L&FP, 68: Cognitive Dissonance and fallacies of projection etc

_{kairosfocus

March 28, 2023

Agitprop, Defending our Civilization, Logic and Reason}

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It is a sub-study of logic, to address fallacies. Accordingly, as it has come up, it seems helpful to highlight cognitive dissonance and certain associated fallacies. First, [HT: Montecinos et al, fair use] here is a recent framework for cognitive dissonance:

This is a simple but powerful model. As an example, it has been argued that certain free trial period software, by involving the user in considerable effort to register and use the product, then shifts attitudes towards reluctance to give up the product. Of course, many attitude, thought, belief or behaviour changes can be influenced by the need to reduce inner pain, and some of these are more justifiable in the cold light of day than others. However, some patterns of behaviour tied to cognitive dissonance are less justifiable, as has been known since ancient times.

A Saw Pit in action, notice the sawyer in the pit (who at least has gravity to aid him in his pull) and the one balancing on the top of the log (HT: Wikipedia)

The fable of the Fox telling itself that the bunch of grapes it cannot reach must be sour is famous, and funny. A bit more painful, is Jesus’ parable of the saw-pit where the sawyer at the top of the sawing pit is busy about the sawdust speck in the eye of the sawyer in its bottom, but manages not to realise he has a plank in his own eye.

As we turn to fallacies, a key one is projection to the other. Sometimes, confession by projection.

For example, as the descendant of such unions, I can freely point to slave masters and overseers projecting racial inferiority and many faults to black slaves . . . even as they repeatedly fathered children by slave women.

In our time, polarisation and associated acts often start with blame shifting. Mr Dawkins’ characterisation of the other as ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked, comes to mind.

A linked issue is the crooked yardstick effect. If a crooked stick is made into one’s reference standard what is actually straight, upright and accurate cannot conform to crookedness. Indeed, neither will a different form of crookedness, so getting people to swallow a crooked yardstick can become a platform for locking them into an agenda that cannot stand on its own merits.

Sometimes, these problems can become so locked in that not even a naturally straight and upright plumb line will be accepted as corrective.

