Football hero Pat Tillman died a military hero, defending the U.S from terrorism, right? How convenient. Or did he die of friendly fire? It depends on what official version of the story you care to believe. Tillman's story reeks of cover-up. Now take a look at this evidence. And now take a look…
The title to this post is from a bumper sticker shown in "Generation Chickenhawk," a video shot last week by Max Blumenthal. The scene? The College Republican National Convention in Washington D.C. Here's proof that our young Republicans love wars as long as others do the fighting. Blumental's ten-minute video…
NPR recently interviewed psychologist Elliot Aronson, co-author, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). Aronson worked closely with Leon Festinger back in the 1950’s “designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory.” Here is NPR’s plug for the interview:
We all have a hard time admitting that we’re wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it’s not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson says our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I listened closely to the interview (you can listen on-line too by visiting the above link) because this was yet another serious attempt to apply psychology to a critical real-life situations. Exhibit A during this interview was the President’s dysfunctional attitude toward to continued U.S. occupation of Iraq.
According to Aronson, cognitive dissonance “is a drive, like hunger or thirst.” It is directed toward the human need to define who we are in a good light in order to reduce dissonance, so that we can “sleep well at night.” It is “a powerful and unconscious motor” that smoothes out our mental “rough edges.”
We commonly refer to cognitive dissonance as “justification.” Regarding many simple mistakes, it’s no big deal to spin the incident in a way that deflects blame and embarrassment from one’s self. If you spill wine on the carpet, you justify that that it was only white wine, or that the damage wasn’t noticeable, …
Members of the U.S. military are now speaking up, as documented by DemocracyNow. This set of interviews by DemocracyNow was provoked by a recent article by The Nation. Here's how DemocracyNow describes that article, entitled "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness": The Nation has published a startling new expose…
It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don't just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.” Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust. What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout "You're GAY!" And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust. Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .