How To Deprogram Trump Supporters

The author does not discuss if this technique will also work with Hilbots:

A brain science expert explains how to deprogram your Facebook-manipulated, Trump-supporting friends

How Trump voters were manipulated:

The Trump campaign did so through the illusory truth effect, a thinking error in our minds that happens when false statements are repeated many times and we begin to see them as true. In other words, just because something is stated several times, we perceive it as more accurate.

You may have noticed the last two sentences in the previous paragraph had the same meaning. The second sentence didn’t provide any new information, but it did cause you to believe my claim more than you did when you read the first sentence.

The Biology of truth versus comfort:

Our brains cause us to believe something is true because we feel it is true, regardless of the evidence—a phenomenon known as emotional reasoning. This strange phenomenon can be easily explained by understanding some basic biology behind how our brain works.

Because everybody says so:

Our brains tend to spread the trust that we associate with friends to other sources of information that we see on social media. This thinking error is known as the halo effect when our assessment of one element of a larger whole as positive transfers to other elements.

My Facebook friends would never lie!

We can see this in research showing that people’s trust in social media influencers has grown over time, nearly to the level of trust in their friends, as shown by a 2016 joint study by Twitter and analytics firm Annalect.

Don't use facts or reason. Validate their emotions and use emotional arguments:

To get more conservatives to turn on the intentional system when evaluating political discourse we need to speak to emotions and intuitions—the autopilot system, in other words. We have to get folks to associate positive emotions with the truth first and foremost, before anything else.

To do so, we should understand where these people are coming from and what they care about, validate their emotions and concerns, and only then show, using emotional language, the harm people suffer when they believe in lies.

Examples:

For instance, for those who care about safety and security, we can highlight how it’s important for them to defend themselves against being swindled into taking actions that make the world more dangerous. Those concerned with liberty and independence would be moved by emotional language targeted toward keeping themselves free from being used and manipulated. For those focused on family values, we may speak about trust being abused.

This suggestion seems a little too structured for most conversations:

Shared Orientation Toward the Truth: The Pro-Truth Pledge

You can use these same strategies in your everyday conversation with people who let their ideological perspectives cloud their evaluation of reality. An excellent way to encourage a mutual orientation toward the truth and bridge the political divide is to get all participants in a conversation to take the Pro-Truth Pledge.

How To Deprogram Trump Supporters

Maybe some brave soul would like to try getting the Pro-Truth pledge adopted over at GOS? It would be interesting to find out if these techniques are effective on Hilbots.

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GreatLakeSailor's picture

Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding Psychological Science - Philip M. Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig R. Fox, Steven A. Sloman, 2013
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/political_extremism.pdf

Abstract
People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people’s mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.

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Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.

I found the article full of biases and assumptions - especially the logical fallacy "appeal to authority" - the writer assumes that Politifact and Wapo (and therefore the establishment Democrats) are always factually correct and completely unbiased. This is clearly absurd and one of the main reasons that "Trump supporters" are so difficult for us to convince.
On the other hand, the article's strategy, as far as it goes, is strong, and should work on our opposition, even Hillbots.

Note: I am a believer of the "5 tools" theory. There are 5 tools to political success: morality, intelligence, numerical support, money, and force.(objective value in reverse order) Always say and do what is right for the listener, or at least what he percieves as right for him or for "everyone", and make it believable that it will work. Get those 2 right and you will get the third, do not have the 2 and you will need the fourth and fifth, and you will eventually lose. (ask Arendt)

Trump uses a perverted version of morality - his followers believe what he says, (he had an advantage in that his audience was already inclined to believe him)and they believe that his claims would better their lives. This allows him to bypass intelligence while still having millions of dedicated supporters.

Contrast that with the Establishment Democrats. Their positions are percieved as having no morality and no intelligence, since they have had 50 years of cynicism, betrayal, and failure. Their numerical support is not only failing, but it is denied sufferage and is seen as a societal centrifugal force. Hillary had money, but her image (positions) made that a negative.

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On to Biden since 1973

thanatokephaloides's picture

@doh1304

Rawstory should try its own advice.

The advice isn't theirs. The Pro-Truth Pledge is located here.

And you're right: Rawstory should take it.

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Big Al's picture

mostly common knowledge and sense. It makes me wonder what he thinks the truth is.

"Many liberals associate positive emotions with empirical facts and reason, which is why their intentional system is triggered into doing fact-checking on news stories. Trump voters mostly do not have such positive emotions around the truth, and believe in Trump’s authenticity on a gut level regardless of the facts. This difference is not well recognized by the mainstream media, who treat their audience as rational thinkers and present information in a language that communicates well to liberals, but not to Trump voters."

That's bullshit and a useless generalization considering 60 million people voted for Trump. What about the other 60 million that voted for warmonger liar supreme Hillary Clinton?

Is he talking about the liberals who voted for Clinton? Or the ones who voted for and supported Obama throughout his 8 years of lying? Are these the liberals that are Russia bashing, who supported Obama's wars?

Part of what he is saying can be helpful but not when wrapped in an illusion.

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Meteor Man's picture

@Big Al @Big Al
Labels and overgeneralizations are always problematic:

There are two types of people:

1) Those who divide people into two different groups and

2) Those who don't.

His approach was the best part of the story. We know that Trumpbots and Hilbots are immune to facts and susceptible to comfortable propaganda that confirms their "beliefs". We will never persuade the propagandists themselves, but a large percentage of their "followers" may be reachable.

