(Illustration: ‘A Mild Case of Cognitive Dissonance,’  ink on canvas, by Wilf Tilley, and found here).

As early-evening Thursday fashions itself here in California’s Central Valley, the country is becoming more and more a problem bin for weird-ass troubles — the lastest is how a huge chunk of Americans are suffering from perceptions of contradictory information, most of that shit bald-faced lies, the rest just bullshit.
This flux of insanity is seen in everything from T-Rump’s Big Lie to anti-vaxxers and JFK Jr. daydreams, and it’s causing some shitty feedback for a dark American future.

In this sense, and as well as we all know as obvious. Republicans have developed a gut sense the 2020 election was not legitimate, starting just hours after the election ended, and really got rolling as evidence accumulated that Joe Biden had whipped the T-Rump.
According to new research published last month, ‘cognitive dissonance‘ has a toxic psychological stranglehold on MAGA hatters love election day. The research indicates the depth of polarized perceptions of US election integrity.
Cognitive dissonance explains how these people’s reality is contradicted by new information, despite the truth in the current data — MAGA hatters don’t want to lose, so they reject the new info.

Researchers also found Republicans expected Trump to win and lost their shit after Biden was widely declared the winner. Generally seen by T-Rump’s continual Big Lie bullshit.
Pointed, bottom-line conclusion from study author Marrissa (Dani) Grant, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, via PsyPost yesterday:

“In healthy democracies, citizens are confident that votes were counted as intended regardless of who won — sure, there may be a fleeting doubt, but ultimately the losers consent to the election results,” Grant told PsyPost.
“That isn’t happening among a large portion of the U.S. citizenship, which is an alarming indication that our democracy is not as stable as in past elections.”

Grant and her team also found that Republicans reported trusting and consuming Fox News more than Democrats, who reported trusting and consuming the 14 other outlets more than Republicans.
Trusting and consuming Fox News, in turn, was associated with lower perceptions of election legitimacy that decreased over time. Trusting and consuming the 14 other outlets, on the other hand, was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy that increased over time.

“We see in our study that polarized news outlets play an important role in resolving cognitive dissonance about the election for dissenters,” Grant said.
“People should know the influence Fox News had by providing social confirmation that facilitates dissonance-reducing rationalizations that can distort factual evidence about election results. Our findings undergird the importance of consuming ideologically diverse media sources to mitigate polarized perceptions.”

The researchers were surprised to find that the Wall Street Journal tended to be more trusted by Democrats than Republicans despite being a conservative newspaper.
They also expected that USA Today would be about equally trusted among Republicans and Democrats, but that was not the case.
Future research, they said, should examine a broader range of conservative media outlets, such as One American News Network, Newsmax, or Breitbart.

“Right-wing media outlets have increased in popularity in recent years, as Republicans have become less trusting of so-called ‘mainstream media.’ An important task for future research is to study the number of outlets trusted and consumed by Republicans,” Grant explained.

No crapola, but it’s good, maybe, to know this disheartening shit.
I wish this could happen:

Way-likely not.
Once again yet, here we are…

(Image out front by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).