One thing that I’ve found interesting in the past week has been the zeal with which the McCain campaign has gone with the “lying to the American people” strategy. Whether it’s choosing to have Sarah Palin continue repeating the “Bridge to Nowhere” lie or John McCain running ads against Obama that are chock-ful-o-lies, the McCain camp decided last week to go all-in on the lying strategy, betting that the Obama campaign and, more important, the press wouldn’t call the bluff.
But both did. And the lies were so audacious, so over-the-top, so clearly lies that the press has taken a giant step back from John McCain, and granted him the adversarial relationship he’s been claiming in the face of all evidence.
Today’s data point in this shift is long-time tire-swing devoteé Richard Cohen, who pretty much repudiates McCain as sharply as he can:
The precise moment of McCain’s abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on “The View,” the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig — an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.
“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”
Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like “Home Cooking” or “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation “I approve this message” was just boilerplate. But he didn’t.
“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.
Actually, they are.
Now, let me remind you, that’s not some guy with a website saying that. It’s Richard Cohen, WaPo denizen and inveterate blog-hater. He’s the guy who put the “conventional” in “conventional wisdom.” So when he writes stuff like this:
McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.
Or this:
McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.
Or this:
…McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can — as he did in South Carolina — renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right — what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.
Well, let’s just say that the worm has turned.
The lying gambit could have worked. Had the McCain camp been more willing to wait for the election to draw near, they could have used lies and distortion in the waning days of the campaign to swing the election their way. But they got impatient. And they pulled the trigger on the strategy too hard, too early. And in doing so, they made what could prove to be a catastrophic miscalculation.
As I’ve written many times, there are two John McCains. “John McCain” is an honorable, likable guy, a conservative, sure, but not an asshole about it. He’s able to work across the aisle, listen to and respect his opponents, and generally behave in an honorable fashion. “John McCain” disappeared in 2006, replaced by John McCain: a nasty, surly jerk who’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal his way to the presidency. Up until last week, the media wanted very much to believe that the real John McCain was “John McCain.” But now, with McCain standing behind the lies and deceit of his campaign, there’s no hiding the fact that the guy calling himself John McCain these days is not honorable.
And this is a problem — because honor was the one thing McCain could sell, the one thing he had that no other Republican could offer. Absent that, he’s Mitt Romney with a war record, George W. Bush, only grumpier. And absent that, it will be very easy for Americans to decide that’s not the kind of change we can believe in.
McCain basically dared the media to go after him last week. And while the media in America is a docile creature, it still can charge when provoked. All indications are that the media now feels it’s being played, and it will respond by treating McCain like the politician he is, not the demigod he was. And that means that the American public will hear often over the next seven weeks about how big a liar McCain is, and how he picked a liar for a sidekick, too. That’s pretty mavericky, if by “maverick” you mean “douchebag.” But that’s John McCain.
I knew a douchebag. Douchebags are my friends. And McCain is no douchebag.
Colostomy bag is more apt.
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What’s interesting is that according to a study by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler (blogged by Kevin Drum), refuting a lie makes it almost twice as likely that Republicans will believe it.
Yes, that’s right. Presenting opposing facts, even ones which actually debunk an blatant untruth, make Republicans more likely to believe the untruth.
Remember what I said about how the Republican party wants its candidates to lie? About how an open and unashamed liar will actually do better in the Republican party than someone who tells the truth?
Yeah. Now there’s evidence.
—Myca
It’s as though conservatives think that liberals will lie to them.
Also…douchebag?
My comment on that Drum post:
There’s a book that came out a couple of years ago called Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) that addresses this very subject, although it suggests that the phenomenon isn’t confined to conservatives. In a nutshell, when you’re confronted with info that conflicts with your preconceived ideas/worldview, the result is cognitive dissonance; you can resolve that dissonance either by changing your ideas or by disbelieving the info. I’ll give you one guess which is easier, and the more severely the new facts undermine your worldview, the greater your incentive to disbelieve them. The bigger the challenge, the greater the investment in holding fast to the incorrect idea.