One common approach to effective communication is to state "What I hear you saying is (rephrase in your words). That gives them a chance to restate, correct or confirm that your understanding of what they said is correct.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

thanatokephaloides's picture

..... isn't a Rawstory thing. The actual text of the Pledge, along with detailed discussion of the same, can be found here.

And I think this would be useful discussion indeed over at TOP! Smile

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

k9disc's picture

Funny article. Too bad it was so jaundiced against the conservative rube. I would have liked to have seen it be less pointed. I mean, Democrats will believe anything Rachel Maddow tells them, and they'll suspend their "rationalistic faculties" to stick with the story.

To point it only at conservatives is to COMPLETELY miss the boat.

The article makes it sound as if the Democrats, or rational thought, are immune to this. We're not. Nothing is. This is Affect; mid-brain neurological auto-processing that our mind rests on.

Democrats tend to think of hard science and the brain. What they don't understand is that the brain, like "the facts™", are just the mechanics or the physical framework; the mind is something completely different. The mind is what we do with the facts.

I'm no fan of Psychology Today when it comes to actual psychology, but this is interesting, and gets to the point far quicker than I can:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/obesely-speaking/201403/your-min...

The busy brain, consolidates, simplifies and anticipates.[32, 33] This promotes efficiency, but at the risk of vulnerability. For example, your brain will interpret the muscles you use to smile as a sign of happiness, even if you are sad. Thus, you can trick the brain into thinking you are happy by placing a pencil in your mouth and biting down on it, because you use the same muscles. Likewise, cortisol levels that habituate slowly are misread as the continuing presence of threat, even though the threat does not exist. This is problematic for the brain, which has not evolved much;it is not problematic for the mind, which constantly changes. [1]

This is a recurring critical error for Democrats. The projection of natural biological law onto Conservatives with all of it's it's ugly subhuman motivations and the reflection of rationality onto the Liberal tribe serve to blind Democrats to the realities of cognition.

This is a root level hypocrisy. A root level hypocrisy that activates the autopilot system for distrust.

I think this root level hypocrisy that Democrats have is far worse than that of Drumpf. Democrats pretend to care about and serve others. Drumpf is out to serve himself. It winds up a case of who is the bigger hypocrite, and unfortunately, it ain't the rational brain of citizens that winds up doing the answering.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

@k9disc @k9disc

...For example, your brain will interpret the muscles you use to smile as a sign of happiness, even if you are sad. Thus, you can trick the brain into thinking you are happy by placing a pencil in your mouth and biting down on it, because you use the same muscles. ...

Could that also relate to part of the reason that smoking and eating are actions which help to provide comfort of a number of people during stressful and unhappy periods?

Edited to belatedly add the freaking block-quotes, lol.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

k9disc's picture

So the idea is that the Brain is different from the Mind.

Smoking and eating as a defense mechanism, I believe, probably has mind and brain principles.

Your mind knows you're relying on it as a crutch but your brain don't care?

Thinking about the disconnect between brain and mind makes me think it is a big part of mental health. Super interesting. Dissonance between brain and mind...

The bigger point is that Democrats believe they are above biology and chemistry. Rationality is a tertiary process. It happens AFTER the base level affect is processed somewhere. It is very hard to be rational after some base level affects have been stoked, and it may not be possible to be entirely rational if there has been long term exposure to low intensity affect.
@Ellen North

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Hillbamabots and Trumpsters are on their own. We outnumber them together. We're too stupid too to just take advantage of it.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

CB's picture

within the first term of a presidency. Election talking points are a manipulation of the historical life experiences and beliefs of the electorate and have little to no basis in reality. These changing beliefs are then reinforced by the MSM, Hollywood and education system. For the system to work, the methodology must be inculcated at a very early age and then constantly repeated in order to mold young minds.

Take for example the almost universal belief of Americans that the USA is the one true democratic nation in the world, that it is only a force for good, that it is THE superior nation in the world, that if all nations were like America the world would be a better place, with peace and prosperity for all.

The requires constant repetition and a significant amount of amnesia in order to "forget", at least emotionally, anything that goes contrary to Americans inculcated image of their country.

All politics in the US takes this very real belief system of American exceptionalism as a starting point for their platforms. Kinda like a vanilla cake to which they apply decorative features to make it look more appealing. The Trumpeter took advantage of the erosion of America's basic belief system. His promise was to bake a new cake. Killary only promised to add more decorative icing.

Here's how young minds are shaped:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEhUWxHjzIQ]

The reason Russia was chosen as a stick to beat Trump with was because Russia has traditionally been used as a raison d'être for over a century to divide and attack an opponent for almost anything. Russia is the only opponent in America's (and Britain's) entire history that has never been defeated or subjugated. It is certainly a worthy enemy. It is the universal, ready to use, scapegoat.

Now you can understand the vehemence with which DKos uses the Russian canard to squelch any dissension in it's ranks. Any disagreement automatically brings a charge of Putin puppet or Russian robot. This actually tells me more about it's current diehard members than it's leaders who are paid to do this work. Their belief systems were very easy to manipulate. Just look to before and after Obama's two terms. Their original beliefs have been completely turned around. It's a wonder their brains don't explode with the cognitive dissonance. I suppose that's due to the rampant selective amnesia.

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