Posted on 03/14/2008 5:32:01 PM PDT by forkinsocket
John McCain once called televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," but now the Republican senator from Arizona is currying favor with social conservatives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) now opposes the Iraq war, although she used to support it. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) once wanted presidential campaigns to be publicly financed but has come to have second thoughts, perhaps driven by the success of his own fundraising.
Such political two-stepping by these presidential candidates may surprise no one, but new psychological research reveals that voters may have less reason to question the sincerity of candidates' newly minted positions than was previously believed.
That is because, imperceptibly and often without their own awareness, politicians can come to believe what they tell voters, even if they start out being insincere.
The finding stems from a larger lesson that psychologists have observed. When a speaker talks to an audience, everyone understands she is trying to shape the audience's views. What is less known, but equally true, is that the audience shapes the speaker's views, too.
Columbia University social psychologist E. Tory Higgins found through experiments that when people are given a set of facts about an issue and asked to communicate them to an audience, they are more likely to deliver messages that match the audience's preexisting beliefs on that particular issue. Volunteers randomly assigned to speak to different audiences gravitate toward messages least likely to contradict and offend their listeners.
If you are talking to a die-hard Obama fan, in other words, you are more likely to mention things about Obama's debate with Clinton last week that paint the candidate in a positive light. If you are talking to a die-hard Clinton fan, on the other hand, you are more likely to mention Obama's shortcomings in the debate.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
All depends upon what your definition of curry is, huh, Shankar?
There is a term for this: Self-delusion.
And we wonder why we end up with a bunch of mental cases in office.
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