Why so many believe Trump

The neuroscience behind why people keep believing Trump’s most egregious lies

Donald Trump’s genius for lying approaches pathological. Witness his latest deceit—when he was finally compelled to correct his most infamous mega-fib, that president Barack Obama was born outside the US (and therefore can’t legally be president). What really happened was that Trump replaced the original “birther” lie with a couple of fat, shiny new ones:

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.” (Trump must have known he was lying when he said this, given this charge has been debunked six ways to Sunday.)

“I finished it. I finished it—you know what I mean.” (Not really. Was he referring to the statement he was about to make, or his previous claims that he sent investigators to Hawaii in 2011? Either way, Trump lied: Hawaii’s state government proved Obama’s birth status in 2008, and there’s no proof he sent anyone to Hawaii.)

The New York Times is now mounting a full-on Trump lie patrol. Unfortunately, it probably won’t matter. Trump has mastered the human brain in a way that the media can’t even hope to—and there’s a bucket-load of science to prove it.

One thing Trump exploits masterfully is “source amnesia,” as Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton University and Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist and author, explained in this 2008 article. When we first encounter a new piece of information, it’s stored in the hippocampus, and every time we recall it, our brain rewrites the info a little more permanently. After a while, this info is shifted to our brain’s long-term storage facility, the cerebral cortex. But the source of the information—or the context in which we learned it—doesn’t usually come along with that move. This is why you probably can’t remember how exactly you learned that Neptune is the eighth planet from the sun, or who first told you that China’s capital is Beijing.

You also probably can’t recall how you know that the forbidden fruit in the Bible is an apple, or that ninjas are sneaky, black-clad assassins.

Neither of those two “facts” are necessarily true—and that’s the problem with source amnesia. If a false statement—or a “fact” of dodgy origin, or something offered with a disclaimer—is recalled enough, the misinformation gets stored without the accompanying caveats. Then the more it’s recalled, the more”true” it becomes.

Trump’s media reach and his frequent repetition of the birther lie—which went on at least until 2014—unquestionably contributed to the fact that more than a third of the American electorate believe Obama was born outside the US, from a poll taken in mid-September:

Another cognitive quirk probably explains why Democrats are far likelier than Republicans to believe Obama was born in the US. Our brains aren’t objective information gathering machines; they are filters that sort and prioritize information based on how it fits with our moral worldview. News that accords with what we already think stays. Anything that challenges it gets deleted.

Republicans are far more likely to object to Obama’s policies and, therefore, are more willing to believe information that validates their contempt for the president’s authority. They’re also, on average, much likelier to believe that blacks are lazier, more violent, and more criminal than whites, suggesting a more general bias against blacks, as Quartz recently explored.

“Trump is just one of millions of birthers with a prior disposition to be skeptical of a black man becoming President,” writes Wang in a Princeton Election Consortium blogpost published Sept. 20.

The lessons from the long, disgraceful life of the Obama “birther” slur are bleak ones. This is why those calling for fact-checking armadas to battle Trump lies during the debates will probably be disappointed in the results. As Wang and Aamodt wrote in 2008, “by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger.”

Why many Republicans believe the Big Lie

NO, REALLY, BLAME THE MEDIA — While we wait for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election to begin its prime-time hearing, we have new research looking more closely at why so many people believe the lie that the election was stolen.

In short, it may be time for news outlets and their graphics departments to convene some hearings of their own.

Researchers at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin interviewed 56 people who believed, falsely, that Trump most likely won the 2020 election.

What they learned, in a paper shared first with Nightly: These people do not exist in “tightly sealed, right-wing echo chambers,” and a majority “did not seem to subscribe to multiple conspiracy theories.” Instead, “It appears that election night visuals were particularly powerful in cueing some people’s suspicions,” says the paper, written by Talia Stroud, a professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Caroline Murray, a senior research associate at the university’s Center for Media Engagement, and Marley Duchovnay, a research associate there.

