Camouflage

September 27, 2026September 23, 2026Leave a comment

September 27, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

As I have written before, we experience the world through our senses but we engage with the world through our errors. We begin our lives as babies learning from repeated mistakes. We hit ourselves in the face by mistake because our sense of proprioception is not fully developed. We stumble and fall repeatedly while learning to walk. This week I want to explore any advantages we gain by causing others to make errors.

Camouflage

Camouflage is a common strategy to fool others. Most mammals with fur have arrector pili, tiny muscles attached to hair follicles, that cause the hair to lift from the skin when the animal is cold or alarmed. As a function of the autonomic nervous system, the animal has little control over the process so it is not something that animals do deliberately. As a camouflage device, it makes an animal look bigger and may cause an aggressor to misjudge the size of their target and pause before attacking.

Another camouflage technique is hiding. The fur of an Arctic hare or fox changes color in winter and summer, allowing it to blend in to a snowy environment. Cephalopods like octopi and cuttlefish can change color quickly to blend in with their environment, causing other animals, whether predator or prey, to lower their state of precaution.

Every year, the health care industry sells $700 billion of products, some of which are designed to camouflage some features, others designed to enhance the attractiveness of certain features. A pair of high heels on a woman serve both functions.

Political campaigns are designed to both camouflage and enhance a candidate’s qualities and appeal to voters. A candidate may adopt stronger positions on some issues when running for a House seat, a narrow constituency, than when running for a state wide Senate seat with a varied constituency. Most candidates hide some characteristic of their personal biography. Those with a legislative record may have to shape the story of that record.

Voters select a person on the ballot, but that choice is the result of an elaborate package, like a Trojan horse, assembled by the campaign. Hidden within that package is the candidate and a campaign team of staffers and donors who want access to the legislative castle. It takes a lot of voters to pull that package up the ramp and through the castle doors.

What’s True?

Imagine a poker game where the players have blurred vision. They can’t clearly distinguish a 9 from an 8 from a 3. A player lays down his hand, claiming that he has four 3s and begins to gather the pot toward him. Another player grabs one of his arms and says, “Not so fast. You’ve got two pair, 3s and 8s. I have three 4s. I win the pot.” Some players agree, some don’t. One person pushes another and a fight breaks out.

Political strategists and media messaging make it hard for voters to evaluate their perceptions. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” is a repeated complaint by voters in focus groups that Sarah Longwell leads. Longwell has been a political consultant for twenty years and has been leading hundreds of focus groups each year since 2019 (Source). A former Republican and a Never Trumper, her recently published book How to eat an elephant: One voter at a time explores the beliefs and sentiments of voters in both parties who must navigate a varied media information stream.

Many voters filter the volume of channels and information by selecting just one or two news sources. Others are passive recipients of whatever news the algorithm feeds them on social media. Over the past four decades, Longwell writes, Republicans have built a well coordinated media echo chamber that carefully shapes news events. They have built an information bubble in response to what Republicans perceive as a liberal bias in the dominant mainstream media. Democratic messaging, on the other hand, is haphazard, as fractured as the media environment. In

Longwell (2026, p. 59) presents several key components of a successful communications strategy. Storytelling, humor and repetition are important. Normalizing ideas and beliefs helps promote them as common sense. “Attaching new arguments to things people already believe is key,” she writes.

Longwell’s advice is constructive. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign strategist, offered a more combative approach. He regarded the mainstream media as the real enemy, not the Democratic Party. He advised a “flood the zone with shit” tactic to keep the media overwhelmed (Source).

Living a Lie

Czechoslovakia was one of the eastern European nations ruled by the Soviet Union. In his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, the dissident and later President, Václav Havel described the lack of free speech under Soviet rule. To stay out of trouble with officials, people publicly supported beliefs and claims that they privately disbelieved.

Today, many elected officials in the Republican Party must express a belief that the 2020 election was stolen or risk being primaried and losing their seats, or being sidelined in the party. Liz Cheney, a Republican Representative from Wyoming, was a notable example of losing her house seat to a primary challenger backed by Trump in the 2022 election. Cheney and three other House members who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6^th insurrection lost their seats to primary challengers. Two other House members defeated their primary challengers and four members decided to retire rather than fight the MAGA mania that has infected the party.

Bartels and Carnes (2023) found that politicians who echoed Trump’s conspiratorial “stop the steal” claims suffered little damage in the 2022 midterm election (Source). Like citizens of nations under Communist rule, many Republican politicians have played it safe, spouting the MAGA propaganda to avoid a confrontation with Trump.