Food, for thought. END

Comments

CD, he was perhaps not consciously doing so but his caricature of Churchill instead bears a close relationship to himself. The explicit disapproval of what he said Churchill did then boomerangs on himself. KFkairosfocus_{March 31, 2023
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KF I doubt that Goebbels was projecting on to Churchill a "self portrait." His caricatures, including that of Churchill, were carefully crafted to elicit hatred among the German people towards concocted enemies, e.g., Jews, Catholics, English, Americans, blacks, gays, etc. Goebbels was a sociopath and immune from any type of dissonance or other psychological discomfort regarding his conduct and cognition. As the father of modern propaganda, Goebbels idolized Hitler and everything he did was deliberately designed to advance Hitler's agenda.chuckdarwin_{March 31, 2023
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CD, obviously, projection can be analysed as to source. Thus, it becomes a confession, though in the guise of blaming the other. Look above at Goebbel's words, for a case in point. Do you not see an inadvertent self portrait lurking under all the accusations against Churchill? This is a fairly blatant case, which is why it was given. KFkairosfocus_{March 30, 2023
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KF So, garden variety projection now morphs into "confession by projection?" You should write your own dictionary so the rest of us can keep up with your constant neologizing. You could write a companion volume with tips on how to steer any conversation around to Hitler and Goebbels. Parenthetically, I think you miss the mark on Nazi propaganda. The fact that the Nazi leadership deliberately constructed "The Big Lie" demonstrates that ostracizing Jews and other "undesirables" was not a result of "projection" on the part of Nazi leadership. Quite the opposite, they were deliberately (remember, all projection is unconscious) and cynically cast by Nazi leadership as the cause of Germany's post-WWI problems, especially economic problems. In fact, Jews had been scapegoated and stereotyped in Europe for millennia. They were the "go to" outgroup always convenient and available for political leaders to exploit when a scapegoat was needed. Ironic, since I believe the original iteration of the word scapegoat was sourced in Hebrew. But this drifts way beyond projection and cognitive dissonance......chuckdarwin_{March 30, 2023
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PM1, do you see the conflict in such perceptions? Why do you think they have to struggle so hard to construct and project blameworthy characteristics? Do you recall the artificial doubts and debates over was it Phyllis Wheatley's poems? Or even attempts down to recent years to construct racial stereotypes of inferior IQ etc? That is dehumanisation, not just prejudice. Try, moreover, the techniques of representing blacks as monkeys or near monkeys in drawings, including Haeckel but going far beyond him. Even Locke has an echo in saying in effect slavery is a mitigation of a death sentence for cause. The longstanding penalty for kidnapping into slavery and trading such victims is of course death. Making such constructs while fathering children with slave women speaks for itself. Where, the point is, to numb the conscience so that the pain of truth is suppressed, as opposed to, absent. Think, Kunta Kinte, given the choice of what to mutilate, his mobility or his generative powers. Ponder the underlying breakdown of responsible reason. KFkairosfocus_{March 30, 2023
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@15
PM1 & CD, on the contrary, start from men of a class dehumanising black slaves even as they fathered children with them. Similarly, ponder the sawyer on top and his behaviour towards the one in the hole. The internal contradictions are obvious, and lead to fallacies that project to the other as one of many defences. A lot of propaganda feeds off that, using dehumanise or at least belittle then blame the victim or he hit back first or the like tactics. A classic pattern is, red herrings led away to strawmen soaked in ad hominems and set alight to cloud, poison, confuse and polarise the atmosphere and frustrate going towards a conclusion one is resisting. Such tactics are all too common online. And, more.
I've been reading a lot of David Livingstone Smith's work (Less Than Human, On Inhumanity, Making Monsters) on one aspect of this. Smith has developed a theory of the psychology of dehumanization. One key aspect of dehumanization, in his view, is that the dehumanized group is simultaneously seen as human in some morally odious way and also as less than human. Thus, a dehumanized group is seen as both criminal, morally degenerate, corrupt -- character traits that only humans can have -- and as vermin, lice, cockroaches, apes, pestilence, rats, etc. An important feature of the psychology of dehumanization is that the mechanisms that would produce cognitive dissonance in normal people are disabled or offline -- the dehumanizers do not experience an unpleasant state of tension or arousal, even when directed questioning can make them fully aware of the incompatibility. (As indicated by interviews with people who directed and participated in campaigns of ethnic cleansing.) That said, I do think that dehumanization is a very specific kind of evil that needs to be distinguished from other pernicious uses of propaganda to vilify, slander, discriminate, and so on.PyrrhoManiac1_{March 30, 2023
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PPS, in case that is not enough, here is Goebbels, 1941 on Churchill's lie factory. Notice, his projection to the English Plutocracy, even as Hitler before him projected to the Jews:
There is no point to debating Mr. Churchill about English ship losses or the damage caused by German air attacks. He follows the time-honored British policy of admitting only that which is impossible to deny [--> truth is the last resort], then cutting it in half, while at the same time doubling or tripling the enemy’s losses. This balances the accounts. The astonishing thing is that Mr. Churchill, a genuine John Bull, holds to his lies, and in fact repeats them until he himself believes them. That is an old English trick. Mr. Churchill does not need to perfect it, as it is one of the familiar tactics of British politics, known to the entire world. They made good use of the trick during the World War [WW1], with the difference that world opinion believed it then, which cannot be said today. That is because at the end of the World War British plutocracy believed that Germany would never recover. In part from indifference, but also in part from boastfulness, they made the mistake of telling the world the tricks they had used to defeat the Reich. In the memoirs written by British statesmen, Mr. Churchill in particular, one could see that the London plutocrats had no problem lying to high heaven during the war. They were even proud of fooling Germany in so easy and clever a fashion. They revealed their methods. They are not believable any longer. We only need to refer to the World War and note that the same men are determining English news policy as did from 1914 to 1918, and everything becomes clear. That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not, as a rule, reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
