"Death Grip" --Political Psychology & Bush's Ghastly Success

[marions ghost]

You Guys--CHECK OUT this article in the latest "New Republic"...

Basically -- it details studies showing that when you remind people of their own mortality they will immediately prefer more conservative ways of thinking. In the experiments "mortality exercises" were used prior to asking questions about subjects' socio-political views. The startling results are based on studies done since 1989 and are quite consistent. After 9-11 the researchers used prompts about 9-11 as the "mortality" focus. They have obviously used the Bush years to further advance their earlier findings.

OK this is what "we already know" about Bushbot thinking in a sense, but it is astounding to realize that this is an immediate reflexive response --where the subconscious in the majority of subjects (even intelligent ones --ie. college students) flips -on a dime- to cause the conscious mind to suddenly prefer very Republican (my words) ways of thinking. Implications for 2008 elections are mentioned.

The whole article is online at link below, and very well written. Recommended!

The New Republic
Aug 27, 2007

"Death Grip"
John B. Judis

/snip/

By the end of the 1990s, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski had made their reputation among social psychologists. Psychologists around the world--particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel--were using their theories to devise experiments of their own. In October 2001, the American Psychological Association asked the three to write a book on how their theories could explain Americans' reaction to September 11. In the Wake of 9/11, which appeared in 2003, recounted more than a decade of experiments and speculated on how the public's reaction to the attack-- including heightened religiosity, patriotism, and support for both Bush and his evangelical swagger--could be explained as worldview defense.

The three scholars also began devising experiments to test this theory. The first of these explored whether reminders of September 11 functioned as mortality reminders. In the spring of 2002, the psychologists, along with five colleagues, conducted an experiment at the University of Missouri, where subjects had either "911," "WTC" (for the World Trade Center), or "573" (the area code for Columbia) flashed subliminally between word associations. Afterward, they completed word-fragment tests to see whether thoughts of death were stirring in their unconscious. The psychologists found the same pattern between "911" and "WTC," on the one hand, and "573," on the other, that they had earlier found between "death" and "field." They concluded that reminders of September 11 awakened unconscious mortality thoughts. Later experiments would further confirm this.

They then explored whether Bush's popularity in the years after September 11 stemmed in part from Americans' need for a charismatic figure who could help them overcome these thoughts. Bush's appeal, the psychologists speculated, lay "in his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God's will to rid the world of evil.'" In 2002, the psychologists, aided by two colleagues, conducted an experiment at Brooklyn College that showed that mortality reminders dramatically enhanced the appeal of a hypothetical candidate who told voters, "You are not just an ordinary citizen: You are part of a special state and a special nation." (more at link)

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070827&s=judis082707&c=2


Thoughts and comments appreciated....

[izzie]

1. One thing to put into this

These tests are usually done on college students meaning middle class people in usually a set range of income and back ground. It also has to go out to the general public to make it more real. When it gets out to every one and the same results come back I start thinking they may have some thing.

[marions ghost]

4. they also did a study using 22 Tucson judges

who meted out much harsher sentences after being reminded of their own mortality.

I guess they were looking for populations that wouldn't be expected to flip from being more "open-minded" to conservative quite so easily. I'm putting it crudely, but I think you can see what I mean.

I'm going to look into this and see what kind of research groups they used--re. demographics. But I think the researchers have likely acknowledged sample selection bias if they did not use a cross-section of society.

[izzie]

5. Recall the Yale study with shocks

got that out to every day people and the results were the same but the first study just were so shocking to people. I always for get the mans name who did that study but it was giving shocks to people because some one told them to do it. The percent of people who would not do it stayed the same even in the general pop. just as who would do it did. It is often tied into the Germans and WW2. Judges are hardly ave, pop. College ed. is still not 100 percent of the pop. It must be done with the whole range of people and usually world wide, as the Yale study has been done, to believe in it. Or so I think.

[izzie]

7. Milgram was the man

--

[unblock]

2. poor study if 9/11 was used as a mortality prompt. 9/11 is way too loaded

it means many things, much more than a mere reminder of mortality.

a simply image of a tombstone might do for simple mortality. 9/11 adds to that violence, crime, nationalism, politics, religion, etc. way too loaded.

[saltpoint]

3. This is provocative and interesting stuff. I'm not a regular reader of

THE NEW REPUBLIC these days but I might pick up a copy of this issue.

The passage you quote there is an essential hinge of how a very few powerful people manipulate and command a vast number of people with minimal clout.

Thank you for putting this up on the boards, marions ghost.

:thumbsup:

[marions ghost]

8. yeah The New Republic

lost me when they avidly backed the invasion of Iraq. I didn't read it for the last 4 years. Maybe they're trying to recover some credibility or is it just my imagination? It seems to be a
better magazine than it was. Maybe somebody had an epiphany moment :think: like in the movies or maybe they're just responding to the temper of the times...

Anyway this particular article is excellent I think. Important studies. :thumbsup:

So...how do we program people to suddenly think liberal? Without using any Shamanic cactus juice, that's cheating. (No ice cream cones or blueberry pancakes either. No substances).

Remind them of their essential hedonism by whatever subliminal means they prefer?
Give them an adoptable highway to clean up (ie. taking care of someone/thing other than themselves & their own)?
Meditation?(that might be a chemical change tho)
Art for the masses--eg. beautiful futuristic billboards, like in the 50's (before the 60's exposed the lies)....?
Take people on tours of their Preferred Afterlife?

Maybe just insert subliminal messages like "you are special, you are loved" or "Mom says it's all gonna be OKAY honey" in what they read or see on TV so they don't need politicians to tell them that?

