Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance. It’s a concept that keeps coming up in discussions about why the local media in Baltimore has refused to revise their assessment of The Senator Theatre and its transition, and refused to investigate what really went on, in light of revelations of the truth reported on this blog and by Friends of The Senator leaders. The media has not done its job on this story, and in fact has instead perpetuated a series of falsehoods that are now believed by many in Baltimore to be the gospel truth. When the actual truth was discovered and reported by me and a few others, it was ignored. What is going on?

The false story: Baltimore City has loaned Tom Kiefaber a lot of money and bailed him out time and again.

The true story: Baltimore City has NEVER lent Tom Kiefaber a single dime, and the city neglected The Senator for over a decade. This was in order to starve Tom out of The Senator, so that they could force a change in operators (which has now been accomplished). Baltimore City is now set to give the new operators much more money in grants and loans than they ever gave Tom Kiefaber. Statements made to the press about this during the past decade by Baltimore City and Baltimore Development Corporation officials almost invariably contained either false or misleading content.

Let me repeat the basic truth here: Baltimore City has NEVER lent Tom Kiefaber a single dime, and the city neglected The Senator for over a decade. See? You still don't believe me, but it's true.

The facts are right on the surface and easy to investigate, yet since I began to uncover them, every media outlet in Baltimore has flatly refused to investigate and report the truth. Most have continued the false and defamatory storyline of “the city bailed Tom out,” in defiance of actual fact. Why?

The answer may lie in the science of brain research.

Cognitive Dissonance is a term psychologists use to describe what happens in our brains when we have one thought, which we believe is a fact, and then are presented with conflicting information. Humans don’t like cognitive dissonance. We want the information in our brains to be neatly organized, for the bits of information to agree with each other, for it all to make sense.

“If someone is presented with information that is dissonant from what they already know, the easiest way to deal with this new information is to ignore it, refuse to accept it, or simply avoid that type of information in general.” – Essay by
Phil Barker

This means when we already believe something false, we will often reject the truth when we hear it.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people are confronted by facts, instead of changing their minds, they often strengthen their false beliefs.

"Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."

If you’re a true believer in the prevalent “the city bailed Tom out” meme, you probably haven’t read this far. Your cognitive dissonance has already maybe caused you to reject my argument. If you’re an adventurous true believer who has read this far, you’re probably sputtering right now, thinking “but…but…the Sun gave numbers. They told us how much the city had lent Tom.”

Numbers lie.

In a recent interview on NPR, I heard author Charles Seife discussing his new book “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” which I admittedly have not yet read. The basic gist I got from the discussion was this:

Numbers automatically lend credibility. When people see a number quoted in a news article, they believe that information to be true, even if they cannot verify that the number quoted is accurate.

To re-quote an excerpt of “Proofiness” that’s quoted on NPR’s web site:

As he held aloft a sheaf of papers, a beetle-browed Joe McCarthy assured his place in the history books with his bold claim: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

That number—205—was a jolt of electricity that shocked Washington into action against communist infiltrators. Never mind that the number was a fabrication. The number went up to 207 and then dropped down again the following day, when McCarthy wrote to President Truman claiming that “we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department.” A few days later, the number stabilized at 81 “security risks.” McCarthy gave a lengthy speech in the Senate, giving some details about a large number of cases (fewer than 81, in fact) but without revealing enough information for others to check into the matter.

It really didn’t matter whether the list had 205 or 57 or 81 names. The very fact that McCarthy had attached a number to his accusations imbued them with an aura of truth.

McCarthy convinced the entire nation that the State Department was filled with communists, based on a number he had just made up. It seems former Deputy Mayor and former BDC official Andrew Frank had similar political instincts.

In articles in the Baltimore Sun and other places, Frank was fond of citing the figure $600,000 when discussing how much money the city had supposedly used to bail out Tom Kiefaber. Except it wasn’t true. This money had not helped Tom to keep The Senator open.

The figure Frank was talking about represented a loan guarantee, not a loan or a grant. The city had not actually paid out that money, and would never become liable for that money, unless Tom defaulted on The Senator’s mortgage with 1st Mariner bank AND the bank foreclosed on The Senator AND foreclosed on Tom’s house AND another residential property Tom had used as collateral AND all of that property still could not cover the outstanding amount of the loan. Not a very likely scenario.