This obviously invites confession by projection analysis and shows fairly strong traces of the inner, plank in own eye conflicts involved. Where, precisely due to largely unconscious nature one can use insights into human nature to responsibly infer from the flowing stream to its spring. PPPS, I should note, that when I went looking for this notorious essay, I ran across a Salon article. It is topped by a back to back photo montage of Mr Trump and Mr Hitler, about as crude a device of guilt by association projection control as one could imagine. It begins:
Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels coined the term "Big Lie." According to the supposed quote, Goebbels said that if you tell "a lie big enough" and regularly repeat it, "people will eventually come to believe it." That said, Adolf Hitler actually did use the phrase "big lie" — but not to describe his own propaganda strategy. In a darkly ironic case of psychological projection, he came up with the expression to defame the Jewish community. "In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility," Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf," his 1925 autobiographical manifesto. He observed that most people are only comfortable telling small lies, and imagined others would be as uncomfortable as themselves perpetuating big ones. "It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously," Hitler explained. "Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation." [--> crooked yardstick effect] Indeed, like many abusers before him, Hitler rationalized his own depraved behavior by falsely accusing his victims of doing the same thing. [--> turnspeech, turnabout projection, often backed by falsification, half truths etc] The story of World War II is, in many ways, a tale of a Big Lie run amok. Germany felt humiliated after its loss in World War I, and the nationalistic pride which had fueled that conflict still burned in the hearts of millions. This tactic, of a leader hypnotizing vast swathes of the public through the perpetuation of a grandiose falsehood, is a phenomenon that extends well beyond World War II and Adolf Hitler.
Of course, the very manner of the Salon piece invites confession by projection analysis itself.kairosfocus_{March 30, 2023
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PS, the designers of propaganda may be like a Goebbels, quite thought through. In many cases, I think they are more a matter of being men of debased thinking themselves, e.g. a politician inclined to graft is often the first to suggest the same about others -- often, without explicit calculation of slander, he just naturally sees the inner thief in others and self reinforces by selectively filtering information and whispered stories etc. But the issue is why does such a con game work? It has been aptly said, you cannot con a through and through honest man. The game is to play off inner conflicts and frustrations, to ride on pain to power; thus, convenient others are put up as strawman, scapegoat targets, inducing controlled projection. Thus, too, the planting of crooked yardsticks as counterfeit standards such that when what is genuinely true, straight, accurate, upright is made available, it becomes suspect. Hence, dirty games with history, news, media, education, science, economics, law and government, etc. Of course, inherently the whole cannot stand prolonged sound scrutiny so concealment of truth, cover up of errors and wrongs, control or domination of information access and more are common. And in a day when truth, soundness, duties of reason etc are at a discount, propaganda has a field day. Where, too, the line between marketing and propaganda has always been blurry and hard to pin down. So, let us ponder how Bernays begins his Propaganda, 1928:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society consti- tute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smooth- ly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, un- aware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leader- ship, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever atti- tude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of per- sons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
The influence, doubtless is exaggerated, but this documents, from the horse's mouth, that propagandists for over a century have been students of psychology. They have tried to harness psycho-social patterns to the ends of power and money. Among these are inner conflicts and the resorts to reduce and dull inner pain. Including conscience pain, however dulled. Where it is from the wellsprings of the heart that proverbially the mouth speaks, the hand moves and the person acts.kairosfocus_{March 30, 2023
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PM1 & CD, on the contrary, start from men of a class dehumanising black slaves even as they fathered children with them. Similarly, ponder the sawyer on top and his behaviour towards the one in the hole. The internal contradictions are obvious, and lead to fallacies that project to the other as one of many defences. A lot of propaganda feeds off that, using dehumanise or at least belittle then blame the victim or he hit back first or the like tactics. A classic pattern is, red herrings led away to strawmen soaked in ad hominems and set alight to cloud, poison, confuse and polarise the atmosphere and frustrate going towards a conclusion one is resisting. Such tactics are all too common online. And, more. KFkairosfocus_{March 29, 2023
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@13
Nor projection, which I noted, is an unconscious defense mechanism. Propaganda or disinformation or misinformation, whatever label you want to use, is a deliberate strategy to mislead. And so the record is clear all defense mechanisms are unconscious, hence the purported need for psychoanalysis. And to close the circle, defense mechanisms are one way of dealing with cognitive dissonance. But they are not the exclusive way….
