Critical thinking required about political proclamations

Recently the CBC reported that a child - killer story revealed some dubious news activity to push election campaign messages.

Some manipulation techniques

The British tabloid The Daily Mail published a story claiming convicted child murderer Jon Venables would soon be released and sent to Canada. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer tweeted a link to the Daily Mail story and said it was "disturbing that this pedophile child killer might come to Canada."

"As Prime Minister I won't let him come here. Where does Trudeau stand?" Scheer wrote. "Our country should not be a dumping ground for murderers, terrorists, and perverts."
Barbara Jo Caruso, an immigration lawyer and the founder of the Corporate Immigration Law Firm, said there are some exemptions to inadmissibility but added that it would be "unlikely" for someone like Venables to be approved to come to Canada.
As with another recent story in the British press — about the U.K. stripping citizenship from a dual Canadian-British national held by the Kurds and accused of aiding ISIS in Syria — the Daily Mail story played into a Conservative narrative that the Liberal government would be soft on crime.1

In words and deeds, Gerta Thunberg is the embodiment of philosopher Howard Zinn's admonition: "We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world."

https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/9/1/2da385a645ed41c7bf025c054504b976_18.jpg

Al Jazeera reports.

Of course, the marauding swarm of vitriolic right-wing climate-change deniers see Thunberg - not how the prophetic Zinn envisioned her - but as a tiny, pretentious zealot who threatens the existing order. Their order. Their comforts. Their traditional "way of life".
De rigueur, they have set out to discredit and, if possible, to destroy Thunberg with their, by now, familiar and crass modus operandi.
They have mocked her. They have belittled her. They have denigrated her. They have insulted her. They have dismissed her. They have questioned her motives. They have suggested she is anti-democratic. They have, in the fetid recesses of the internet, even threatened her.2

The National Observer writes that Greta Thunberg is winning hearts and minds. Some old men hate it. The piece by Matthew Klippenstein cautions that climate advocates would also do well to recognize that some of Thunberg’s critics’ core concerns do have merit. As Langley chemist Blair King noted in an articulate recent blog post.

"It is easy for climate strikers and their activist supporters, who go to bed well-fed and warm in Canada and Europe, to tell the world they should use less energy. But the governments of China and India still have deep poverty and hardship to fight and will ignore those cries because they are dealing with louder and more pressing cries of citizens who need food and shelter today."
There is also the challenge of affirming the need to transition beyond fossil fuels while discouraging boasting by those naively believing they’ve already done so. I can think of few things more counterproductive than my fellow early adopters extolling their electric cars’ carbon chastity as if they’d been fitted for vehicular purity rings.
These boasts won’t only annoy the oilpatch but public transit and cycling advocates as well, given that climate nudges may reduce support for truly transformative change. As Green Leader Elizabeth May has noted, the enemy of climate action right now (which in cities means housing density, cycling and vastly expanded public transit) is incrementalism: the belief that switching from combustion to electric vehicles is magically adequate. Zero-emission vehicles are absolutely necessary, yet still insufficient as a complete climate solution.3 

These articles underline the importance of disciplining our mind to avoid easy and lazy decision making, like the too common confirmation bias, and use our mental ability to critically think about the motives behind proclamations we read and see

particularly if we perceive an attempt to generate a fear response to their message.

References

1	(2019, September 3). Child-killer story shows how parties use dubious news to ... - CBC.ca. Retrieved September 4, 2019, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/scheer-tweet-bulger-venables-story-1.5269306
2	(2019, September 1). Who is afraid of Greta Thunberg? | US & Canada | Al Jazeera. Retrieved September 4, 2019, from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/afraid-greta-thunberg-190901191445655.html
3	(2019, September 3). Greta Thunberg is winning hearts and minds — and some old men .... Retrieved September 4, 2019, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/09/03/opinion/greta-thunberg-winning-hearts-and-minds-and-some-old-men-hate-it

Using fear to manipulate our voting decision

As we approach a fall election we need to assess political claims that have been psychologically designed to manipulate our voting decision. Three methods of manipulation are identified by sociologist Barry Glassner.

Attention to these strategies

There is a difference between post-truth and plain old lying, says professor and author Lee McIntyre.

"I see post-truth as a little bit darker in motive. It's manipulation for a political purpose that has less to do with convincing someone and more to do with ruling that person."1 

Kendra Cherry shares an important cognitive bias that can distort our thinking.

Confirmation Bias: This is favoring information that conforms to your existing beliefs and discounting evidence that does not conform.2 

Daniel P. Horan, OFM speaks on how we can be manipulated by people who play on our fear in his address on “Natural and Unnatural Fear Rational and Irrational Hope” to the Oblate School of Theology's Summer Institute where he cites work, on “fear mongering” by Barry Glassner who demonstrates in his book, The Culture of Fear, that it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk.

At minute 49 Horan refers to Glassner on fear and three contributing factors in manipulation.4

Our psychological response to fear may be “fight, flight or freeze” and we become focused on immediate threats to our security. This primitive mind space is not the attitude that selects the best long term political policy for our society.

References

1	(2018, April 27). How “post-truth” entered the political mainstream - CBC.ca. Retrieved April 29, 2018, from http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/sunday-edition/segment/15540579
2	(2018, January 4). How Cognitive Biases Influence How You Think and Act - Verywell Mind. Retrieved April 29, 2018, from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963
3	(n.d.). The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the ... - Amazon.com. Retrieved August 28, 2019, from https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities-Microbes/dp/0465003362
4	(2019, June 17). Natural and Unnatural Fear; Rational and Irrational Hope | Daniel P .... Retrieved August 28, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWEDeTxmwwg

Psychology to shake our carbon-emitting habits

Anthony A. Davis writes about 37 different reasons why it is so hard to change our climate change habits. University of Victoria psychology professor Robert Gifford calls the barriers “dragons”.

Source: https://www.dragonsofinaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/doi_3dragon_header.png

They fall into seven broad categories: limited cognition, ideologies, comparison with others, sunk costs, discredence, perceived risks and limited behaviour. When he published a 2011 article in American Psychologist that identified the first 29 of these dragons, the article went viral and became the publication’s most-read piece in its history.1

Mistrust dragon

Seth Wynes, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, found evidence of a “climate mitigation gap,” where education and government recommendations often miss the most effective actions Canadians and others can take.

For instance, he says, few governments say the most effective ways to reduce carbon footprints include having one less child, ceasing air travel, living car-free and eating a plant-based diet. Instead, much of the educational and government literature focuses on less effective measures, such as hanging clothes out to dry, or installing more efficient LED lighting in homes.
The reason for that, Wynes suggests, is a “foot-in-the-door” strategy. “Communicators emphasize easy-to-perform actions that get people started on environmental lifestyles, and hope that people adopt more important actions later. Unfortunately, with the scale of the climate problem, we don’t have time to focus on small changes anymore.”2 

Tokenism dragon

One troubling finding in Wynes’s research is how misinformed people are when they engage in what psychologists call “moral licensing.” “We do this with dieting,” says Wynes, explaining the term. “We say, ‘I went for a jog, now I can eat cake.'' Some people do this with green behaviours: ‘I have recycled for a year, so therefore I can go on a vacation to Cuba.’ ”

References

1	(n.d.). The Dragons of Inaction – Diagnosing and Slaying the Barriers to .... Retrieved July 24, 2019, from https://www.dragonsofinaction.com/
2	(2019, July 22). Why we can't shake our carbon-emitting habits, even as the world burns. Retrieved July 24, 2019, from https://www.macleans.ca/society/health/why-we-cant-shake-our-carbon-emitting-habits-even-as-the-world-burns/