There’s a very interesting article at Scientific American this morning, with the title ”How the science of ‘Blue Lies’ may explain Trump’s support”.
The basic premise is that there are three common types of lies, which they color-code for convenience. Black lies are lies told to benefit or gratify the self by possibly harming others, white lies are lies told to benefit others, while blue lies are lies told to benefit or cohere one’s social group while possibly harming others. They believe that Trump’s lies are predominantly blue in that they are a kind of weapon that simultaneously binds his supporters together while potentially harming everyone else.
For millions and millions of Americans, climate change is a hoax, Hillary Clinton ran a sex ring out of a pizza parlor, and immigrants cause crime. Whether they truly believe those falsehoods or not is debatable—and possibly irrelevant. The research to date suggests that they see those lies as useful weapons in a tribal us-against-them competition that pits the “real America” against those who would destroy it.
It’s in blue lies that the best and worst in humanity can come together. They reveal our loyalty, our ability to cooperate, our capacity to care about the people around us and to trust them. At the same time, blue lies display our predisposition to hate and dehumanize outsiders, and our tendency to delude ourselves.
I encourage you to read the article because it may explain certain phenomena that have otherwise defied explanation.
The article takes it a bit further in discussing solutions to the problem of blue lies being used effectively as a weapon against the electorate.
First, they point out that since blue lies are tied so strongly to group identity, it is extremely difficult for an outsider to debunk them effectively for members of the group. In this case, it must be white conservatives who debunk Trump’s (and more generally, rightwing) lies. Second, they suggest that we should do what we can to avoid adopting the blue lie technique ourselves, since just as blue lies told by Trump et al. tend to divide us, blue lies told by us divide as well.
Anyway, it’s an interesting article and worth a read.