cognitive dissonance scale

Cognitive Dissonance Games and Tipping Points: President Trump Made Rob Reiner the Greatest Hollywood Director Ever and Himself Into an “Ogre.”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Among the many reasons that President Trump’s attack on Rob Reiner before the shock of his murder at the hands of his own son had subsided was stupid (as well as unpresidential and cruel) was its ignorance of the Streisand Effect. The completely predictable reaction of the Trump Deranged, always seeking a new metaphorical drum to beat, and the similarly inclined Axis of Unethical Conduct, ensured that the President’s gratuitous Truth Social post would trigger an eruption of outrage that will fuel attacks on the President’s character for months, perhaps reaching into the mid-terms.

For this to really work, of course, Reiner must be elevated to near saint-like status, and sure enough, that’s what is going on. The higher Reiner (he was a wonderful, flawless man, we are now being told) and his films ( one of his movies is a favorite movie of everyone, one article claimed) can be pushed up the Cognitive Dissonance scale, the lower Trump goes by attacking him. Trump is first and last a salesman; how could he not know his gratuitous outburst would deeply wound his “brand”?

Among other gifts to Trump’s political enemies. this Cognitive Dissonance Scale botch makes defending or even continuing to support the President perilous. If you link yourself to President Trump (based, as it must be based, on his policies and actions rather than his character) by defending him you are simultaneously proclaiming your opposition to “The Princess Bride,” “Stand by Me” and “When Harry Met Sally” and the unassailable murder victim who made them.

This, in turn, poses the real danger that Trump’s revolting post will prove to be a tipping point, that last, tiny, thing that makes the Jenga tower fall or Mr. Creosote’s stomach explode as it does after eating the “wafer thin” morsel offered him in the clip above from “The Meaning of Life.” Trump’s stupid, mean words may well tip public opinion against his whole Presidency permanently and completely. If so, it will undoubtedly be the most trivial verbal tipping point in U.S. political history. By comparison, George Romney saying he had been “brainwashed,” President Ford saying in a debate that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe, or President Carter claiming in his debate with Ronald Reagan that he consulted daughter Amy on nuclear weapons policy seem positively earth-shattering.

And yet if attacking a recently slaughtered director crushes Trump’s chances of holding off the Far Left’s siege on American values and core individual liberties, it may prove to be the most consequential moment in his Presidency.

Additional points:

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Warning to Democrats: Beware the Cognitive Dissonance Scale! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.

None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.

The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.

True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.

Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.

Professor Jacobson Asks, “What Happened To Tucker Carlson?” EA’s Answer: Nothing! He Was Always Like This!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Prof. William Jacobson of Cornell oversees an excellent, well-researched conservative blog that often delves into the world of ethics, often from a legal perspective. One of his current posts is titled “What Happened to Tucker?,” as the Prof. laments what he sees as Carlson’s turn to the Dark Side. “He’s turned out not to be the person I thought he was,” Jacobson writes. “After leaving Fox News, he has done more to normalize Jew-hatred and bring it into the MAGA movement through the “woke right” than any other major ‘conservative’ personality…Something has gone very wrong. Maybe his true self finally was freed of the constraints of corporate news, or maybe something else influenced him. But now he is — in my estimation — a malign force and not just as to Jews and Israel, but also to the Trump agenda which he seems determined to undermine.”

You see Fredo above in his pathetic protestations of intellectual acumen from “Godfather II,” one of my favorite entries in the EA Hollywood Clip Archive, because in this instance, I was way ahead of Prof. Jacobson. Last December I issued this post, in which I quoted from an earlier “Why can’t everyone see that Carlson is an untrustworthy asshole?” essay that said in part,

“ [Tucker Carlson is] a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it.…since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has! Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power.”

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Here Is How Arrogant and Delusional Harvard Is: It Really Thinks It Can Prevail In Public Opinion Over The President of the United States…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.

To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”

“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.