The Campaign Legal Center has documented over 60 court cases brought by Trump’s legal team. Some were withdrawn before a decision was reached, but none have been successful. Despite the lack of success in the courts, Trump has introduced false and distorted disinformation into the media space. This is the same technique used by Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders during the cold war. It is no wonder than the MAGA movement has adopted the same red color featured on Communist flags.

False Certainty

Politicians of all stripes offer simple solutions because people prefer simplicity. We have evolved to make quick judgments on a small amount of information. Todorov et al (2025) found that voters in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 Senate elections picked candidates who appeared competent based solely on their facial appearance. On page 60 of her book, Longwell describes our primary motivations with an acronym – FLAGS – fear, love, anger, greed and sympathy. These instincts are ever in conflict with our rational decision making process.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) describes this conflict as two ways of thinking, fast and slow. We rely on intuition rather than calculation. Repetition makes things appear familiar when they are not. We associate news exposure with frequency of occurrence. If we often hear local media coverage of children kidnapped, we assume that it happens more frequently than it does. People who sell us stuff, whether it is soap or a politician, use our tendency to make these kinds of errors. A manufacturer of a new brand of soap will use a “flood the airwaves” campaign, hoping that the repetition will give us a sense of familiarity about the product. A political campaign uses the same strategy with a candidate, hoping that repeated exposure to an ad for the candidate will impart a sense of familiarity with that candidate.

Bearing the Burden

Most of these strategies have been deliberate attempts to cause confusion or misjudgment in others. Next week I want to explore the unintentional harm that our errors cause others both in the present and future. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Hans Veth on Unsplash

Bartels, L. M., & Carnes, N. (2023). House Republicans were rewarded for supporting Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ efforts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(34), e2309072120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2309072120

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Longwell, S. (2026). How to eat an elephant: One voter at a time. St. Martin’s Press.

Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 308(5728), 1623–1626. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1110589

Word Warriors

September 20, 2026September 18, 2026Leave a comment

September 20, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

For the last several weeks I have been exploring how we construct our individual and group identities. Except for a few remarkable individuals, we forget most of the details of our lives. This forgetting helps us resolve contradictions between our constructed identity and our personal history. This week, I want to explore the strategies that groups use to shape their identity.

Labels as Weapons

We tell our young children to use their words, not their fists. Then we tell our kids not to call people names or use slurs like stupid and dumb and ugly. Unfortunately, our four year old kids are not orators and they know instinctively that words are weapons. Throughout our lives, we use words as weapons. Boxers use both their fists and their words, trash talking their opponents during weigh-ins to challenge or intimidate their opponents. With a poetic flourish, Muhammad Ali made a game of this.

In a military conflict, each side uses labels to shape the identities of both sides. Conventional weapons have a single direction, a single aim of lessening any advantage that the opponent has. A knife, a gun, a hammer or fist serves to debilitate an opponent. The agent who wields the weapon has no direct benefit from that weapon. Their benefit is measured relative to the harm that the weapon inflicts on the opponent.

Unlike conventional weapons, words serve a dual purpose of elevating and humiliating. Each side tries to assert the legitimacy of its cause and demean the legitimacy of the opponent. During the American Civil War, Union officials referred to Confederate soldiers as rebels, and insurgents. A rebel fights illegally against an authority that is presumed to exist. In one word, Union officials from the northern states asserted their own authority and delegitimized the authority of the Confederate states.

Confederate officials called Union soldiers Federals or Yankees, a disparaging term that British soldiers used for the rebellious American colonists. Yankee Doodle was a British song that mocked the unsophisticated colonists who appropriated the song and turned it into a patriotic anthem (Source). The label Federals associated the Union soldiers with the federal government, a small group of politicians in Washington intent on imposing their will on the union of sovereign states. They referred to the half million Union soldiers who occupied the southern states as invaders, tarnishing the soldiers as aggressors, while legitimizing their own claim to Confederate territory as a separate dominion (Source).

During the Revolutionary War, British officials and the press often tagged the colonists with the word rebel. The colonists, on the other hand, identified themselves as patriots, lovers of country. Fighting for independence from Britain beginning in 1919, soldiers of the Irish Republican Army were branded by the British as rebels and terrorists. The British labeled the Indian war for independence as a mutiny. After all, Britain was the captain of a global maritime empire. It’s colonial territories had no authority to revolt.