It’s true that Trump had some unique things going for him in advancing his fraud. His portrayal of himself as a victim of the news media helped feed the idea that “actors on the left would go to extreme and illegal lengths to see that he was out of office,” according to the researchers.

And the rally sizes that Trump cared so much about? They made a difference in how people viewed the outcome, too. Some people who believed Trump won had a hard time reconciling his large crowds with his losing vote total.

But there was another factor that had nothing to do with Trump: how the lead on election night shifted from Trump to Joe Biden in some states as more ballots came in. Even though such shifts were expected — and explained by many traditional news outlets — the visuals on TV were difficult to overcome.

Nightly spoke with Stroud and Murray about the people who believe Trump’s election lie, how susceptible the country may be to such falsehoods in a future election and what they think the news media should do about it. This conversation has been edited.

Most people you spoke with don’t subscribe to other conspiracy theories.

Why is the election lie so effective?

Talia Stroud: I think it’s because it’s so popularly discussed. So many elite figures are making this claim that it adds perceived legitimacy that the election actually was stolen.

Caroline Murray: I would add that this election in particular was actually more difficult to follow in real time than some elections in the past because there were new changes due to the pandemic. When people said, “I’ve never in my whole life experienced what happened in this election,” I think that that actually may be true. The newness and the unique circumstances that were present in 2020 did really open the door for people to be suspicious.

How susceptible to a lie like this do you think people may be in future elections?

Stroud: I think we’re really going to find out in 2022 and 2024, but I think there is a possibility that now that the groundwork has been laid and people think this is a possible narrative, that it’s actually going to be easier for those sorts of claims to take root. I think that there’s a good reason to be nervous about how this will play out in the future and a good reason for all of us to be attentive to the way in which we communicate.

Do you get any sense from the interviews you’ve done that people could be persuaded that they believe in a lie?

Murray: One of the things that made me a little bit hopeful after doing all of these interviews was that there are a lot of shades of belief here. Some people really believe this strongly and might be more susceptible to believing it again in future elections. But a lot of people were expressing uncertainty as they were sharing their thoughts with me, and they were saying that this felt so complicated to them.

It felt like they didn’t have a media home, so to speak, someone that they could turn to that they felt would explain to them exactly what was happening in an in-depth way. They seem to want to seek out very detailed and perhaps very complex information about the election. Because they are invested and they are consuming a diverse set of sources in some cases, I do think there is room here at the very least.

Is the news media contributing to the problem by showing vote totals as they trickle in?

Murray: There’s some evidence that that was the case — that it might not be the best way to sustain trust in elections if you show the numbers and the mechanisms behind them go unexplained. I think that adding some context there, particularly around how different states count mail-in ballots, would’ve been really helpful.

But lots of outlets did offer explanations for the shifts. If it’s getting missed, is there cause for a more drastic change in election night coverage?

Stroud: I definitely think there is room for rethinking what election night coverage looks like. In this particular case, maybe not everyone is listening to it to hear that information. If they’re just looking at it visually, maybe there are ways to convey election results in better ways on air, and in print for that matter. Should we be reporting as 10 percent come in and 20 percent come in? I don’t know. I think that it’s worth having a conversation.

Donald Trump’s truth: why liars might sometimes be considered honest – new research


According to fact checkers, Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. That’s around 20 a day. But, according to several opinion polls during his presidency, around 75% of Republican voters still considered Trump to be honest.

It seems incredible that a serial liar – whose biggest lie about the 2020 election results led to a violent insurrection and nearly brought American democracy to its knees – is still considered honest by so many people.

We began to tackle this question in a recent article that examined the political discussions of all members of the US Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022. To do this, we analysed nearly 4 million tweets. Our approach was based on the idea that people’s understanding of “honesty” involves two distinct components.

One component can be referred to as “fact-speaking”. This form of speech relies on evidence and emphasises veracity and seeks to communicate the actual state of the world. Most of us probably consider this an important aspect of honesty. By this criterion, Donald Trump cannot be considered honest.

