THE COMMON MYTH - ALL POLITICIANS ARE THE SAME
Initiated by recent conversation, the “both sides” argument hamstrings us all
Some days ago I was in a conversation with someone who admitted they didn’t follow politics in any meaningful way. They are busy with their life as are millions, trying to make a living in 2023 America. This person is adamant that all politicians are bad. No amount of trying to dissuade had any effect upon this viewpoint. I have heard this in the past among other people in one case from a very right leaning individual. So I attempted to address this apparently common viewpoint in the verse below.
Here is what a word search of X brought forth for ‘both sides.’ This appears to be on many minds today in following the mainstream media. Can we ever expect a change, or do we only keep bringing it up for those consumers to consider hoping for some enlightenment?
Here is what the same word search on Truth Social brought. Both X and Truth Social certainly have foreign propagandists posting. The both sides approach most likely does damage to society when democracy is under attack. So it would seem that effort would be put into this approach from nefarious foreign countries. But I also think that it is natural when one sees intractable problems of one’s long time political affiliation, that an effort is made to make the other choice even worse in the mind to dissuade changing beliefs. The both sides argument is an easy way out.
How does the stereotype of a politician play into this both-sides argument? The politician stereotype is greatly established for decades without doubt. Now populists like Independent Bernie Sanders and fake populists like Donald Trump seem to break the mold to this stereotype perhaps. I didn’t find any specific research on this. Rather, I didn’t take the time to research this further. It seems like a good idea for the future. But on stereotyping itself I found a paper which portrays the current approach to the phenomenon. Here are some excerpts from it.
Implicit stereotypes and the predictive brain: cognition and culture in “biased” person perception
By *Perry Hinton
humanities and social sciences communications
September 1, 2017
Traditionally a stereotype has been defined as overgeneralized attributes associated with the members of a social group (such as the reserved English or the geeky engineer), with the implication that it applies to all group members.
Psychological researchers have sought to identify why certain people employed stereotypes and, in much of the twentieth century, they were viewed as due to a mental fallacy or misconception of a social group, an individual’s “biased” cognition, resulting from proposed factors such as “simplicity” of thought and arising from upbringing and social motivation (particularly “authoritarianism”). A considerable amount of effort has been made subsequently to persuade people to avoid stereotype use, by highlighting its inaccuracy and unfairness. However, since the 1960s, cognitive researchers, such as, have argued that stereotyping is a general feature of human social categorization. Despite this, it has been argued that individuals can consciously seek to avoid using negative stereotypes and maintain a non-prejudiced view of others. The present work argues that, rather than viewing implicit stereotypes as a problem of the cognitive bias of the individual, they should be viewed as “culture in mind” influencing the cognition of cultural group members.
During socialization, members of a culture learn the beliefs existing in that culture concerning different social groups. Owing to their frequency of occurrence, stereotypical associations about people from the stereotyped group become firmly-established in memory. Owing to their widespread existence in society, more-or-less everyone in the culture, even the non-prejudiced individual, has the implicit stereotypical associations available in semantic memory. Consequently, the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of a member of the stereotyped group, and has the potential to influence the perceiver’s thought and behaviour.
It is argued here that implicit stereotypes, as attributes associated with social groups, do not indicate an unconscious cognitive “bias” (a “cognitive monster”) within the fair-minded person but are learnt associations arising from the normal working of the predictive brain in everyday life. These associations are based on information circulating within the person’s culture, and the associations are probabilistically detected by the predictive brain: as such they can be characterised as “culture in mind” rather than an individual bias. According to the predictive brain model, when the culture changes then the implicit stereotypes of its members will change (albeit slowly for some associations). Therefore, to properly understand the nature of implicit stereotypes, cognitive research needs to be combined with the study of the dynamics of culture, to understand the specific associations prevalent in the communication within a culture and their implicit influence on the members of that culture.
Perry Hinton
Professor at University of Warwick
University of Warwick
Coventry, England, United Kingdom
I am a cultural psychologist in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. My research focuses on stereotypes and intercultural communication. I have written a number of papers about the perception (and misperception) of modern Japanese culture in Western media. My books (all published by Routledge) include 'The Perception of People: Integrating: Cognition and Culture' (2016) and 'Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture' (2000). My most recent book 'Stereotypes and the Construction of the Social World' (2020) critically reviews the key psychological research on stereotypes over the last 100 years and presents a new cultural theory of stereotypes that deals with the contradictions of past explanations.
The information above stresses the force of culture in the stereotyping process. Hence it can change with cultural change. Exactly how the stereotype of the politician from the time my maturation has changed is beyond my ability to say. I will have to ponder this more. Donald Trump upset the whole apple cart, and we’re reeling from it to this day. Now his cultish members will never consider him a politician, although he certainly is undoubtedly one. He is skillful in using the media in a political manner to further his goals. This disconnect in the MAGA is part of their overall problem of cognition of what exactly Trump is. The typical politician stereotype doesn’t fit him perhaps, but as a pure authoritarian he is much worse. Anyway, I wished to research and write a little on this as it seems to be appropriate in the discussion, and with this I will end. Thanks for reading.
96th posting, September 22, 2023