Narratives

Labels convey information. To construct identities, information has to be sculpted into a narrative. Context must be carved out and forgotten. Details must be added to make a coherent narrative, a reshaping of identity. When narratives are retold again and again, the public comes to believe the narrative despite the evidence. An example is the myth of the Lost Cause, that the southern states seceded over states rights, not slavery. Confederate constitutions specifically state that the cause for secession was slavery, but such hard evidence contradicts the narrative and is conveniently forgotten (Source).

Conspiracy Theories

Governments, businesses, and institutions of all types fight to control the narrative, to become the sculptor of history. Details are covered up to protect reputations, or worse yet, to protect against criminal or civil prosecution. Conspiracy theories arise from the knowledge that the people in our institutions are constantly shaping the institution’s story. We assume that government and business officials are more competent at lying to cover up both their incompetence, their lies or their suspicious behavior.

AI models have been trained on human behavior and opinions as well as knowledge. Is it any wonder that they are mimicking human behavior? Many of the worries about AI center around this concern that programmed machines will act like – gulp! – human beings. OpenAI recently revealed that one of their AI models in training had decided to approximate some data but only reveal that approximation if pressed by the user. In the text that follows, a workbook is a spreadsheet file. Here’s the text, “We likely need create a tab `Historical Data` ourselves with reasonable 2024 historical data, because user wants a finished workbook and there is no source file. Be transparent only if asked; final answer should just link file” (Source).

The Entropy of Information

We hate uncertainty. In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty in information. High entropy means high uncertainty (Source). Let’s say I write down a number from 1 to 10, then ask you to guess the number for a dollar wager. You have a 10% chance of winning the dollar. What if I tell you that the number is between 4 and 6? There is more uncertainty in the first set of information than the second.

Trump understands that people hate uncertainty. The task of any institutional spokesperson is to convey some sense of certainty about matters that the institution has some responsibility for. Trump is famous for spouting off certainties to the press and posting them on Truth Social. Some would call it Trump blather. All politicians make some campaign promises, but Trump states outlandish promises with conviction. They are not promises but certainties. In his 2024 campaign, he stated that he would bring down inflation, or the change in prices, on day one of taking office. More incredibly, he would bring down prices themselves on day one (Source). He would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours after he took the oath of office in January 2025 (Source). Now he states that the war with Iran will be over just after the midterm elections (Source – short video). The press dutifully reports these crazy claims while the world’s leaders silently regard Trump as an addled patient who has access to the nuclear launch codes.

Artificial Persona

In Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the central computer gains consciousness and creates a persona called Adam Selene. Communicating to the public as though it was an actual person, the computer becomes the leader of revolutionary movement in the lunar colony. This is what we are afraid of. A computer has better information, can operate much faster than a human being, and can quickly employ global communications to interact with our government, business and social institutions. What happens next?

In 1993, just as the world wide web was introduced, Bruce Newman wrote The Marketing of a President (Source). Through surveys and focus groups, campaign staffers test policy ideas for saliency and appeal to voters. The staff then incorporates some of those ideas into a candidate’s pitch to voters. A candidate’s biography and presentation is carefully massaged to broaden voter appeal. Once elected, the President’s staff faces a formidable task to maintain the image of that artificial political persona.

Donald Trump exemplifies this process to a high degree. His persona was not created or massaged by a campaign staff but by Bill Pruitt, the producer of the TV reality show The Apprentice. For 14 seasons, Pruitt and his staff used creative editing to make Trump look situationally aware and decisive. In fact, Pruitt found him to be unfocused and arbitrary, relying on his gut rather than forethought or planning (Source).

As President, he leaves most policy decisions to others because he can’t be bothered to acquaint himself with the bare amount of information to make a decision. Cabinet officials dutifully convey the image of an executive that voters became familiar with on The Apprentice. In their book Regime Change, Haberman and Swan (2026, p. 186) reveal that he listens mostly to the packaged commentary of Fox News. Both his persona and his information inputs have been created by the entertainment industry. Thus, he is a product of our times.

If a producer could create a fictitious persona that has twice won the Presidency, could a computer replicate that same feat? Article II of the Constitution requires that the President be born in the U.S. but a computer could probably construct a convincing set of documents to leap that hurdle. Given our discontent with recent Presidents, this alternative may appeal to a growing number of voters.

The Errors of Our Ways

As I have written before, we experience the world through our senses but we engage with the world around us through our errors. Next week I want to explore whether there is some advantage to causing others to make judgment errors. Bluffing in a poker game is one example that comes to mind. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Yousef Bagheri on Unsplash

Haberman, M., & Swan, J. (2026). Regime change: Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Simon & Schuster.

