It’s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration—what linguist George Lakoff has called the “salient exemplar”—and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn’t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it’s newly exploitable…
In the past, the president has also promised to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. What he hasn’t promised to publish is a list of crimes committed by Americans. That’s not news. But his list is likely to create the false impression that undocumented immigrants are especially prone to commit violent crimes—an impression in which the human brain is complicit…
Recently, Trump told an audience of senior military commanders at CENTCOM that the “very, very dishonest media” didn’t report on terrorism. The implication was that journalists bury important news about terrorism because of some alternate agenda. Later that day, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer released a list of terrorist acts the president felt that journalists didn’t spend enough time covering. Journalists pounced: Hey, we reported on ALL OF THOSE! We won Pulitzers for our reporting! Here are a bazillion front page headlines proving it!
In doing so, journalists took the bait. The stories about their stories fed the narrative that terrorism is everywhere (it’s not). Instead, reporters need to get smarter about covering the non-aberrant, to show that commonplace does not equal mundane. It may not be rare, but it’s reality.
Donald is flagging amygdalae by focusing people on specific images they will notice and remember, like K-selected images of violence.
Notice how the left wants to argue honestly with numbers on overall cases when isolated cases favor us, but they don’t want to go near numbers when you begin to break the statistics down, like how many African or Middle Eastern Migrants are involved in sex crimes or theft, or what their average IQs are. Nor would they touch the numbers on crime more generally as they relate to race or welfare usage.
The bottom line is, what is driving them all crazy is that Trump plays their games better than they do. So unlike George W Bush, he will actually advance the K-selected cause, and create a lasting majority by the time he leaves office.
Now if we could just get Don Jr and Eric in the queue to run in eight years.
After eight years of this much winning, we will not be wanting to break the addiction by risking another clueless Cuckservative hack stealing the primary.
Tell others about r/K Theory, because the science is good for hacking the brain
[…] Good article: It’s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration—what linguist George Lakoff has called the “salient exemplar”—and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn’t continue […]