> I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.
It never was true for some people I know, for example my parents.
My parents have such a bias towards their and their ancestor’s culture/religion, that anything said in favor of it will be believed instantly, and anything critical of it will be met with hostility.
I do not dare point out to them basic falsifiable truths about things such as medicine (e.g. this simple action will cure cancer or reverse male pattern baldness).
My parents are very gullible people. Skeptical about exactly the wrong things, repeatedly wrong year after year, yet ever so trusting of the same bullshit sources and rhetoric, as long as it resonates with their prime belief about the superiority of their culture/religion.
I see this in mainstream US too, with the antivaxxers who got a C in high school biological or 5G crazies who couldn’t pass a physics class.
Once someone has formed an identity around some core assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it will be seen as an attack on one’s ego.
> Once someone has formed an identity around some core assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it will be seen as an attack on one’s ego.
That's hard to escape, and it might well be a quite useful mechanism in many cases, but multiply that by filter bubbles and echo chambers, and it can become difficult for otherwise reasonable people to have conversations about many topics. It happens here too but I would say less than in other parts of the worlds. Here = HN. Worlds = Parallel realities that get created that way ^
I'm inferring from your brackets that you're referring to public figures.
If this is what you intended then I would suggest that they are more media than "ordinary life". If anything, I feel like they further highlight the accuracy of the effect.
Fits my 2020 experience. At the start of 2020 this described perfectly my view of Trump. At the start of 2021 it describes perfectly my view of everyone.
Alas, not so sure that part is still true.
[looks back at 2020]