Right. And since they are unconscious defense mechanisms, they cannot be discerned on the basis of what people say -- especially not in an online forum, where what people publish has been filtered and edited. There are no accidental 'slips of the tongue' when someone can edit their words as much as wanted before posting -- nor are we discussing what we fantasize in our unguarded moments. I also should emphasize that cognitive dissonance requires a feeling of discomfort -- and such feelings are quite impossible to determine online.PyrrhoManiac1_{March 29, 2023
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Nor projection, which I noted, is an unconscious defense mechanism. Propaganda or disinformation or misinformation, whatever label you want to use, is a deliberate strategy to mislead. And so the record is clear all defense mechanisms are unconscious, hence the purported need for psychoanalysis. And to close the circle, defense mechanisms are one way of dealing with cognitive dissonance. But they are not the exclusive way....chuckdarwin_{March 29, 2023
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@6
PM1, not only does [CD + projection] help us understand whole classes of fallacies and trollish misconduct, it is pivotal to understanding industrial strength power backed fallacies, i.e. propaganda. The capital example is turn speech blame projection pioneered by the Bolsheviks and brought to full hellish force by Goebbels and co. As in, the Poles attacked first. The Reichstag was burned through a Communist push, we must pass an enabling act. The Jewish-Bolshevik grand conspiracy of global subjugation must be defeated, so we launch our counter stroke, June 22, 1941. And of course, the big lie technique is the invention of the English Plutocracy. And of course, hatred for the other, is obvious in those cases.
These examples of disinformation and misinformation have nothing to do with cognitive dissonance.PyrrhoManiac1_{March 29, 2023
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CD, Jesus was a Carpenter. Those days, you got planks the hard way, using a saw pit and a two-man saw. Guess what was going to happen to the sawyer down in the pit, under the log? Guess how the sawyer on top would be likely to react if the one in the pit stopped sawing properly because of dust in his eyes? Now, imagine an unsympathetic top sawyer busy trying to saw logs. KF PS, I am going to add an illustration.kairosfocus_{March 29, 2023
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Andrew at 9, Something tells me he actually does...relatd_{March 29, 2023
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"I never really understood the plank in the eye story." CD, Not surprised. Andrewasauber_{March 29, 2023
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KF I never really understood the plank in the eye story. Maybe it makes more sense in Greek……..chuckdarwin_{March 29, 2023
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CD, kindly notice my response to PM1. While CD + P must be identified on a case by case basis, it is in fact an extremely common pattern, on the ground plus the internet, indeed to our horror a live case of mass murder pivoting on ill founded projection of genocide is, sadly, playing out this very week. Jesus' response, to deal with the plank in one's eye, is still sound and still too often side stepped. KFkairosfocus_{March 29, 2023
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PM1, not only does [CD + projection] help us understand whole classes of fallacies and trollish misconduct, it is pivotal to understanding industrial strength power backed fallacies, i.e. propaganda. The capital example is turn speech blame projection pioneered by the Bolsheviks and brought to full hellish force by Goebbels and co. As in, the Poles attacked first. The Reichstag was burned through a Communist push, we must pass an enabling act. The Jewish-Bolshevik grand conspiracy of global subjugation must be defeated, so we launch our counter stroke, June 22, 1941. And of course, the big lie technique is the invention of the English Plutocracy. And of course, hatred for the other, is obvious in those cases. KFkairosfocus_{March 29, 2023
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Hunger and mating attraction also explain a lot of behavior but no one suggests that they are indicia of fallacious thinking (or vice versa). Moreover, cognitive dissonance is an important component in the learning process and the ability to effectively resolve dissonance is highly correlated to intelligence. See e.g., Piaget, J. (1975). The equilibration of cognitive structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Projection, on the other hand, is simply a garden variety, Freudian (viz. outdated) defense mechanism interposed to protect the ego from having to confront its prejudices and insecurities. Projection is, in principle, an unconscious process unearthed via psychoanalysis, not in the comments section of a blog devoted to "Serving The Intelligent Design Community." Posting provocative OPs on blogs to generate long comment strings is probably also indicia of some type of unconscious defense mechanism or ego validation strategy, but what do I know? ;-)chuckdarwin_{March 29, 2023
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Firstly, cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomena that has no substantial connection to fallacies, informal or formal. Correct reasoning does not avoid cognitive dissonance. Secondly, you misquoted Dawkins. His quip was “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).” One may disagree with him about this, but he is not referring to "the despised other": he is referring to people who hold a specific set of beliefs.PyrrhoManiac1_{March 29, 2023
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FP, cognitive dissonance and defence mechanisms explain a lot of behaviour. The above simply provides background, for those who need it, in part answering dismissiveness [here, compare Aesop's Fox and grapes]. Which, predictably, re-appears . . . inadvertently showing, its relevance. KFkairosfocus_{March 29, 2023
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The author writes:
Food, for thought.
I have read through the OP and I am still trying to figure out what the point is. It may be good for something, but thought isn’t it. Although, I am aware of a Madagascar beetle, Scarabaeus, I believe, that may see this as food.Ford Prefect_{March 28, 2023
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L&FP, 68: Cognitive Dissonance and fallacies of projection etckairosfocus_{March 28, 2023
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