Believing Alternative Facts: Spicer – Bannon – Conway. Why?

[Update-1] Added comment:

Tit-for-tat. I’ve written about the abuse of the ratings here at the pond. I have never downrated anyone. I promised those who downrate my comments I will pick a moment of my choosing to return in kind. So what is the fu**ing complaining about?

How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail | Scientific American |

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

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In these examples, proponents’ deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect. In the classic 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to a UFO cult when the mother ship failed to arrive at the appointed time. Instead of admitting error, “members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs,” and they made “a series of desperate attempts to erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

Two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), in their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance. Their metaphor of the “pyramid of choice” places two individuals side by side at the apex of the pyramid and shows how quickly they diverge and end up at the bottom opposite corners of the base as they each stake out a position to defend.

In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”

Why the Trump lies are laid out as “alternative facts” and stick in the minds of his supporters. Dutch spoken but the storyline is taken from the US media.

Continued below the fold …

The U.S. Media’s Murky Coverage of Putin and Trump | The New Yorker – July 6, 2017 |

Some of the best reporting appeared in an investigation last winter by Danya Turovsky, a correspondent for Meduza, an online publication that is based in Riga, Latvia, in order to circumvent the pressure and attempts at censorship faced by newsrooms in Moscow.

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When I asked him what he thought of how American journalists have described both the composition and tactics of Russian hacking squads, he said that the general understanding “is correct, but, all the same, there isn’t really much in the way of real evidence.” It’s one thing to say Russia has both the motive and, with its cyber forces, the technical ability to hack U.S. accounts, Turovsky told me–but, after that, things get very murky. “We can be sure that Russian cyber forces exist, that there are a lot of people involved, that the special services are capable of something like this–but that doesn’t mean we can say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty they are guilty.” It appears that the primary sources for many Washington-based reporters are U.S. intelligence agencies, which unanimously concluded that the effort to disrupt the election was directed by Putin and emanated from Russia. That makes it possible that American journalists know more about the hacking than their Russian colleagues do.

Still, Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example, the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”–nicknames for hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services–entered the American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work; it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads that you could call this or that,” Turkovsky said. He told me that, during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically backward much of the Russian state’s security apparatus appeared–a nuance he said that he hasn’t often observed in American press coverage of the situation. Once, a source took Turovsky inside a cybersecurity facility run by the F.S.B., Russia’s main security service and the successor agency to the K.G.B. As he described it, “the F.S.B. officers had to give up their phones upon entering. There were no computers connected to the Internet–just one for each floor. To access it, they have to sign up in advance and get a key that was good for a certain amount of time. They were complaining that it was impossible to investigate anything in such conditions.”

Even as Turovsky was cautious about some of the more sweeping allegations directed at hackers working for the Russian state, he acknowledged that the chances of the claims being true were just as high as the chances of them being false–that is the hall-of-mirrors reality of reporting on Kremlin plots and intrigue. “Oftentimes, in Russia, what seems totally absurd actually turns out to be the truth,” he said, pointing to the story, reported in detail by my colleague Adrian Chen, of a so-called “troll farm” run out of a nondescript office in St. Petersburg. “Who would have imagined there was a building where people go to work and get paid salaries to sit all day and write online comments in different languages?” Turovsky said.  

The Clock Strikes 13, and Donald Trump Is President

Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald and Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed join Jeremy Scahill for a discussion on the crazy apocalyptic present in which we find ourselves. They break down Trump’s attacks on the media, that insane speech he gave at the CIA, and the state of the Democratic Party.  Jeremy goes deep into the secretive world of Seymour Hersh’s kitchen and shoots the shit with the legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist about why he calls Trump a “circuit breaker” for the two-party system.

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JS: We are now in a situation where we just had a Democratic president who presided over a war against whistleblowers, which is in many ways is a war against a free press, where a charge of espionage was used to go after people who were whistleblowers.

Well this week, I went over to Sy’s house and we sat down at his kitchen and it wasn’t so much an interview. It was more that I wanted to shoot the shit with this incredible reporter who has faced down with authoritarian administrations before, in what is really a conversation between two journalists. I began by asking Sy to give me his assessment of what Trump’s election and his emerging administration, what we should make of it.

Seymour Hersh: I can, I can play high-end or low-end. Let me give you the, the high-end. He’s a circuit breaker. You know? Here we are, we’ve got, we’ve had I think you can say for the past three or four decades, the oligarchs have been running everything and these guys are simply cutting out the middlemen. Those little greedy congressmen and senators who want their handouts. So they’re just cutting out the middlemen and he’s naming people to the cabinet jobs that have one thing, they’re all very very rich. They’re all multi-millionaires. Their career is over, they’re not using, they’re not gonna use the, the cabinet job they have to run for president for, or run for anything for, so this in a way, there’s no reason for them to disagree with the boss. I mean not to disagree with the boss. They have nothing to lose. You could argue that. And that he might have a new relationship with Putin and that’s the high-end.

I think increasingly as you look at it, I mean that’s not going to be the reality. But the idea of somebody you know, breaking things away, you know, and raising grave doubts about the viability of the party system, particularly the Democratic Party, are not a bad idea. That’s something, we could build on that in the future. But we have to figure out what to do in the next few years.

JS: Well, I mean, and Trump, the day after his inauguration goes to the CIA and gives that speech in front of the wall of the stars of the fallen agents. What did you make of it? And he, and he was mostly obsessed with the size of his crowd but what did you make of that first meeting, official meeting of the CIA?

SH: Ha. I can’t begin to tell you. Well he’s obviously going to remake the CIA. And he’s got some basis for thinking that there was, you know, the case. I don’t want to get too much into what I’m reporting but I can tell you the case about Russia. There’s a much simpler explanation for what happened.

JS: The real thing that I wanted to ask about here is: does Trump have a point when he says that these were leaks intended to undermine his credibility and damage him?

SH: Sure.

JS: That came from the CIA or other parts of the intelligence?

SH: Of course. There’s no question. I mean you see Brennan is speaking out, even now that he’s out of office, still speaking out. And that’s sort of, we haven’t seen that before.

JS: Well Brennan’s primary, you know primary thing that he claims he’s speaking out about is Trump’s use of the words nazis to describe people in the intelligence community.

SH: But before that he was speaking out. But look, the road is open for alternative journalism in a way that it hasn’t been in a long time. Because I don’t — I don’t think –my view of the way major media treated the thing with the Russian thing and the Putin wire tag, the hacking, is they were hectoring. They were just using it to hector. They didn’t do reporting.

And the real story was the extent to which the White House was going and permitting this kind of stuff to go, and permitting the agency to go public with assessments. What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate you would have five or six dissents, people saying, `cause I can tell you right now. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force, they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story.

JS: Even in their own summary that they released, the NSA’s level of confidence, as reported in that was a full degree lower than that of Clapper and his crowd. And on what issue?

SH: An assessment is simply an opinion. It’s not — if they had a fact, they’d give you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief.