February 21^st

In the paper today we have a longish Factcheck.org article debunking comments by Alabama Congressman Gary Palmer who predictably claims that climate data has been manipulated to show global warming.  Factcheck explains why data must be changed because of changing conditions in the way it is collected. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is likely to change the Congressman’s mind. I would guess that Mr. Palmer will now come to believe that Factcheck is a clandestine organ of an international left wing conspiracy out to ruin American coal companies.

How does it happen that providing information on one side of an issue changes few, if any, minds if they have already come to the opposite conclusion? The answer may be found in Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory. This theory suggests that we guard against dissonance which is the simultaneous holding of contradictory beliefs. (That’s hardly a surprise!) For example: if we really like our Chevy but brother-in-law Jasper insists that Chevys are junk we have dissonance. We can reduce this by believing that Jasper doesn’t know what he’s talking about but we like and admire Jasper so that won’t work. We like Jasper but we also like our Chevy so we conclude that, on the whole, Jasper may be right but that this Chevy is not typical. This decision allows us to keep both beliefs intact. On a much simpler level we can predict that very few liberals will tune into Fox News, at least not for the news.

Here are two other studies of a less obvious nature: Festinger gave a group of student volunteers a series of utterly boring tasks. Then he split them into two groups; one group was paid twenty dollars (this was back when that was real money) to tell a new group of students that the tasks were interesting and fun to do, the other group was paid just one dollar to tell the same lie. So which group actually came to believe the lie? Not the group paid twenty dollars but the group paid just one dollar. Being paid just one dollar is not enough money to justify a lie so that group came to believe the tasks were, indeed, interesting. That’s kind of counter intuitive.

In the next study Festinger infiltrated a doomsday group. They had sold everything they had and prepared themselves to be lifted off the earth which would then be consumed. Of course no such thing happened. How would these people handle such enormous dissonance? To an outsider they would appear to have been bone stupid; no such thing. They decided that their beliefs, and their sacrifices on behalf of those beliefs, had actually saved the world so their sacrifices were justified after all.

We can be sure that those holding the most extreme views, regardless of party, will not be happy with a moderate candidate. But the great majority of voters are not on the fringes of either party so any extreme candidate isn’t likely to be nominated. If extreme members are unhappy with a moderate candidate and sit on their hands then the party with the largest number of extremists loses. What party could that be?