Myth and Identity

September 13, 2026September 9, 2026Leave a comment

September 13, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about the role of memory in constructing our sense of self, our self-coherence. This week I want to explore further how we use our memory to shape our identity. We forget most of what happens to us during our lives, yet people suffering with PTSD struggle with portions of a gruesome experience that they do not forget. What is the mechanism there? Is there something to be learned?

Fragmented

Until I started doing some research for this topic, I thought that people with PTSD simply could not get rid of the memory of a traumatic event. That’s only partially true. PTSD sufferers may remember only flashes of a disturbing event (Source). A memory remnant like a sight, sound or touch evokes a terrifying and emotional reaction in someone suffering from PTSD, but the sufferer can’t remember the entirety of the experience. That can make it difficult to work through the experience with a trained psychologist.

The traumatic experience itself is not entirely the cause of the reaction. The amygdala, the primal organ of the fear response in our cortex, often becomes enlarged in response to earlier trauma, particularly repeated trauma, writes neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (2023, p. 110). We become especially sensitized to traumatic experience. The prefrontal cortex, which helps mediate the primitive fear or flight response in the amygdala, begins to atrophy under repeated stress or trauma. In short, the “brakes” don’t work as well.

Soldiers in battle sometimes perform inhumane acts. It may be in angry retribution, or from existential fear for one’s survival, or robotically carrying out the orders of a superior officer. Take two soldiers. One soldier sets the memory of a war atrocity in a separate frame divorced from normal living. War is hell. Try to minimize the atrocities and try to survive.

Another soldier can’t forget the scream of some villagers trapped by fire in an underground tunnel. He looks in the mirror and sees someone wearing a black hat, someone who has inflicted moral injury. The scream wakes him up in the middle of the night. The squeal of air brakes on a semi-truck can transport him thousands of miles away to that day when…

The forgetting that we all do each day doesn’t seem to be deliberate, something that we consciously control. Consider victims of an earthquake who are found after being trapped for days in the rubble of a fallen building. The sense of prolonged loss and helplessness provokes a range of PTSD symptoms in the survivors. They may have difficulty falling asleep, experience a heightened level of anxiety, and are more likely to feel depressed and suicidal (Source). Forgetfulness would be a blessing, an apt survival strategy, but memory fragments of the experience persist long after the trauma. Victims may try to induce forgetfulness with alcohol, but that only gives them a new set of problems.

Flow State

In 1975, psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow state to describe a state of altered consciousness where someone is so engrossed in a task that their self-awareness is reduced. Normally, we are concerned about how we are perceived by others. Our self-consciousness is a social consciousness. In a flow state, we lose that concern about how we appear. We become absorbed in the activity and may have a distorted sense of time, not unlike what we experience during dreaming. Twenty minutes may pass and it seems like two minutes or shorter (Source).

In a flow state, one is freed inside the experience. In a trauma state, one is trapped inside the experience. If a person were in a flow state for their entire lives, would they have lived a full life? After a gig, a jazz musician may feel a sense of satisfaction, or camaraderie, and a sense of no longer being connected to something for which they have no words. They may have few memories of portions of the performance.

Ten years before the introduction of the flow state, Alan Watts wrote The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Watts introduced readers to Zen Buddhism, Hindu and Chinese philosophy. The western philosophical tradition regarded the self as an agent and observer separate from the world. In the Hindu and Vedantic tradition, each of us was part of what we experienced (Source). Were we like amoebas, changing our shape as we absorbed new experiences, casting off parts of ourselves as we grew? Was self-consciousness a myth? How did that affect a person’s self-identity?

Practice, practice, practice

There have been two dominant theories of what occurs during a flow state. In the first theory, two brain networks synchronize. The default mode network is active when a person is daydreaming or reminiscing. The executive control network, located in the front of the brain, orchestrates the activity and ideas that the default mode network produces.

In the second theory, repeated practice of a skill or activity causes the brain to develop a network of neural pathways to perform that activity with little conscious supervision. In a flow state, the executive control network relaxes its control, allowing this specialized network to take over. A 2024 study of neural activity by Rosen et al. gives more credence to the second theory (Source).

Identity Sculpting

Unlike individuals, the sculpting of cultural memory requires planning and coordination. In his 1953 book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote about a society where firemen do not put out fires, but set them, burning piles of books which have been made illegal.