Why could this be more common among conservatives? I don’t know, but some possibilities I can think of offhand: because they’ve been taught to distrust the “liberal media” and/or “research’; because their worldview is further from reality and thus they’re more likely to be presented with facts that challenge it (the Colbert hypothesis); because they place more emphasis on faith than on data; because they’ve never been taught in school to think analytically — no, that last one would apply to anyone who’s been through what we like to call our education system.
And a few further thoughts…
The book makes some interesting points about the psychology of cognitive dissonance. For example, suppose I treat a friend badly, to the point where if told that someone else had done what I did to a friend, I would think them a bad person. Since I can’t think myself a bad person, this creates cognitive dissonance, which is easier to resolve by thinking ill of my (now former) friend, who, I can convince myself, deserved such treatment, than by trying to make amends.
I have myself misread or ignored glaring facts to the point that, when forced to acknowledge them, I couldn’t believe how dumb I’d been — but the facts refuted my preconceived idea, so I interpreted them any way but the right one. Having done it myself, I can easily see how people can get entrenched, digging deeper with each unwelcome fact.
Yes, and as Steven Colbert says, “reality has a well known liberal bias.”
I swear, it’s getting harder and harder to make fun of you guys.
It’s like you’re proud of blindly believing whatever bullshit you’re fed.
—Myca
This is interesting. No one seems to believe evidence that contradicts them but conservative have a backfire effect that liberals don’t.
I wonder how independents would fare?
Despite my speculating about why the backfire effect might be stronger among conservatives, I’m not sure I buy that it applies only or even mainly to them — I think it’s just human nature to believe what agrees with your preconceptions, to disbelieve what doesn’t, and to dig in when challenged. Think of all the nasty Palin rumors that flew around right after McCain chose her, and how reluctant some people (me included, sad to say) were to abandon some of those storylines.
I’d love to see the raw data on that study, and to know how it was collected. It would stand to reason that the further to one side of the spectrum you were, the more likely you’d be to cling to your position in the face of contrary evidence. Is it possible that the conservatives were further to the right than the liberals were to the left?
(Two caveats here: there are plenty of actual verified Palin storylines to work with, and it’s possible that the study results were perfectly valid — it just seems odd to me that the effect would go only one way.)
The study didn’t look at liberals, so for all we know there is a backfire effect there as well.
Interestingly, one of the two scenarios does not demonstrate what the study authors seem to think that it does. In the tax cut study, the participants were given the statement that tax revenues would go up after a tax cut, then given the counter that tax revenues as a percentage of GDP had gone down. This, of course, does not counter the first statement, which as about an absolute measure, not a proportion.
*which IS about an absolute measure
Well, it’s interesting. According to the news story, the study did look at both liberals and conservatives. Fewer liberals believed the bogus liberal-biased stories after the refutation than before, but more than had originally. More conservatives believed the bogus conservative-biased stories after the refutation than before.
But the info is a bit lopsided: the article gives the percentages of liberals that held a certain viewpoint before hearing a reinforcing but bogus story, after hearing the story, and after hearing the refutation. Percentages for conservatives are given for after the bogus stories but before and after the refutation. The thing is, though, that the link between the counterfactual beliefs and the bogus stories is more direct for conservatives than liberals. For example, the study measured the percentage of liberals that disapproved of detainee treatment at Gitmo before hearing, after hearing, and after hearing the refutation of a story that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet. It also measured the percentage of conservatives believing that Iraq had WMDs after hearing Bush admin claims that it did and after refutation of the claims. So what was measured was not exactly parallel. That may have had an effect on the findings.
Robert writes:
Robert, that’s simply not true. Here’s what the subjects read:
It is true that the study gave respondents information in two ways — first as nominal tax revenues, which is the absolute amount of money collected, with no adjustments. They also gave it as a percent of GDP.
I’m also not convinced that Bush’s statement “The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury,” necessarily has to refer only to “an absolute measure” of money, rather than referring to more substantive measures. Bush’s citing of “vitality” and “growth” seems to indicate that he’s claiming a substantive improvement in the budget outlook, not merely claiming a technical increase.
