TC
14th August 2006, 14:30
I think the idea of 'truthiness' is important in understanding how people in both the mainstream western politics but also large elements of the radical left understand political reality. Truthiness is defined as "the quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination", and i think it helps to explain how people, even reasonably well informed people on the left, will have considerable conviction in things they feel they know to be true despite being unable to site any specific evidence to support those claims. It also has the additional quality of people being able to disregard specific facts when they contradict what they feel they know to be true.
'Well the workers aren't really in controll of Cuba' is a claim that has a great deal of truthiness without much factual evidence, just the sense that it must be so and with everything they feel it would be hard to believe otherwise to many segments of the left, likewise a shocking fifty percent of americans still think that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction despite overwhelming evidence against this)
Although the concept of "Truthiness" was coined by a political comedian, Stephen Colbert, it has been discussed seriously by the maintream newspaper and TV news media. The New York Times, after having run an article on the word truthiness, listed it in its december 25 issue as one of the 9 words capturing the zeitgeist of the year 2005. The American Dialect Society voted truthiness its 2005 Word of the Year, and described its reasoning as:
"In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel [sic], truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, 'I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.'"
In an out of character interview with the Onion AV club, Stephen Colbert said:
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?...
Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.
Truthiness might be understood in part as a phenomenon similar to the resolution of cognitive dissonance explored in Festinger and Carlsmith's 1950s psychological experiments. One involved planting a research in a doomsday cult and watching how the cult members rationalized to themselves the fact that the world had not ended when they thought it was going to. They didn't change their behavior based on the facts and stop believing in the aliens, rather they reconciled the facts with their behavior in such a way that their preperations for doomsday still made perfect sense. When people are compelled to represent something as factual when it is not (and they do not have sufficent moviation to explain this), they convince themselves that the facts are there, that it is the truth, in order to resolve dissonance.
So, how applicable, significant or useful is this concept in understanding why some people believe the things that they do?
'Well the workers aren't really in controll of Cuba' is a claim that has a great deal of truthiness without much factual evidence, just the sense that it must be so and with everything they feel it would be hard to believe otherwise to many segments of the left, likewise a shocking fifty percent of americans still think that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction despite overwhelming evidence against this)
Although the concept of "Truthiness" was coined by a political comedian, Stephen Colbert, it has been discussed seriously by the maintream newspaper and TV news media. The New York Times, after having run an article on the word truthiness, listed it in its december 25 issue as one of the 9 words capturing the zeitgeist of the year 2005. The American Dialect Society voted truthiness its 2005 Word of the Year, and described its reasoning as:
"In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel [sic], truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, 'I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.'"
In an out of character interview with the Onion AV club, Stephen Colbert said:
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?...
Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.
Truthiness might be understood in part as a phenomenon similar to the resolution of cognitive dissonance explored in Festinger and Carlsmith's 1950s psychological experiments. One involved planting a research in a doomsday cult and watching how the cult members rationalized to themselves the fact that the world had not ended when they thought it was going to. They didn't change their behavior based on the facts and stop believing in the aliens, rather they reconciled the facts with their behavior in such a way that their preperations for doomsday still made perfect sense. When people are compelled to represent something as factual when it is not (and they do not have sufficent moviation to explain this), they convince themselves that the facts are there, that it is the truth, in order to resolve dissonance.
So, how applicable, significant or useful is this concept in understanding why some people believe the things that they do?