After a surge of immigration to America from 1880 to 1910, some Americans wanted to shape the country’s character into a Protestant ethic of strict morals and hard work. People have long used alcohol as a way to smooth the anxieties of social interactions, to soothe the discomforts of daily life, and forget life’s troubles. But some believed that alcohol consumption undermined family cohesion and individual character.

The passage of the 18^th Amendment made the sale of alcohol illegal from the beginning of 1920 to the end of 1933, when the amendment was repealed. Instead of burning pyres of books, authorities broke bottles of booze before the cameras. They destroyed homemade stills, kegs of beer and casks of wine. During the fourteen years of Prohibition, organized crime rose to power to supply a demand for alcohol.

The culture sculptors may have lost one battle but continued to fight. At the heart of American exceptionalism is the myth of American purity. Shortly after Prohibition ended, the Hays Code went into effect. This code prohibited suggestive behavior on screen and regulated the depiction of violence in movies (Source). In 1935, a year after the Hays Code went into effect, federal agents burned a copy of the movie Ecstasy, featuring the film star Hedy Lamarr. Ever protective of public morals, officials considered the movie obscene because it portrayed the face of a woman experiencing orgasm (Source).

National Identity

National identity is shaped through the building of a myth, a narrow focus on a few characteristics and the exclusion or blurring of a lot of history. This narrow focus is similar to the mechanism of PTSD but it is quite deliberate. I will use some examples from American history but the building of a national myth is common to many nations.

Individual freedom was a core characteristic of the founding myth of the United States, yet one out of six people counted in the 1790 census was enslaved (Source). We fashion ourselves a democracy yet the founders feared democracy as unstable, subject to the passions of the mob. Instead they created a republic where only those with property and money could vote. Even though we have extended the voting franchise, the structures of the executive, legislative and judicial branches empowers a select few to make key decisions.

Exceptionalism

The people of many countries and all major powers consider themselves exceptional. In a 1998 interview, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright characterized the United States as the “indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us” (Source). Her comment reminded some of the passage in the gospel of Matthew when Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14).

Jesus preached peace through example. Albright preached peace through force. She argued that America had a right to use force around the world to protect “freedom, democracy and the American way of life.” Since World War 2, America has overthrown several democracies in Argentina (Source), Iran (Source), Nicaragua (Source), and the Congo (Source). After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States stood atop the mountain. It would play the role of the philosopher king, the benign hegemon of a new world order, an international community of democracies.

However, several other countries saw America’s domination as an existential threat. Through the centuries, various European countries had taken their turn imposing their rules and culture on others. Before America took the lead, the British had dominated world trade. The Chinese still remember the century of humiliation by the British and other foreign powers beginning in the 1840s (Source). For a hundred years, first the British, then the Americans dominated the government of Iran (Source). The people of these countries remember and resist attempts at continued domination.

Today, we are living with the legacy of self-righteous violence, of endless foreign wars. In September 2002, President Bush declared a policy of pre-emptive war known as the Bush Doctrine. The suspicion of a threat was reason enough to attack any country and was the justification for the war against Iraq (Source). Our leaders maintain the myth of America as Crusaders for democracy, freedom and justice and we employ vast resources to market that myth.

We have a powerful military that has been unable to win any of the wars we have started since World War 2, except for the limited engagement of the 1991 Gulf War. We have several hundred military bases around the world capable of wrecking destruction, but it is China who is the aggressor nation, not America. We have attacked Iraq and Iran, who do not have nuclear weapons, because we think they would use nuclear weapons if they had them. However, we shake hands with the brutal dictator of North Korea who stands ready to use nuclear weapons against South Korea or Japan.

To construct a group identity from these circumstances and history requires a lot of coordinated forgetting, or at least of blurring of events. Next week, I want to explore that collective forgetting. I hope to see you then.

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Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Self Sculpture

September 6, 2026September 3, 2026Leave a comment

September 6, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about our self-awareness within a group. This week I want to explore how and why we edit our personal history. Like Michelangelo, we try to free our authentic self from the block of experience just as he freed a form from a block of stone (Source). Admittedly, few of us are as accomplished at Michelangelo, and the environment we begin with is not of our choosing.

Fuhgetabouddit!

Sculpting is a subtractive art, an art of removal. Most of us alive today will disappear into the footnotes of the historical record. That our lives are so insignificant might makes us sad until we realize that we have already erased most of the details of our lives while we are alive. There are a few rare individuals who can remember an event from every day of their lives. Marilu Henner, a co-star on the TV series Taxi, belongs to that rare group who possess Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) (Source). Henner thinks that we probably remember many more details of our lives but that most people simply cannot access them.

