by Devon Williams
While reading The New Censorship, I was struck by how much of the current distrust in the media, fueled by populist political leaders, ties into key psychology frameworks of groupthink and manipulative mental control. Panievsky repeatedly states that one of the main ways that these extremist figures gain unlikely power is through hours and hours of airtime. Whether it is through social media soundbites or repeated interviews with a variety of outlets regardless of their perceived political leaning, the main thing these figures need is to be visible (68). Their actual policy is nearly negligible in these interactions– it is their inflammatory nature and the reaction they are able to garner from journalists and the audience alike that causes their visibility to increase seemingly exponentially. In psychology, this concept is called the mere exposure effect– the more someone sees something/someone or hears a certain ideology, the more likely it is that they a) normalize it b) perceive it as a popular and wide held belief in their community and the world and/or c) begin to sympathize with it themselves. These politicians are capitalizing on the fact that the human brain learns and interacts with the world through familiarity, and it is that familiarity that over time numbs people to extremism and later could cause them to believe in it.
Panievsky echoes this sentiment, stating that “political elites tend to over-estimate how right-wing or conservative the public actually is” (71) and extends this tendency to the public and to journalists themselves. Left-leaning people tend to overestimate the most, she continues, as a form of ‘overcorrection’ for what they believe their own bias to be. Conservatives, however, do the opposite, yet still lean towards a belief right-wing beliefs and extremism are more common than they actually are. This is because “those more vocal are perceived to be more numerous” (73), highlighting another psychological principle: availability bias. We have already established that the most extremist and right wing figures currently are doing their best to be on air as much as possible, attempting to become unavoidable in the public ethos. This constant exposure means that when one thinks of politics, their mind employs a heuristic (a mental ‘shortcut’ to grasp large or abstract concepts and create a quick judgement on a situation) to decide what they have heard recently, how often, and from whom. Heuristics are employed by the brain more often than not; a person likely won’t think long and hard about every single video they have seen, count the numbers, account for social media targeting etc. when considering the current political atmosphere in a short span of time. They will attach to whatever appears first in their mind, and with the inundation of content from extremists, they will likely guess that those beliefs are more common, widespread, and representative than they actually are just because they are most ‘available’ in memory.
These two concepts in tandem — the mere exposure effect and availability bias — produce another interesting effect within an individual. The perception that extremism is more common and accepted by your surrounding society will push you to be more open to it and to participate in it more willingly as a way to fit in with the perceived ‘group’ as a form of self preservation. If it is greater acceptance of hate speech, voicing racist and biased opinions more often, or even not objecting to that cruelty and extremism is a result of this powerful effect (80-81). These conditions together allow extremist figures to gain a platform, convince us their views are wide-held and ‘normal’, all while convincing you to accept it or drift closer to that same extremism for what your brain believes to be self preservation by remaining with the in-group. The only way that extremism can be combatted by a society is to be aware not only of the fact that those views are not normal or accepted but also why exactly people react to them the way they do through our brains’ hard-wiring.