I notice that organized religions haven't seemed to do a great job convincing people of their Im-mortality...& "Touched by an Angel" didn't do it either... Personally I don't take much comfort in the punishments implied in Reincarnation.

It's early, my examples aren't too witty, but you get the direction...:)

[saltpoint]

9. Ok, I'm flexible on the Shamanic cactus juice but ain't nobody gonna

take away my ice cream cones and blueberry pancakes.

We have to establish boundaries, goddamit!

_____

Excellent questions. I have no idea how to persuade people generally, nevermind in the slapdash world of politics. Agree with you on the NEW REPUBLIC -- they do seem to have turned a corner. I hope it's an earnest change of direction from recent years. It could be, and I'm hopeful.

Maybe we need a "Galveston" moment -- the Jimmy Webb song done by Glen Campbell, of all people, about the love affair brought under such strain separation when the young man goes off to Viet Nam and leaves his lover on the barrier strand ("...and clean my gun / and dream of Galveston"). The pathos of that separation turned a lot of heads and hearts in barber shops and beauty parlors in a more powerful, permanent way than Jane Fonda did with her in-your-face protesting.

Which is not to say that I don't love Jane Fonda. I do. Always will. It's just that I failed to anticipate the power of one 3-minute hit single at a time when all the neighbors were at each other's throats over the war in SE Asia. It was something of the epiphany moment you mention for a lot of people, coming from a fairly unlikey source. I always had Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as musical references against the war, but here was Glen Campbell (!) speaking from the jukebox honkytonk about the emotional penalty for aggressive war policy.

An amazing thing.

If you're this sharp this early in the morning, you must be invincible by noon. Great post.

[fasttense]

6. Is this really any different then using fear to control a population?

"Mortality reminders" are nothing more than telling people to be afraid because they will die. I'm not so impressed. Didn't Machiavelli figure this out in the 1500s? The Church seems pretty good at reminding people of their mortality too. The Catholic Church sure used it to control people all over the world.

Everything old is new again.

[marions ghost]

12. yes it's an old idea

but some refinements come out -- for ex. the idea that you can make these changes in a person's whole world-view in a very short time with simple means. A world-view is a very unstable attribute then. Also interesting that this process works just as well on people you don't see as vulnerable or gullible, such as judges...people who may even hide any change in their attitudes. I'd like to know if people who identify as Liberal or Conservative are any more or less susceptible to this fear of death effect, or does that wash out?

Also the researchers show that thoughts of death don't have to be conscious to affect a person's total world-view. Subliminal messages work best. We now have much more efficient means of getting subliminal messages to large groups, as we saw with the run-up to the 'war'. So many people of all kinds were convinced. It happened without a charismatic leader (GWB not being adored, like Hitler or Elvis)-- but with a lot of boogie men on the Deck of Cards & Dubya as a knight in shining armor.

Yes fear is used by churches & religions a lot, unless they're not very hierarchical or dogmatic, & that's rare. They do a good job of actively helping people get through times of sickness & death, but then they add to the fear of it. Keeps those parishioners safely on the hook.

There are (rare) non-pathological people who absolutely do not fear death, and so are likely to be immune to this reflex. How did they get like that I wonder? Would it be harder to change the world-views of people who work as firefighters, for ex, or skydivers, or anyone who has a "healthy" sense of fatalism? What about morticians--can you affect their world-view? It doesn't seem to be a function of intelligence, or of having the trappings of 'security,' or any logical thing.

[Ian David]

10. Would this mean that blaming Bush for deaths and disasters is counter-productive...

...because in the process (rightly) of BLAMING Bush for things like 9/11, the coal mine disasters, Hurricane Katrina, etc... we're also giving them "Mortality Reminders" and putting them in a more "conservative" mindset?

[marions ghost]

11. OK interesting...

I'm no expert but I'd say that twisted minds (pathological narcissists, megalomaniacs, sociopaths) do not respond to "mortality reminders" the same way. They reject the very idea of their own mortality & cannot tolerate the dissonance that goes with being a mere mortal, caring about others and having a functional conscience. Their narrow world-view is all about moi -and they are masters of their universes. They are crowned early in life it is theorized.

These types in politics tend to link up with similar others --a select club. When disasters happen because of their callous policies they see them as just oopsies. They exhibit the My Pet Goat flat response to disasters and say stuff like the outrageous, "this is working well for them" (Katrina victims). Other people's deaths can make them feel even MORE alive. This is a sick mindset, not merely a conservative mindset (unless you think all conservatives are criminals).

Anyway twisted power freaks don't really believe in conservatism, they just use that -and liberalism- for their purpose. They thrive on power and control and so ideology is just a means to an end. What the Bushites are pushing is so far from the kind of conservatism that might attract rational, otherwise decent traditionalists. It becomes radical, aberrant, sadistic. It needs to be strongly rejected.

You might be able to identify pathological tendencies and correlate them with vulnerability to this kind of subliminal fear response, re. world-view in the article. Maybe somebody has done that. But I bet it would show that there is not nearly as much vulnerability to change in the world view of serial abusers who have immunized themselves from consequences. This is how they can manage to do what they do.

Yes we do need to blame these people, and hold them accountable. Hardball IS the only thing they understand. You just have to purge them out and recognize the type in future, until such time as we might figure out a way to have less of them in our midst. I don't bother to hate such subhumans. They're like hurricanes that can hit with little warning.

We should be worried about what the Bushites might do yet--but it won't be furthering conservatism IMO. Personally I fear them more than "death" anyday.

Just my opinion.