“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength
and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to
the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the
result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration.
We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge
interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and
9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link.
We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false
beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters
the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration’s decision
to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the
war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties
between Iraq and 9/11.

~snip~

In this article we present data that contest this explanation, and we develop
a social psychological explanation for the belief in the link between Saddam
and Al Qaeda. We argue that the primary causal agent for misperception is not
the presence or absence of correct information but a respondent’s willingness to
believe particular kinds of information. Our explanation draws on a psychological
model of information processing that scholars have labeled motivated reasoning.
This model envisions respondents as processing and responding to information
defensively, accepting and seeking out confirming information, while ignoring,
discrediting the source of, or arguing against the substance of contrary information
(DiMaggio 1997; Kunda 1990; Lodge and Tabor 2000). Motivated reasoning is
a descendant of the social psychological theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger
and Carlsmith 1959; Kunda 1990), which posits an unconscious impulse to
relieve cognitive tension when a respondent is presented with information that
contradicts preexisting beliefs or preferences. Recent literature on motivated
reasoning builds on cognitive dissonance theory to explain how citizens relieve
cognitive dissonance: they avoid inconsistency, ignore challenging information
altogether, discredit the information source, or argue substantively against the
challenge (Jobe, Tourangeau, and Smith 1993; Lodge and Taber 2000; Westen
et al. 2006). The process of substantive counterarguing is especially consequential,
as the cognitive exercise of generating counterarguments often has the ironic
effect of solidifying and strengthening the original opinion leading to entrenched,
polarized attitudes (Kunda 1990; Lodge and Taber 2000; Sunstein 2000; Lodge and
Taber 2000). This confirmation bias means that people value evidence that confirms
their previously held beliefs more highly than evidence that contradicts them,
regardless of the source (DiMaggio 1997; Nickerson 1998, Wason 1968).

~snip~

We chose to focus on Republican partisans because of the well-documented
partisan difference in the perception of the validity of this link. We assumed
that Democratic partisans would not have a strong desire to defend the Bush
administration on this issue, thus severely reducing the variation we would
capture in responses. Our choice of subjects means that we are investigating how
partisanship produces and reinforces political (mis)information. Our choice of
subjects should not be taken to imply that the processes we are examining here
are particular to conservatives: we expect that, had we conducted this study in
the late 1990s, we would have found a high degree of motivated reasoning
regarding the behavior of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.
Previous research on motivated reasoning has found it among respondents of all
classes, ages, races, genders, and affiliations (see Lodge and Tabor 2000).

~snip~

Another respondent takes this argument a step further by speculating that
the president must know things the rest of us do not:

I think the best thing you can do with this is to hope that the president has enough information
to do the right thing. And then you need to trust him to do that and as part of the country you
need to support that. . . . I mean, you may make the comment of saying, “Well, boy I wish
they wouldn’t have done that because it just doesn’t seem like from our point of view that that
was the right thing to do.” But on the other hand you gotta realize that maybe they know more
than what we do about what’s really going on. Now granted, they clearly said that they don’t
think there was any link between those two, but that’s not to say that maybe it wasn’t the same
problem.

Official and unofficial propaganda continuously
drums home the message that the friends and allies of the nation
are virtuous and the enemies evil. The average man in the street
has a firm belief that the governments (and possibly the people as well)
of certain nations are his friends in a very personal sense while others
are his enemies. He is willing to pay high taxes, obey regulations that
may be detrimental to his private interests, and even go to war and kill
people in support of his nation's foreign polley. He would he shocked
and horrified if his government suddenly asked him to alter all his
opinions and fight on the side of the nations he dislikes against the nations
he likes. Sudden changes are therefore made particularly difficult
by the role of modern public opinion.

Organski, A. F. K. (1958). World politics (p. 353). New York: Knopf.