I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…

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Ethics Quiz: Victor Davis Hanson’s Head-Exploding Pro-Trump Essay

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Over at RealClearPolitics, conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson has an essay that I fervently believe is spot-on regarding what he calls “the Trump counter-revolution.” Of course I do: it tracks exactly with what I’ve been writing here for more than a decade, the primary difference being that Hanson’s views carry a lot more weight than mine do. The “money quote” in the essay, its conclusion:

Enraged Democrats still offer no substantial alternatives to the Trump agenda.

There are no shadow-government Democratic leaders with new policy initiatives. They flee from the Biden record on the border, the prior massive deficits and inflation, the disaster in Afghanistan, two theater-wide wars that broke out on Biden’s watch, and the shameless conspiracy to hide the prior president’s increasing dementia.

Instead, the Left has descended into thinly veiled threats of organized disruption in the streets. It embraces potty-mouth public profanity, profane and unhinged videos, nihilistic filibusters, congressional outbursts, and increasingly dangerous threats to the persons of Elon Musk and Trump.

All that frenzy is not a sign that the Trump counterrevolution is failing. It is good evidence that it is advancing forward, and its ethically bankrupt opposition has no idea how, or whether even, to stop it.

Oh, those words give me a BINGO! orgasm. I am now in the processes of fighting the impulse to post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing full well that it will lead to mass fury among 90% of my friends, have me unfriended and cancelled, even cause some associates to pull out of a major theatrical project I’m involved in. Posting it would run directly into Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality.

And yet…I put up with far more triggering (for me) content from them literally every day without protest. I don’t cancel them or unfriend them, any more than I reject friends and relatives when they have contracted a pernicious disease. Do friends let friends remain tunnel-visioned, bubble-bound, biased and ignorant?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should I post Hanson’s essay on Facebook, knowing that it will change the minds of no one, except perhaps changing the minds of valued friends to conclude I am not fit for human contact?

The Last “Snow White” Post (I Promise)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Why is the Cognitive Dissonance Scale the graphic I chose for the final word on Disney’s “live-action” remake of Walt’s biggest and most important hit, 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”? (For some perspective, realize that we have the same relationship on the timeline to that film that it had to the Presidency of Millard Fillmore.) It is clear that this cultural ethics train wreck, which EA has been dutifully covering (here, here, here, here here, and here), is now stuck inextricably in cognitive dissonance territory. For most viewers, what they think about the movie will be influenced far more by their biases and what they associate with the movie than the movie itself.

That’s how the scale works, as I keep explaining ad nauseam. If Disney is generally a plus-5 on a ticket-buyer’s scale (once upon a time, Disney would have been a plus-10 or higher on everyone’s scale) and the movie in a vacuum would be at “Meh”-level Zero, Disney would pull the film into positive territory. If Disney is in negative territory already for a different viewer, the film begins with an anchor chained to its metaphorical ankles.

Thus it is hardly surprising to see this as the early returns on the film (which doesn’t officially open in theaters until tomorrow):

Now that’s polarization!

What’s going on here? Well, a lot…

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An Ugly “Lookism”-Kings Pass Hybrid

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Above is a photo of then-high school pole-vaulter Allison Stokke. Stokke was made into an involuntary pin-up when the photo was posted in 2008 to a sports blog, along with the caption: “Meet pole vaulter Allison Stokke… Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds.” The image went “viral” making her an instant celebrity, and sex symbol. As I wrote in 2021, “Oh, Allison did just fine: she became a model and married a pro-golfer. But that’s moral luck. Her photo might have triggered an obsession by a sheik who had her kidnapped and brought to his harem as a sex slave. You never know.”

This is just one of the ugly pathologies social media has inflicted on us. Even more people than before the internet are obsessed with appearances, particularly since the culture now actively cultivates narcissism. (I will never take a selfie to my dying day.) A particularly nauseating example occurred this week, when University of Georgia student Lily Stewart was arrested on March 8 for speeding, Morgan County Crime shared Stewart’s mugshot with her arrest information, and the photo went “viral” to the extent that the British tabloid The Daily Mail treated it as a news story.