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The other component can be referred to as “belief-speaking”. This focuses on the communicator’s apparent sincerity, but pays little attention to factual accuracy. So when Trump claimed that the crowds at his inauguration were the largest ever (they were not), his followers may have considered this claim to be honest because Trump seemed to sincerely believe the claim he was making.

Healthy political debate involves both fact-speaking and belief-speaking. Political ideas often cannot be contested based on facts alone, but also require beliefs and values to be taken into account.

But democratic debate can be derailed if it is entirely based on the expression of belief irrespective of factual accuracy.

One of Trump’s senior advisers, then US counsellor to the president, Kellyanne Conway, coined the phrase “alternative facts” in order to back her boss by persisting with the falsehood about the largest inauguration crowd. This allowed viewers to choose whose “facts” to accept.

Within two years Trump’s senior lawyer and adviser Rudy Giuliani was insisting on national TV that “truth isn’t truth”. He was defending Trump’s feet-dragging over submitting to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller and the likelihood that Trump’s testimony would conflict with sworn testimony offered by another witness.


‘Truth isn’t truth’: Rudy Giuliani beggars belief, August 2018.
These are examples of an extreme form of belief-speaking that goes beyond the bounds of conventional democratic debate.

Whose ‘truth’ are we talking about?

We wanted to know the extent to which either belief-speaking or fact-speaking have become more prevalent in political speech, in this case in Twitter posts by Republican and Democrat members of the US Congress since 2011. To do this we set up and validated two “dictionaries” that captured those two components of honesty. To capture belief-speaking, we used words such as “feel”, “guess”, “seem”. To capture fact-speaking we used words such as “determine”, “evidence”, “examine”.

Using advanced mathematical analysis, we were able to measure the extent to which each tweet represented belief-speaking and fact-speaking, and how the two trended over time.

The figure below illustrates the results of our analysis with examples of tweets that involve a lot of belief-speaking (top) and fact-speaking (bottom), separately for members of the two parties, red being Republican and blue Democrat.



Our analysis first considered the long-term trend of belief-speaking and fact-speaking. We found that for both parties, both belief-speaking and fact-speaking increased considerably after Trump’s election in 2016. This may reflect the fact that topics concerning misinformation and “fake news” became particularly prominent after 2016 and may have resulted in opposing claims and corrections – involving belief-speaking and fact-speaking, respectively.

When we related the content of tweets to the quality of news sources they linked to, we found a striking asymmetry between the two parties and the honesty components. We used the news ratings agency NewsGuard to ascertain the quality of a domain being shared in a tweet. NewsGuard rates the trustworthiness of news domains on a 100-point scale based on established journalistic criteria, such as differentiating between news and opinion, regularly publishing corrections, and so on, without fact-checking individual items of content.

We find that for both parties, the more a tweet expresses fact-speaking, the more likely it is to point to a trustworthy domain.

By contrast, for belief-speaking we observed little effect on the trustworthiness of sources in tweets by Democratic members of Congress. There was, however, a striking association between belief-speaking and low trustworthiness of sources for Republicans: A 10% increase in belief-speaking was associated with a 12.8-point decrease in the quality of cited sources.

The findings illustrate that misinformation can be linked to a unique conception of honesty that emphasises sincerity over accuracy, and which appears to be used by Republicans – but not Democrats – as a gateway to sharing low-quality information.

Why does this happen? Another aspect of our results hints at an answer. We found that belief-speaking is particularly associated with negative emotions. So if Republican politicians want to use negative emotional language to criticise Democrats, this goal might be more readily achieved by sharing low-quality information because high-quality domains tend to be less derogatory of the main parties.

Finally, we also found that the voting patterns during the 2020 presidential election in their home state were not associated with the quality of news being shared by members of Congress. One interpretation of this result is that politicians do not pay a price at the ballot box for misleading the public. This may be linked to their convincing use of belief-speaking, which large segments of the public consider to be a marker of honesty.

