Part of the problem, as psychologist Bill von Hippel explained in a phone interview, is that Trump supporters “feel
that what he’s saying he genuinely believes.” This sense that Trump
believes in himself may matter more than the actual facts.
Von
Hippel, who teaches at the University of Queensland in Australia, is
part of a research team that just published the paper “Self-deception
facilitates interpersonal persuasion” in the Journal of Economic Psychology.
His study, which involved 306 subjects, suggests that those who excel
at deceiving others often deceive themselves first. The best liars, it
turns out, are people who can successfully lie to themselves. [...]
Now, there’s no way to know for sure whether Trump — or Sean Spicer or
Stephen Miller — really has talked himself into believing his own lies,
or whether he’s just a really good actor. In a sense, it hardly matters.
The real issue here is that people tend to rate a politician’s honesty
less by the factual accuracy of what the politician says, and more by
whether they believe that the politician himself believes what he is
saying. [...]
The fact that Trump says things that are generally seen as socially
unacceptable also reinforces his supporters’ belief that he is honest,
von Hippel added. If he expresses vile beliefs that most people shy away
from, that suggests to his followers that he must believe deeply in
what he’s saying. Why else would he say it?
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