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Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn’t even complete. I’ve heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing? It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. This is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it. This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on...

In the H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine, the Eloi, are a brain dead, zombie like community who put up no resistance as they are hunted and destroyed by the evil Morlocks. Today’s active duty Army is starting to resemble the Eloi as they willingly accept every absurd, destructive directive from the Morlocks in the Pentagon and the White House, while operating in a trance from reveille to taps every day. The Army’s leaders, from the Chief of Staff down to senior NCO’s (non-commissioned officers, aka sergeants) are suffering from a massive case of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is defined...

Dr. Joy DeGruy Clearly Describes A Potentially Life-Scarring Mental Condition Experienced By Many Kids Who Are Victims of Child Abuse/Neglect.Hello. I try to calmly relate my experiences providing uniform and investigative police services for more than a decade to a Brooklyn, NY, Rap Hip Hop influenced community. Though I am told my writings are not always sensitive. I apologize if my frustrations seep into the my accounts of personally witnessing child abuse, as well as how abuse/neglect adversely impacts the lives of developing infants, toddlers, children, teens and their communities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRnctOyS8w While doing online research into child abuse I came...

Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday he and President Obama have been targets of “a racial animus” by some of the administration’s political opponents. “There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. … There's a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there's a racial animus." Holder said the nation is in “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years...

Contradicting the faultless, albeit far-fetched image he has of himself, Barack Obama is a man harassed by truth. That's why, judging from his inability to accept personal responsibility, Barack Obama must be living in a constant state of agitated cognitive dissonance. The late Leon Festinger is the social psychologist who proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to Festinger, until the person suffering with perceptual disharmony can find a way to justify wrong actions and decisions, it's impossible to achieve a calm mental state, especially when those wrong actions and decisions challenge the way the cognitively dissonant individual sees himself.That's...

NORMAN — When George Lee first came to the University of Oklahoma in 2009, he felt out of place. Lee, who is black, grew up in a low-income, predominantly black neighborhood in Bryan, Texas, near College Station. But when he arrived at OU, he said, he felt pressure to change how he spoke and acted to integrate himself into the dominant culture. He felt like he couldn't be the same person he'd been in his old neighborhood, he said. He felt like he was being asked to trade part of his “blackness” for the values and characteristics of the dominant...

Whatever global warming might or might not have done to polar bears, it has put Rick Perry's presidential candidacy at risk. The Texas governor clings to an ice flow of diminishing credibility, emerging in just about a week's time as intellectually unqualified to be president. He engaged in a brief dialogue with a child about evolution and came out the loser. Perry said there are some gaps in the theory. If so, he is one. Maybe more important, Perry waxed wrongly on global warming. He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that...

(snip) A new study suggests that liberals are more likely than conservatives to follow other people's eye movements. People normally respond to "gaze cues," or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person's attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different on a biological level, said study researcher Michael Dodd, a psychologist at...

If you're a conservative, it might be your brain's fault. So says British scientists who scanned the brains of two members of the British Parliament and about 90 students. Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent for the UK Telegraph, reported Wednesday that those with conservative views have larger amygdalas, the area of the brain associated with anxiety and fear. They also have a smaller anterior cingulate, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and optimism. Prof Geraint Rees, of the University College London and head researcher for the study, told the Telegraph: "We were very surprised to find...

The “Conservatives are Crazy” Study: Paid For by Taxpayers Congressional investigators call for a new look at funding academic research. An academic study of conservatism that lumped together Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh was funded by federal grants, according to congressional investigators. The study, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," was written by John T. Jost, a professor at Stanford University, Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and Arie W. Kruglanski, a professor at the University of Maryland. It was published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin. Congressional...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2010) — It goes without saying that conservatives and liberals don't see the world in the same way. Now, research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that is exactly, and quite literally, the case. In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task -- and found big differences between the two groups. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to...

Liberals focus their attention on 'gaze cues' much differently than do conservatives, study findsIt goes without saying that conservatives and liberals don't see the world in the same way. Now, research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that is exactly, and quite literally, the case. In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" – a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task – and found big differences between the two groups. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently...

It sounds like a quack remedy -just moving the eyes from side to side to treat emotional suffering. But it works, says Julia Stuart, for anything from childhood abuse to post-traumatic stress disorder 08 January 2003 It sounds too good, and frankly too bizarre, to be true. After just three 90-minute sessions, people suffering emotionally after severe trauma such as rape, a car accident or abuse, can be rid of their debilitating symptoms. Add the fact that the therapy involves moving the eyes rapidly from side to side, and that it was discovered by an American while out for a...

What is “Liberalism?" In my previous article in Front Page Magazine, I argued that people who describe themselves (and are described by others) as "Leftists", "socialists", "social democrats", "Communists" and (in North America) "liberals" do have some things in common. And that is important. However unsatisfactory and apparently simplistic the Left/Right division of the political world may be, there is any amount of research showing it to be a powerful, ubiquitous and perhaps inescapable way of identifying both people and political parties (e.g. Budge et al., 1987; Ray, 1982; Bobbio, 1996). An important part of what I proposed was that...

Psychology of Leftism - revised Friday, September 13, 2002 *********This is a revised and extended version of my paper that originally appeared in Front Page Magazine on 12th September, 2002********* The Psychology Underlying "Liberalism" John J. Ray University of New South Wales, Australia HomePage: http://geocities.com/jonjayrayEmail: jonjayray@hotmail.com. What is "Liberalism"? In my previous article in Front Page Magazine, I argued that people who describe themselves (and are described by others) as "Leftists", "socialists", "social democrats", "Communists" and (in North America) "liberals" do have some things in common. And that is important. However unsatisfactory and apparently simplistic the Left/Right division of the...

"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. In the 1980s, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, caught people's brains jumping the gun on consciousness. A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The result was hard for some to stomach...

”The mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in a person is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: the person rejects, explains away, or avoids the new information, persuades himself that no conflict really exists, reconciles the differences, or resorts to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in his conception of the world and of himself.” -Encyclopedia Britannica My post last year about kids defying the ACLU brought me back to a point I have been making for several years. Socialism collapses...

The sociopolitical concept known as socialism and/or communism is not new. In fact, it is very ancient. Some ancient Greeks attempted to make communism a reality. That experiment ultimately failed. Plato spoke of it admiringly, even though he understood that it was not feasible. However, the first attempt at building socialism was in ancient Shinar. It came about when the terrible-willed Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament, also Gilgamesh and Hammurabi) the great-grandson of Noah “killed” God and then declared himself “two-parts god, only one-part man.” The pyramid-shaped ziggurat (Tower of Babel) built by Nimrod symbolizes socialism/communism, a sociopolitical system...

Democrats deserve a Guinness World Re cord award for their election-season cogni tive dissonance. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and White House senior adviser David Axelrod accused Republicans last week of benefiting from "money from foreign corporations" -- which liberals claim the US Chamber of Commerce is funneling into domestic political ads. Endangered Democratic candidates across the country are dutifully parroting the line of attack. It's beyond comical to watch the party that cries "RAAAACISM" whenever conservatives question their shady foreign funny money suddenly sounding the alarm over non-US campaign cash. And it's beyond galling to hear Democrats fret...