Thursday, September 08, 2005

Great line

From Americablog: "...we need to stop focusing on the fact that 36% of Americans like Bush -- they'd like him even if he ate their children."

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

yup; it's a cult.

and they are most definitely brainwashed. intentionally and intensively brainwashed.

there is an old psych study, cannot recall who did it (no matter), but it consisted of two rooms, one with subjects waiting to go in the other room, where there were 'confederates.' a series of pairs of parallel lines were drawn on the blackboard. most of the line pairs are of unequal length. the confederates in the main room stand as if they are also subjects, and one subject enters the room and stands in the line. beginning at the other end of the line, each person is asked to say if this pair of lines is of equal or unequal length, and they go down the line like this for each pair of lines. unbeknownst to the new subject, all the confederates have been told to say 'equal' even when the pairs are clearly not.

i honestly don't know the exact percentage of naive subjects who simply go along with the crowd on these decisions, but it was - as best i can recall - astronomical, something like 70% or more.

i was a subject once for a replication in college, and i can tell you, these lines are FAR from close to equal in length; there was no judgment call here.

for the life of me, i STILL, twenty years later, canNOT believe anyone would forfeit their own perceptual honesty for WHAT??? there were absolutely no stakes here, that i could see.

but, there it is. and now, here it is.

Anonymous said...

III, that's an interesting study. I never
heard of it. I never took psychology myself
but a girlfriend who did told me that the
principle was well established that when an
activity does NOT reward you, you are more
likely to ascribe great benefits to it than
you do when it does. That is...cutting your
losses is more psychologically stressful
than is staying the course--even when
something is not working out.

Anonymous said...

anon, yeah, your girlfriend is right, and there are several 'decision making' studies to support that.

essentially, folks are coward in addition to being mindless cult sheep. but then i suppose it's all of a piece.

Anonymous said...

That psychological principle is called "cognitive dissonance", which is an apt description of the Bush administration mode of operation.

When reality doesn't match the rhetoric, you get "dissonance", and the brain has to cope. But it chooses to believe the rhetoric, because otherwise it would have to conclude that Georgy Boy is a liar, and you were taken by him, and that the country is defenseless and run by incompetents and thieves.

At some point, of course, reality clobbers you if you dissonance drives you in the wrong direction, but even then some people persist....

Anonymous said...

Agreed, Anon. Bushco understand that they need not govern, they must only manage perceptions.
It is the reason why bush was surrounded with firemen in his photo op. See, sheeple? Your Dear Leader is supported by big, strong powerful men. Remember 9/11? Your "team" is still on top!
It is the reason why, in Potemkin villages passing as public appeareances, you see everyone clapping in unison on cue.

Herr Karl Roverer's primary function is to know when this collective cognitive dissonance may rear it's ugly head - like now - and manufacture images that will be reassuring to the masses who desperately WANT to be reassured. Forgive the unfortunate pun, but for once, Karl seems to have missed the boat on this one.

Kim in PA

Anonymous said...

I know monkey-boy's approval ratings appear to be 36%, but those are actually responses to specific poll questions on hot ticket items and not the percentage of people who would today vote to replace him with Kerry or another Democrat. Of all the ReThuglicans I know who voted for our resident commander-in-thief, they would still vote the same way today. They may disagree on a few policy decisions, but they would prefer Bushit to the alternative Democratic leader. It's worse than the sheeple Psych study, they actually LIKE what Bush is doing overall! Truly scary witnessing the fall of a once great nation.

CathyW said...

LMAO. Great comment. Wish I had thought of it.