Conspiracy Theories
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

Cass R. Sunstein
Harvard Law School

Adrian Vermeule
Harvard Law School

Whenever a bad event has occurred, rumors and speculation are inevitable. Most
people are not able to know, on the basis of personal or direct knowledge, why an
airplane crashed, or why a leader was assassinated, or why a terrorist attack succeeded. In
the aftermath of such an event, numerous speculations will be offered, and some of them
will likely point to some kind of conspiracy. To some people, those speculations will
seem plausible, perhaps because they provide a suitable outlet for outrage and blame,
perhaps because the speculation fits well with other deeply rooted beliefs that they hold.
Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more
likely to attribute those events to intentional action. In addition, antecedent beliefs are a
key to the success or failure of conspiracy theories. Some people would find it impossibly
jarring to think that the CIA was responsible for the assassination of a civil rights leader;
that thought would unsettle too many of their other judgments. Others would find those
other judgments strongly supported, even confirmed, by the suggestion that the CIA was
responsible for such an assassination. Compare the case of terrorist attacks. For most
Americans, a claim that the United States government attacked its own citizens, for some
ancillary purpose, would make it impossible to hold onto a wide range of other
judgments. Clearly this point does not hold for many people in Islamic nations, for whom
it is far from jarring to believe that responsibility lies with the United States (or Israel).

Here, as elsewhere, people attempt to find some kind of equilibrium among their
assortment of beliefs,34 and acceptance or rejection of a conspiracy theory will often
depend on which of the two leads to equilibrium. Some beliefs are also motivated, in the
sense that people are pleased to hold them or displeased to reject them.35 Acceptance (or
for that matter rejection) of a conspiracy theory is frequently motivated in that sense.
Reactions to a claim of conspiracy to assassinate a political leader, or to commit or to
allow some atrocity either domestically or abroad, are often determined by the
motivations of those who hear the claim.

These are points about individual judgments, bracketing social influences. But
after some bad event has occurred, those influences are crucial, for most people will have
little or no direct information about its cause. How many people know, directly or on the
basis of personal investigation, whether Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or
whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy on his own, or whether a tragic
death in an apparent airplane accident was truly accidental? Inevitably people must rely
on the beliefs of other people. Some people will require a great deal of evidence in order
to accept a conspiracy theory; others will require much less. People will therefore have
different “thresholds” for accepting or rejecting such a theory and for acting on the basis
of the theory.36 One way to meet a relevant threshold is to supply direct or indirect
evidence. Another way is simply to show that some, many, or most (trusted) people
accept or reject the theory. These are the appropriate circumstances for social cascades, in
particular informational cascades, whose dynamics help to explain the pervasive
acceptance of conspiracy theories.

This phenomenon will become more understandable if we reflect
on the psychology of the communication process. A communication
cannot be viewed as an isolated stimulus automatically evoking a certain
response. The surrounding circumstances make an enormous difference
insofar as the response is concerned. If we want to predict the
response, we have to consider not only the content of the stimulus (what
the communication asserts), but also the predispositions of the recipient
and the perceived role and nature of the source. One of the most important
questions, in connection with this last-named variable, is
whether the source of a communication to me is perceived as a person
whom I know and trust, or as somebody having no person-to-person
tie with me. In the former case, I shall very probably accept the communication
as truth; in the latter, belief will depend on my image of
the basic motivation of the source. If the source's perceived role is that
of a mere purveyor of information who has otherwise no axe to grind,
I am likely to accept the content of his communication matter-of
factly, without an urge to look beyond. If I see the source as a human
being expressing spontaneous opinion, I shall take that opinions imply
as something with which I agree or do not agree, and if I wish I can
freely acknowledge the source as an authority whose views, as views,
carry weight for me. But if the role of the source includes elements
extraneous to the supplying of facts or views-e.g. if I see him as interested
in maintaining a power position in which I do not share then
a barrier will be set up between him and me, and I cannot spontaneously
internalize his message.

Kesckemeti, P. (1950). Totalitarian communications as a means of control: A note on the sociology of propaganda. The Public Opinion Quarterly 14(2), 224-234.