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Cognitive Dissonance Scale Lesson For Senate Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have mentioned here frequently that one of two things I learned in college that have been most useful in my life and career is Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Scale. The concept illustrated by the scale is also one of the most useful tools for ethical analysis, often essential to answering the question, “What’s going on here?” the entry point to many perplexing situations. Check the tag: it just took me 15 minutes to scroll though the posts that got it. I was surprised to find that I didn’t use the tag until 2014, when the scale helped me conclude that the Tea Party, then in ascendancy, was “doomed by a powerful phenomenon it obviously doesn’t understand: Cognitive Dissonance.” Heard much about the Tea Party lately? See, I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says… I wrote then,

As psychologist Leon Festinger showed a half a century ago, we form our likes, dislikes, opinions and beliefs to a great extent based on our subconscious reactions to who and what they are connected with and associated to. This is, to a considerable extent, why leaders and celebrities are such powerful influences on society. It explains why we tend to adopt the values of our parents, and it largely explains many marketing and advertising techniques that manipulate our desires and preferences. Simply put, if someone we admire adopts a position or endorses a product, person or idea, he or she will naturally raise it in our estimation. If however, that position, product, person or idea is already extremely low in our esteem, even though his endorsement might raise it, even substantially, his own status will suffer, and fall. He will slide down the admiration scale, even if that which he endorses rises. If what the individual endorses is sufficiently deplored, it might even wipe out his positive standing entirely.

The implications of this phenomenon are many and varied, and sometimes complex. If a popular and admired politician espouses a policy, many will assume the policy is wise simply because he supports it. If an unpopular fool then argues passionately for the same policy, Festinger’s theory tells us, it might..

1. Raise the fool’s popularity, if the policy is sufficiently popular.

2. Lower support for the policy, if he is sufficiently reviled, and even

3. Lower the popularity of the admired politician, who will suffer for being associated with an idea that had been embraced by a despised dolt.

This subconscious shifting, said Festinger, goes on constantly, effecting everything from what movies we like to the clothes we wear to how we vote.

Here, for the heaven-knows-how-many-th time, is the scale in simplified form…

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Comment of the Day: “Hello. This Is Mira!….Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

AM Golden has delivered a fascinating Comment of the Day describing a phenomenon I was barely aware of: the practice of paying celebrities to attend conventions that have little of nothing to do with what the celebrity does or is famous for.

The COTD was inspired by my commentary on the brain-meltingly stupid anti-Trump “X” screed by one-time Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, now on the shady side of what turned into a disappointing career. (To be fair, she was black-balled in her prime by Harvey Weinstein for not accommodating his sexual demands when he was one of biggest power-brokers in Hollywood.)

Incidentally, appropo of subsequent events, Mira’s polemic proclaimed Trump as the second coming of Hitler and said that if he was elected, it would mean the end of America as we know it. And as it is beginning to look like he will be elected…what is the patriotic thing to do to save the nation, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

But I digress…

The convention practice is clearly a cognitive dissonance scale stunt in part: an organization that sponsors a generally admired and beloved public figure as a “guest” gets a boost up the positive end of the scale. Or the celebrity is more like a freak show attraction: Come meet Joey Buttafuoco! Kato Kaelin! And a convention that features a professional leach like Mary Trump (above)? Don’t expect me to register.

AM’s Comment of the Day is also something of an ethics quiz. Don’t jump to the end: that’s cheating.

Here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?”

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Ethics Dunce: The Biden Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

This might be the easiest Ethics Dunce pick ever; at least I am certain that there couldn’t have been an easier one. When I heard which ever Democratic Party hack it was introduce Robert DeNiro as a featured speaker for the Biden campaign’s Trump Hate presser outside the Manhattan courthouse where this kangaroo kaper is inching to a conclusion, I thought, “No! They can’t be this crude, obvious and stupid. They just can’t be.”

They were, and they are.

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