Last night's debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden offered an interesting opportunity to watch the process by which people learn and change. Partisans will find a multitude of reasons to believe their candidate won the debate. For the partisan, gaffes will not matter (as long as they do not reach the threshold of Gerald Ford's "Eastern Europe is free" proportions), demeanor can be spun for or against the candidate of one's choice, and the content is usually predictable and immaterial. Partisans have an emotional attachment to their decision and emotionally charged beliefs are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. Because Sarah Palin has been an unknown to most Americans, her performance and the performance of the MSM over the last few weeks is worth remarking upon.
[As a partisan for Sarah Palin and john McCain I am most struck by the MSM narrative that Joe Biden is a man of great intellect and gravitas. His debate style apparently includes complete fabrications said with the utmost conviction. My favorite was his contention that the United States and NATO had tossed Hezbollah out of Lebanon. My immediate reaction was to ask, "Does Hassan Nasrallah know that?" Yet nothing Joe Biden says seems to shake the image of Joe Biden for most people.]
Sarah Palin's initial introduction to the American people, her speech at the convention, was a resounding success. She was genuine, passionate, and very likeable. She was appealing on many different levels and the American public, if the polls can be believed, responded well to her. Over the following weeks, a combination of McCain campaign diffidence and MSM disparagement combined to damage her image. She was increasingly depicted as unsure of herself, poorly informed, extreme in her views, and at the margin, barely literate. The MSM savaged her, not only by asking questions designed to elicit a poor response but by purposefully editing her responses to make her sound more unprepared. Last night's debate was, therefor most instructive.
Not surprisingly, a CNN focus group of uncommitted viewers, identified as leaning toward Obama/Biden, heavily favored Biden as the "winner" of the debate. This is not a surprise. People who self describe as leaning have already made the preconscious decision of who they support and are looking for confirmation. Unless there was a "game changing" moment, their opinions are unlikely to change. On the other hand, a Frank Lunz focus group, which had the first Presidential debate as a "win" for Barack Obama, overwhelmingly gave the nod to Palin.
Here is my best guess: people who were truly uncommitted tuned in to see Sarah Palin for themselves and those people were impressed that the woman they saw was nothing at all like the caricature that the MSM has been promulgating for the last several weeks. Whether this will matter in the general election remains to be seen, but it offers an excellent starting point for a discussion of how people learn and change.
Two weeks ago a study was published that showed that attempting to debunk incorrect information often paradoxically made people's belief in eh information stronger.
I've long thought that correcting misinformation (often called "debunking") helps enable human understanding. I think this is a principle which many bloggers believe in, to the point where it's often considered one of the basic advantages of the blogosphere. As the theory goes, the more bloggers do this, the more "self correcting" the blogosphere becomes.
So I was a bit taken aback to learn about a study which claims that correcting misinformation can have the effect of causing people to adhere more strenuously to the misinformation which is being corrected.
This is not news to a Psychoanalyst. When people have an emotional investment in a fallacious intellectual construct, it typically serves many unconscious and conscious functions. In other words, people believe nonsense because it serves a deep psychological need. In order to loosen the hold such nonsense has on them it is necessary to unravel many of the strands of emotional investment that maintain the need for the nonsense. This is done in two different ways.
[As an aside, the New York Times reported on a meta analysis of a limited sample of studies that support Psychoanalysis for some chronic conditions:
Intensive psychoanalytic therapy, the “talking cure” rooted in the ideas of Freud, has all but disappeared in the age of drug treatments and managed care.
But now researchers are reporting that the therapy can be effective against some chronic mental problems, including anxiety and borderline personality disorder.
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
The authors, writing in Wednesday’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, strongly urged scientists to undertake more testing of psychodynamic therapy, as it is known, before it is lost altogether as a historical curiosity.
The review is the first such evaluation of psychoanalysis to appear in a major medical journal, and the studies on which the new paper was based are not widely known among doctors.]
First, over the course of a long period of time, the Analyst carefully interprets the defenses against knowing and the unacceptable ideas and feelings that fuel the defenses. For example, a person who needs to blame others for his failures would be shown in multiple ways how he attributes agency to others in order to avoid feeling bad about himself. He failed the test not because the teacher was pernicious but because he didn't study adequately. Such interpretations must be done with great tack and form multiple angles until the person is ready to accept that they have more than a little influence on their lives. This can take a long time. (Mr. A is an example of the way this works in an Analytic treatment.)
The other alternative is that a more dramatic (sometimes catastrophic) interpretation breaks through the defences, either because over the course of time the defenses have been thinned by interpretive work or the intensity of either an event or an interpretation is enough to overwhelm the defenses. At such a time, the character structure becomes more fluid and can reorganize in a healthier way with more adaptive and mature defenses. For example, after many years of resisting the knowledge that she has always believed herself to be helpless in order to avoid knowing how she contributed to her own misfortunes (which stemmed from early a physical and verbal abuse) in response to a comment that she was turning me into a tormentor in order to fail and be harmed by me just as she had been harmed by so many before me, a young woman remarked that she knew I was right but if she decided that she could no longer be the "Queen of Denial" then she would just have to start all over as a mere peasant. Her pun and self-deprecating comments were a humorous attempt to deflect some of the pain of recognition. There was a great deal of preparatory work that had occurred that allowed her to accept the interpretation and her character did, in fact, reorganize at a higher level of functioning, though there was still a fair amount of work done in the following months consolidating her gains. (Dr. Y is an example of someone who required a catastrophic reality based interpretation in order to begin the difficult process of change.)
This brings me full circle back to the debates. For confirmed partisans, nothing short of a catastrophic blunder would shake their faith in their candidate. Even then, for some there is so much of an investment emotionally that electoral defeat is preferable to seeing their candidate as fallible. However, for the non-partisan, interested, uncommitted viewer, the debate offered two important interpretations. First, Sarah Palin is not the borderline intellect that they have been told repeatedly she is by the MSM. Second, the MSM do indeed, in an unmistakable way, have a bias and an interest in electing their candidate.
For the last several years, as the MSM has slowly evolved a business model that slants the news toward the positions of its core audience while hemorrhaging market share, they have inadvertently been making preparatory interpretations to the American people. More and more Americans realize that the MSM is biased and distorts the news, not least by what they cover and decide not to cover. Even those who only occasionally pay attention have a hard time not noticing that the MSM in five weeks have vetted Sarah Palin much more intensely than they have yet vetted Barack Obama. Whether that will be enough to direct the election to ward the MSM's favored candidate or not is impossible to tell; there is a very strong wind at the back of Democrats. Yet whatever the outcome of this election, the MSM's erosion of confidence has probably reached a critical mass where most people do not trust their reporting yet do not yet have trustworthy alternatives.
Sarah Palin made the interpretation, to those whose minds were open, that she is a genuine threat to the status quo in Washington.
The MSM made one more of a long series of interpretations that their trustworthiness is suspect.
Both interpretations will become more and more inportant in the years to come.
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