In fact, the only thing the loan guarantee did was to give the city financial leverage, so that when Tom eventually could not pay the mortgage on The Senator, they were able to dictate what the disposition of the property would be, and therefore acquire it themselves. The $600,000 did not go into bailing Tom out, but instead went to the bank, so that the city could acquire The Senator. The city used the loan guarantee to get its own hooks into the property, not to help Tom Kiefaber.

Numbers can be used in a deceptive way. Take the letter to the Kansas School Board by Bobby Henderson, which used numbers and a graph to document that global warming is caused by the global decline in pirate populations. Now this is absurd – almost as absurd as claiming that Tom Kiefaber, who put over 1.2 million dollars of his own money into The Senator, and never borrowed a dime from the City of Baltimore, was bailed out by the City of Baltimore time and again.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The way the local media has framed The Senator story is largely false, in many particulars. In example after example, known by a few insiders, what the media reports on The Senator is often actually the opposite of the truth, but detailing all of that when the population of Baltimore is still faced with cognitive dissonance over the most basic of facts would be simply an exercise in frustration.

To give one anecdotal example, after The Senator changed its programming from mainly first-run films to a more eclectic mix of film, live music, and community events in March-April of 2009, the local media persisted in repeating the falsehood that the theatre was closed. One day when I was volunteering there, a passerby saw Tom Kiefaber changing the letters on the marquee, so that they would list the next day's event. The passerby remarked that it was nice that he continued to care for the marquee, even when the theatre was closed, and asked if he was advertising events for other theatres. When Tom told him that in fact, the theatre was not closed and he was putting up the marquee information for the next day's event, the passerby refused to believe him, and argued with Tom for several minutes. Finally, Tom brought him into the theatre and showed him a crowd of people in the auditorium, watching a movie.

"Friends of yours?" asked the passerby.

"You don't believe your own lying eyes, do you?" said Tom, and explained again that the people in the auditorium were paying customers, and that the theatre was in fact open.

Finally, the man had to admit that he had not been able to believe what his own eyes had shown him, because the TV news had told him something that wasn't true, but that he had believed. The man told Tom he would tell others the theatre was open, but the volunteers at the theatre doubted it would help. After all, a lot of other people had been told by the TV news that the theatre was closed, and even if they saw it open, they might not believe their own lying eyes.

When working hard to maintain cognitive dissonance, though, sometimes emotional arguments work best. When all else fails, true believers in the “Tom is the problem” meme simply state, “well, we don’t like him. He’s a jerk.” So, even if it's proven to them that the city never bailed Tom out, many will fall back on this argument.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff knows all about how emotional arguments bypass the logical part of the brain and go straight to the emotional centers, often making arguments with facts ineffectual. He wrote about that in his eye-opening book “The Political Mind.”

So, why does all this neuroscience stuff matter in the case of The Senator Theatre? Why do I care that people have been fooled about what has happened in the past, leading to the transition of ownership of The Senator Theatre?

It matters because the best advocate The Senator has ever had in its history has been defamed, marginalized, and effectively silenced, and contrary to public belief, The Senator Theatre is now more endangered than ever before, because the current plan by the new operators is poorly thought out and is not based on real understanding of the issues involved.

Advocates for The Senator’s future need Tom’s voice back, not because he should be in charge again (he doesn’t want to be), but because of his years of experience and his visionary insight, which are very much missed by those in the know.

Book Review: The Political Mind

I just finished reading George Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. Lakoff’s previous books include Don’t Think of an Elephant!, which discussed progressive and conservative mental models of politics and the reasons why progressives lose elections due to ineffective use of language structures called frames.

Don’t Think of an Elephant! made quite a splash in the progressive community by showing that progressives give a huge advantage to conservatives, allowing them to define the cognitive frames that we all use to conceptualize politics. By letting the conservative message machine set the frames used in the media and throughout society, progressives lose. It argued for a more conscious use of language to accurately convey the progressive moral vision.

The Political Mind continues Lakoff’s revelation of research into cognitive linguistics, the brain, and how the brain works when thinking about politics. The information conveyed here is profoundly important and creates a whole new paradigm of how we understand political decision-making based on recent brain research. I cannot overemphasize how important it is that progressives learn and assimilate this information. Our Democracy, our environment, and our ability to effect the kind of changes that are needed to protect them may actually depend on it.

Lakoff’s central argument is that as progressives, our most widely accepted modes of political communication and political theory are incorrectly based on an 18th-Century Enlightenment understanding of how the mind works. He describes the 18th-Century view of reason thus:

“Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self-interest.”

