people are trolling. 

Principles and Practices:

Pretend to confuse cause and effect. Never assume anyone with a college degree is confused about how this works. They are hustling you to get your money. Just because X happened and then Y happened, don't believe that X caused Y or had anything to do with Y. The cause and effect relationship has to be established with some additional data, and logic. Anyone who skips over either of those things is trying to pick your pockets. 

Boiling down a continuum to this or that...Let's go back to gun control. How many liberals want to take all of the guns? How many conservatives think all gun control laws violate the Constitution? In both cases, the answer is the same - very few. Let's see why. 

Polling organizations have asked dozens of gun control questions, at least, and just in the past 20 years. What have these researchers found? That liberals hate guns and conservatives love the Second Amendment? No! Let's look at some relevant examples: 

An April 2021 Pew Research poll found that 20% of people who are Republican or lean Republican want existing gun laws to be more strict, in contrast to 81% of respondents who are Democrats or lean Democratic. 

An October 2019 survey found that over 90% of Republicans AND Democrats want to make it harder for people with mental illnesses to get guns. 

If you do a Google search on "gun control" and "Pew" or "Gallup" you will find other studies that show a variety of opinions by political orientation. You will almost certainly find predictable differences between Republicans and Democrats. What you won't find is widespread support for the idea that liberals are coming for all of the guns. 

"But, you see all these quotes from liberal politicians like Pelosi and Schumer." No, you don't. This is a dishonest hustle that activist on the Right and the Left use to confuse people. You can string together a series of quotes from politicians over X number of years to "prove" almost anything. I could use this trick to "prove" that Republicans want to ban atheism. Of course, this would be utter nonsense, and if you are a smart conservative, you will recognize it as utter nonsense. 

Now, try the same logic when someone tries to con you with a list of "crazy shit" gun grabbers say. Have enough respect for yourself to tune out these messages. Don't watch these hustlers on TV and don't listen to their shows or YouTube videos. 

So, there isn't a huge gulf between conservative and liberal Americans. You are going to find a similar phenomenon on abortion, college, same-sex marriage, and other issues. Don't take my word for it - that's one of the big problems we have today, people just nod and go along with people who tell them what they want to hear. 

Abusing Fact and Logic to Sell Lies

Politicians and pundits have many techniques for selling bad ideas and spreading misunderstanding about, well, all sorts of things that I described previously. Dishonest politicians, but I repeat myself, have a variety of techniques they use. 

Decision Science Abuse - We can use two different criteria for making decisions about our own actions and about things like gun control policy. We can focus on the values or the moral principles at stake. Or, we can consider the consequences of our decision, and decide whether those consequences are acceptable. Most people operate on a combination of consequences and moral principles when making decisions. 

Do we ban abortion? Assuming this was possible, should it be done? Did your answer come from an abstract principle or from considering the likely consequences of banning abortion. 

Statistics Abuse - Pretending to not know about rates, percentages, means, and medians. Abusing terms like "theory" as in "I have a theory that liberals hate rich people because they keep trying to raise taxes." A real theory would help us predict what people will say about various social issues, based on their answers to some carefully selected and thoroughly tested questions about their political orientation. 

Change the subject, usually by saying "What I know is..." followed by something irrelevant.

Overemphasis on extreme behavior and making it look mainstream. A woman with shaved head and nose ring yells about taking the guns and gets famous on the right-wing Web. An articulate, conventional-looking Leftist female explains why we need red flag laws, and she gets very little attention. Why? It helps conservative pundits keep their audience hooked. 

But for...We would have the best school system in the world, but for certain urban school districts. Drawing an imaginary line around groups or areas you'd rather not talk about does not make them go away. Impoverished, underperforming school districts exist in the United States regardless of some political hack's wish they were in another country.

So, I hope you appreciated this little preview of our own thinking, and our lovely "influencers" undermine our ability to think about social problems. If you do, please subscribe and comment. I plan to delve deeply into every area mentioned here, and some more.