An Analysis of Trump Supporters Has Identified 5 Key Traits

KEY POINTS
1. A 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
2. A 2016 survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump.

An analysis estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was $72,000, which disputes that Trump supporters are "working-class."

The lightning-fast ascent and political invincibility of Donald Trump has left many experts baffled and wondering, “How did we get here?” Any accurate and sufficient answer to that question must not only focus on Trump himself, but also on his uniquely loyal supporters. Given their extreme devotion and unwavering admiration for their highly unpredictable and often inflammatory leader, some have turned to the field of psychology for scientific explanations based on precise quantitative data and established theoretical frameworks.

Although analyses and studies by psychologists and neuroscientists have provided many thought-provoking explanations for his enduring support, the accounts of different experts often vary greatly, sometimes overlapping and other times conflicting. However insightful these critiques may be, it is apparent that more research and examination is needed to hone in on the exact psychological and social factors underlying this peculiar human behavior.

In a recent review paper published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew argues that five major psychological phenomena can help explain this exceptional political event.

1. Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome—a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition—is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wing around the world. President Trump’s speeches, which include absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those who prefer authoritarianism.

While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise.

2. Social dominance orientation
Social dominance orientation (SDO)—which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome—refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities).

A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published this year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.

3. Prejudice
It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters has a prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that some do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” used strategies that appealed to bigotry, such as by delivering speeches with “dog whistles”—code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were more subtle, Trump’s are sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a new study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

4. Intergroup contact
Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border.

5. Relative deprivation
Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

Common explanations for Trump’s popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers may be lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to. For example, an analysis conducted by FiveThirtyEight estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was $72,000.

If such data is accurate, the portrayal of most Trump supporters as working-class citizens rebelling against Republican elites may not be fully accurate.

Does Trump Believe His Own Lies?

Donald Trump’s mindset remains a significant factor for the outcome of the investigation by Congress's Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. But much confusion exists about the question generally asked: Does he really believe that he won the election and that it was “stolen” from him? The trouble is that an accurate answer is neither yes nor no but yes and no.

This question may assume that belief is definite and fixed. That is not the case. Belief is a form of behavior, often a form of adaptation. It can readily change. An important determinate of belief is the requirement that it be consistent with one’s own larger story, with what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called narrative necessity. Once Trump created the Big Lie about the 2020 election, his narrative necessity came to include at least a partial belief in that falsehood. At the same time, he is consciously aware of manipulating the Big Lie and attempting to impose it on the American public.

I have characterized Trump’s approach as that of solipsistic reality. This means that he is only capable of embracing a version of reality based on what his own self seeks and needs, however removed from accepted standards of evidence. Also, that element of belief is critical for him in effectively disseminating the Big Lie. At the same time, his solipsistic reality allows him to keep the belief active in the face of endless insistence by those around him that he is wrong. Here, narrative necessity joins with solipsistic reality.

To put this in simple language: Trump makes things up, comes to believe partially in his lies, exploits those lies in his assault on truth, and viciously attacks those who question them. He makes broad threats of violence that are sometimes carried out by a righteous subculture of white supremacy groups. Not only are individual lives destroyed but there is a constant aura of political violence.

Whether Trump can be prosecuted under the legal concept of “willful blindness” we will leave to the lawyers. But we can say that Trump’s talent for socially manipulating half-belief is second to none and is enabled by his version of narrative necessity.

Narrative necessity, however, pertains not only to individual psychology but to collective understanding in the larger society. A nation’s stories sometimes emerge organically from history and culture, and sometimes, as today, from the deliberate work of democratic institutions.....