Lakoff argues that the entirety of this 18th-Century understanding of reason can be proven to be false based on recent discoveries about how the brain actually operates. In fact, he says, thought is mostly unconscious, emotional, and fits into metaphorical structures called frames that group related concepts through neural connections made and strengthened when different parts of the brain are activated simultaneously.

Why does this matter?

It matters because we cannot assume, as progressives usually do, that if you give someone the facts about an issue they will study those facts and make a logical decision that serves their self-interest. Some might, if they have taken the time to research the issues and to create a mental connection between issue positions and their own understanding of those issues. For most voters, however, there is a much more direct way to communicate political concepts, and it is emotional, metaphorical, and based on values.

Lakoff argues that progressives must learn to communicate their moral vision, which is fundamentally based on empathy, in direct emotional language that strengthens the brain’s empathetic response. In fact, he states that brain research has shown that humans are mentally wired for empathy. A progressive’s job, then, is to present policies and messages that elicit that natural empathetic response.

He also discusses the difference between progressive and conservative thought, in an extension of the nurturant parent vs. strict father model that he presented in his previous work. Just as the progressive moral vision is fundamentally one of empathy, the conservative moral vision is fundamentally one of authoritarianism. These are two distinct modes of thought that are very different, but each of us is capable of using both modes at least some of the time. As Lakoff says,

"Our democracy is presently being threatened by the politics of obedience to authority, the very thing that democracy was invented to counteract. The politics of authority is succeeding because conservatives have been activating their ideas in the brains of the public, while finding ways to inhibit the use of progressive modes of thought."

The conservative spin machine, by working actively to get their frames into the public consciousness, has succeeded over many years in activating the authoritarian mode of thought to a greater degree in our society. Progressives need to learn to use language that explicitly states their moral vision of empathy. Hearing words that evoke an empathetic response repeatedly will strengthen the natural empathetic response in the public.

Lakoff argues that we must replace the 18th-Century Enlightenment view of reason with a New Enlightenment understanding of real reason. The information he reveals is certainly a new paradigm and very important, but one of the weaknesses of his book is that he fails to succinctly define his term “real reason.” It is not clear, at least to me, whether real reason refers to the way people’s minds actually work in regard to language and metaphor and physically embedded associations, or the knowledge of how brains work, which at present is described in technical scientific language that is unavailable to most people. This knowledge can be used by those who understand it to craft more effective policies and messages, but it is a long way from being accepted as popular scientific knowledge. The public would benefit, I think, by learning more about how our brains work with language, for, in Lakoff’s words,

"Language can be used to change minds, which means it can change brains – permanently, for good or ill. It does not merely express emotions, it can change them; not merely arouse or quell them, but change the role of emotion in one’s life and the life of a nation."

Reading these words and those that followed describing the physical changes that can be wrought in the brain through the use of language, I was reminded that ancient cultures often credited the same god who created language, such as Mercury in Roman mythology or Thoth in Egyptian mythology, with the invention of magic. There is great power in words. Understanding how they work protects us from being manipulated.

Ultimately, Lakoff’s book will be read by intellectuals and adopted by some, but for the political workings of the mind as he describes them to be understood by the public, and for the modes of communication that he suggests to come into common usage by the average progressive, someone is going to have to translate this information into precisely the kind of emotional, metaphorical language that Lakoff suggests, but as a scientist, is not very much prone to using himself. In other words, Lakoff does exactly what he accuses Democratic politicians of doing: presenting us with facts that few will be able to immediately understand and asking us to accept his premise based on those facts, while perhaps failing to notice that his arguments do not make an emotional connection in our brains. Indeed, there are whole chapters of this book that seem to be aimed more at his colleagues in cognitive science than at the general reader. (I have not quoted these sections, because their meanings were at best quite difficult to comprehend for the lay person.)

It’s a shame his work is not presented in a more readily accessible fashion for the general reader, because the implications of understanding it are quite astounding. In his Afterword, Lakoff describes how society might change if this research were common knowledge.

"We would understand that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth. We cannot exist alone.

We would embrace the fact that empathy is at the heart of American democracy. It is a positive force for human society at large. It is why we care about fundamental human rights... Without such care, there would be no America."

I recommend this book to all progressives who want to learn to communicate more effectively and who are willing to wade through at least some technical language about brain science. I hope that Lakoff will write a shorter book explaining this information and aimed at the general reader, much as he did with Don’t Think of an Elephant!

 

 

July 19, 2008: Edited to shorten quotes and conform to fair use standards.