Interesting. Robert posts a bit of disinformation and Lu and Ampersand post refutations … let’s see if Robert continues to believe the untruth afterwards.
If the study holds true, he is likely (though not certain) to.
—Myca
I’d agree in general. I don’t think that there’s anything special or magical about liberal positions that exempts us from the backlash effect. What I do think, though, is that there’s something different about liberal tactics, at least over the past decade or two.
Time and again, we’ve seen conservative politicians and pundits denigrate ‘experts,’ ‘eggheads,’ and ‘the elite.’ President Bush is openly contemptuous of learning about the world around him … he makes decisions with his gut! Meanwhile, there are large factions within the Republican party who are terrified of their children learning about evolution, sex ed, global warming, gay people, etc. Because knowledge is scary and bad, and if you learn the wrong thing, it will make you scary and bad.
Best not to ever have your ideas challenged.
I believe that it’s this sort of tactic … the idea that, ‘we know what we know, and anyone who says anything different can go to hell,’ that’s lead to this.
There’s nothing that says that something similar couldn’t be done by liberals (and there’s a good argument that Huey Long, frex, did), but in the modern era, I think this is a mostly Republican thing.
—Myca
I didn’t read the news story, I read the study, and they said they didn’t look at liberals. Or so I thought; they say “It would also be helpful to test additional corrections of liberal misperceptions. Currently, all of our backfire results come from conservatives – a finding that may provide support for the hypothesis that conservatives are especially dogmatic (Greenberg 25 and Jonas 2003; Jost et al 2003a, 2003b). However, without conducting more studies, it is impossible to determine if the results we observe are systematic or the result of the specific misperceptions tested.”
I read it quickly the first time and assumed they meant they hadn’t studied liberal people. Instead they mainly looked at issues where a conservative misperception exists (they looked at one liberal misperception, from my quick second scan). So they have shown that liberals don’t backfire on conservative misperceptions that exist, but they haven’t really looked at liberal misperceptions, so they aren’t sure if their results are complete. My misread, however.
On the revenue question, I stand corrected as to the fact of the revenue amounts, but not on the validity of the question as posed in the study. Being told revenue as a percentage of GDP has gone down isn’t being told that revenue as a lump sum has gone down. The fact that revenue as a lump sum DID go down would indicate the error of the first statement, but that information wasn’t provided to the study participants (afaik).
Look! Over there! Something shiny!
Robert, why do you say it’s a “conservative misperception” that “President Bush has banned stem cell research in the United States”? I’d expect that to be something liberals would be more likely to believe that conservatives. From the liberal perspective, that reflects badly on Bush.
In an interview I read, the authors said that they were actively soliciting conservatives for “liberal misperceptions” they should text in future runs of their experiment. Maybe you should email them a suggestion?
(I’m trying to think of something that is factually untrue, without any wiggle room or arguments about what words mean, that liberals believe… “Obama’s health care plan will pay for itself,” perhaps? That might be too obscure, though.)
Here’s the statement respondents were asked to agree or disagree with:
And here (again) is the extended information that half the respondents were given, indicating that Bush’s tax cuts have decreased government revenue:
How can you claim that respondents weren’t told that “revenue as a lump sum has gone down?” They were told exactly that. “revenues in 2005 will remain well below previous projections…. an unprecedented three year decline in nominal tax revenues….”
Nor did the statement they were asked to agree or disagree say anything about a “lump sum,” by the way; the statement would be equally applicable to either lump sums or to % of GDP. So even if your claim that respondents were never told “lump sum” information was true — and it’s not — your overall argument would still be wrong.
The stem cell one was the one liberal misperception they tested.
OK, I stand corrected on the survey question.