I found this rather interesting article on why Trump has so much appeal, and why so many believe whatever he says. It's several years old now, but is still relevant today.
https://theconversation.com/why-so-many-americans-continue-to-believe-in-donald-trump-100498

Quote:

After Donald Trump caused a debacle at the recent NATO summit and started a trade war between the United States and most of its partners, one would imagine he would be highly unpopular.

Yet 87 per cent of Republicans continue to approve of the U.S. president.

The enduring support from most of Trump’s voters is surprising given the president’s many eyebrow-raising statements. He accuses legitimate media of producing “fake news” while relaying dubious information himself. He undermines the authority of the media and scientific institutions that have traditionally brokered knowledge. His communication style is indifferent to the truth.

We suggest that Trump remains popular because he is a storyteller, and that stories do not have the same relationship to the truth as other statements. People accept stories even when they contain factual errors because they resonate with their own experiences and provide them with an active role in their own narratives.

You can trust this article because it’s written by academics.

The narrative paradigm

In the early 1980s, Walter Fisher, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, pioneered the “narrative turn” in the social sciences. He defined human beings as “homo narrans” and as “symbol-using animals.”

Fisher considered human communication to be an exchange of stories. Through these stories, we comprehend the world beyond the accuracy of the statements that compose them. Stories allow us to constitute coherent links between events. We then evaluate those links based on our understanding of the world. In other words, Trump — like other populists — tells stories that allow his supporters to understand the world by connecting it to their knowledge, experiences and identities.

According to Fisher, a story appears coherent if its sequence of actions is well-constructed and if the relationships between the characters are logical. That, in fact, is the first criterion: Narrative coherence.

A good story will include, for instance, protagonists gathered to complete a quest. They may seek a material object — money or a loved one — or immaterial ones, like happiness or justice. Some characters — the hero and their allies — help each other to accomplish the quest. Others — their opponents — are also in pursuit of the same objects.

We accept a story as plausible if it resonates with our view of the world. This is the criterion of narrative fidelity. The reader or listener may feel disconcerted when a story does not correspond to their own experience or what they hold to be true.

Fiction may allow for a greater lack of plausibility than other genres, but in all cases, some plausibility exists.

People will accept narratives as true if they correspond with how they view the world.

Stories to make America great again

The stories told by politicians, however, should be more truthful about the world. But those narratives do not always refer to the actual world — as science does — but to the world as we already understand it.

Therefore, the tales that popular candidates and elected officials tell must resonate with their supporters’ beliefs and conception of the world. That is why different groups regard Trump’s stories differently. For a portion of the population, the facts presented by experts — as conveyed through fact-checking, erudite editorials and statistics — are not as coherent and do not echo their lived reality.

The best examples of Trump’s use of narrative are his promise to build a wall to prevent the entry of “illegal” Mexicans, and his move to suspend the immigration of people from Muslim-majority countries. The narratives fuelling these actions, although largely discredited, resonated with perceptions already well-embedded in the American imagination about jobs being “stolen” by Mexicans or terrorist acts being committed by Muslims.

These two narratives meet both of Fisher’s criteria.

First, they are coherent, as the protagonists play their roles consistently, claiming Mexicans and Muslims are the “bad guys” who rob Americans of good jobs and security. Second, they are plausible, since they reflect the concerns of many Americans who are struggling with unemployment and perceived insecurity, not to mention their fear of outsiders.

Trump makes sense to those ‘left behind’

Left behind following the globalization of the manufacturing sector and unable to adapt because of a feeble education system, some Americans find themselves living in a world they don’t understand anymore. They feel powerless. Trump’s narratives make them feel great again.

As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explained, the will to hold power often manifests itself not as a desire to understand the world, but rather as the desire to change it so that it corresponds to one’s current understanding.

Similarly, rather than propose that Americans adjust their knowledge to reflect the new social and economic reality of their country, Trump offers them performative politics: He will change the world so that it matches their knowledge.

He gives them back, so to speak, their power, by offering them a place in the stories from which they were left out.

... and they believe that cabal is, for the most part if not 100%, Jewish.