Lies are a symbolic show of strength
2025-10-30 00:50:58.938869+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Last week my mom came to visit, and she has ... alternative ... believes on health and healthcare. I have spent a lot of time chasing down some of her assertions, sometimes they're nebulous cause and effects things (like the RFK Jr thing suggesting that circumcision leads to autism via acetaminophen), sometimes they're contextual (yes, the Covid MRNA vaccines may have some negative impacts on cancer rates, aside from the unexpected positive effects on some cancer treatments).
But I've spent a bunch of time trying to understand why she believes some of the things she does, indeed, why I believe some of the things I do. So this is kinda fascinating...
Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.
Journal of Social Psychology: Symbolic show of strength: a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation Randy Stein, Abraham M. Rutchick, Alice Y. Sin & Luis F. Jarrin Rueda, it's worth skimming.
More generally, the question of whether symbolic beliefs are “real” might obscure how people actually think about truth. A future direction for the misinformation literature could move beyond unidimensional ratings of belief toward acknowledging perceptions of different types of “truth.” Zmigrod et al. (Citation2023) argue that beliefs should be understood as not being single values but distributions, with some people having wider distributions and being more open to misinformation. We add that wider distributions might be a sign of openness to both rational and symbolic truth, underscoring need for more finer-grained operationalizations of “belief.”