I vote for the Colbert thesis. Joe summarized, “No one seems to believe evidence that contradicts them but conservative have a backfire effect that liberals don’t.” Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance may be related, but they are distictly different psychological effects. The refusal to believe contradictory evidence is confirmation bias, and liberals and conservatives are equally guilty. The backfire effect is classic cognitive dissonance, and only conservatives are exhibiting it to significant amounts. Confirmation bias permiates ALL informal debate and decision making, and comes into play whenever you need to sift through mounds of evidence. Cognitive dissonance only comes into play when you are FLAT WRONG and reality knocks you on your ass and you are still huddling on a mountaintop at 8pm with the prophit you gave all your money to who said Jesus would show up at noon. Liberal psychies can handle being wrong about a few things because, *on the whole*, reality supports our world view. Conservatives need to be in full reality-denial mode to maintain their world-view.
The difference between conservative and liberal tactics is, I submit, not the cause of the absense of the backfire effect on liberals, but the result of it. In law school they told us: If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, pound on the table. We are arguing the facts and the law, conservatives are pounding the table. They have spent the last twenty years belittling science and accademic elites because it is necessary to convince themselves they are right.
Consider the current liberal line about McCain. A once-honorable if ambitious man who has chosen his ambition over his honor, thrown out his integrity and is now lying his ass off to get elected. Contrast him with Obama, also an honorable but ambitious man, but who is maintaining his integrity by sticking as much as possible to the issues. Does this mean that Obama is a better man? No. He might be, but we have no way to know: Obama’s integrity is not being tested by reality. It is 7 weeks before the election and the banking system is collapsing due to lax regulation and oversight. Why would a corrupt liberal BOTHER to lie? And what else could could even an honorable conservative do BUT lie? Note also that the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that McCain has either justified his lies to himself, or, more likely convinced himself that his lies are true.
Any theory other than the Colbert thesis paints liberals and progressives as being better people than conservatives. We are not. We just happen to be right.
Oh, okay. I misunderstood what you were saying.
Thanks!
They DID test liberals. Liberals ignore the refutation.
Conservatives actually become MORE confident after the refutation.
If I may play devil’s advocate for a minute, though…
Let me go back to the report of a Quran’s* being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo. Liberals were asked if they believed detainees were mistreated at Gitmo before seeing, after seeing, and after seeing the refutation of the report, and they showed confirmation bias, the tendency to believe evidence that supported their position and to hold that position more strongly, even after the evidence was refuted. But it wasn’t all or nothing: the toilet story supported but wasn’t necessary to the belief in detainee mistreatment, because other supporting evidence existed. The belief is therefore reasonable with or without that story, and once you get the average liberal thinking about it they’re probably going to remember some of that other evidence and say yes, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure mistreatment did occur.
Now consider the Bush administration’s assertion that Saddam had WMDs and the Duelfer report refuting that assertion. That is all or nothing: either Saddam had WMDs or he didn’t, the Bush admin said he did, the Duelfer report said he didn’t. So here we do have a direct challenge to a common conservative belief, which I would think would be more likely to trigger the reaction of digging in and holding fast.
Suppose a new EPA report came out tomorrow that strongly supported** the idea that in fact no climate change was taking place, and the evidence that it was had been fabricated or misinterpreted. Would a typical liberal be likely to believe the report — or would she more likely believe that since a Bush administration agency went to all that trouble to disprove climate change, that must prove once and for all that there was something to it? I might react just that way, because at this point I don’t believe anything the Bush administration says unless it’s backed up by Paul Krugman, Eugenie Scott, and Michael Moore. Conservatives typically distrust the MSM (especially, of course, if it reports facts they don’t like) as well as scientific studies, because like everyone else they’ve heard about lies, damn lies, and statistics.
All that said, I think Decnavda is right about the Colbert hypothesis, although I may be exhibiting confirmation bias since I proposed it in the first place. But I would like to see a study where more parallel stimuli were presented to liberals and conservatives.
*I’ve seen that spelled with and without an apostrophe. Does anyone know the official spelling? Having seen the Arabic word I don’t think the apostrophe should be there (it usually indicates a glottal stop, which the word doesn’t seem to have) (yes, I read a little Arabic), but I’m not sure.
**I hesitate to say proved, because there’s really no such thing as scientific proof. There’s such a thing as a big enough mountain of supporting evidence for scientists to treat it as (next door to) proof. (Still waiting for that Precambrian rabbit.)