27 February

Because we make the disastrous mistake of thinking democracy is ‘the people’ individually reasoning out situations, we also assume the answer is to just get rid of ‘misinformation’, and everything will be fixed. I post a lot about how humans actually behave. They rarely think, they *imitate* one another, to gain social status by membership of various social groups. Those groups then compete with other groups, for status, in ‘imitative rivalry’. In other words, social conformity runs all human life. The desire to fit in, to have status, and thereby identity. And here’s a fascinating implication, which psychologists have studied. People will actively FALSIFY what they actually believe and feel, to others, to go along with what the group is doing. It’s called ‘preference falsification’. We all know this is true, we all do it and have seen it throughout our lives. A great example is the Scott Morrison-led destruction of public health controls in Australia, when he made us ‘live with’ Covid. Even at the time the overwhelming majority of Australians, when surveyed individually, didn’t support that. But once the refusal to do basic public health practices became the norm, preference falsification kicked in. People buried their individual discomfort and dislike of them and their families catching Covid, underneath the social conformity of needing to fit in/copy what everybody else was doing. This is the way bad faith actors can create an impression they have widespread popular support. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-gravity-weight/202104/what-is-preference-falsification