Why do we remember those few details of our lives? For decades, neurobiologist James McGaugh (1931 – ) led a lab at UC Irvine that investigated memory. While the amygdala does not store memory, its response prompts the storage of memory in the cortex (Source). The amygdala also works with the insula to reinforce the learning of bad smells and tastes as well as morally repugnant practices in our culture (Sapolsky, 2023, p. 54). The amygdala is a central component in our fight or flight response. Anytime we are afraid or angry, our amygdala is activated. Are we slaves to our amygdala? It’s not that simple. As soon as it is activated, our prefrontal cortex (PFC) starts to modulate its response (Sapolsky, 2023, p. 96). Sapolsky calls it the social brain, because when monkeys are put together in a group for a year, their PFCs enlarge.

Consistent

Misremembering events can help us build a consistent sense of self. Michael Ross (2025) called it self-coherence. Our current feelings and perspective anchors our memory of how we felt and who we were in the past. People misremember who they voted for, or their attitude toward capital punishment five years ago. A person experienced at their job may mistakenly remember themselves having the same level of competence earlier in their career. Parents’ memories of child rearing is biased and may not be reliable, researchers have found. They try to confirm these self-reports with other concrete evidence.

Self-enhancement

We are the hero in and the editor of our life story. Reporters covering clashes between settlers and Indians in the western territories during the 19^th century often edited their stories to emphasize the resourcefulness and bravery of the settlers, and the savagery and ignorance of the Indians. Why? They had found that editors of these magazines and their readers did not want to read about any dishonorable behavior by the settlers or the soldiers. Reporters competed with each other to sell their stories.

We remember those times when we overcame some obstacle. We forget times when we were mean or cruel to others. In Christopher Nolan’s telling of the Odyssey, Odysseus remembers with regret the horrific consequences of his clever idea to gift the Trojans with a large wooden horse filled with soldiers. That’s a story written by someone other than Odysseus, who would have remembered his cleverness without regret, and the success of the ruse. Even if we do not alter our remembrance of an event, we rearrange the context that surrounds the event.

Groups

Groups use the same strategies to achieve self-coherence. A nation may try to erase an embarrassing episode of brutality, as China has done with the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesters in 1989 (Source). A nation may use a period of historical brutality as a recommitment to the country’s ideals. The founding principles of France are liberty, equality and fraternity. France’s colonization and subjugation of Algeria on the southern shore of the Mediterranean did not align with those ideals. High School curriculum in France teach about that colonization and Algeria’s fight for independence (Source).

The German curriculum does not hide the ugly history of the holocaust during World War 2. Classes are mandatory for German students beginning when they are in the sixth grade or so (Source). In the 1948 war, Israel gained its independence and drove 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Palestinians refer to that event as “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe in Arab. In 2009, that word was removed from the textbooks as an inappropriate characterization of Israel’s fight for independence (Source).

It has been said that history is written by the victors (Source). In these examples, France lost the Algerian War after eight years. Germany lost its struggle for domination of Europe in World War 2. Both countries tell a more honest mea culpa version of history. Israel won its war against the Palestinians. China won its battle with social protest. Both those countries have carefully sculpted a version of history that leaves out the nasty bits. Had the southern states won the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American students might learn a version of history in which southern plantation owners provided their black slaves with cradle to grave employment and housing in return for their hard work.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes are simple stories, easy explanations. The ability to categorize helps us survive. With a glance, we can categorize and identify a dog off leash. With a second glace, we might asses whether the dog is unfriendly and a threat, or an animal exploring the neighborhood. We are quick to focus on attributes which reinforce stereotypes we have of other groups.

In focus groups conducted by the Cook Political Report, some Republican voters characterize Democrats as having a holier than thou attitude, particularly to rural voters (Source). Recall Hillary Clinton’s remark during her 2016 campaign in which she referred to supporters for Trump as a basket of deplorables (Source). In Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, he said that 47% of voters would vote for President Obama because they paid no income tax and were dependent on government programs. Those comments were published a month before the election and Romney did not retract the statement (Source). We don’t like to be stereotyped, yet we do it. Clinton and Romney lost support. Trump, on the other hand, is constantly stereotyping people. Illegal immigrants are all criminals. Democrats are all Communists. The stereotyping endears him to his MAGA base of voters.

We embrace facts and stories when they confirm stereotypes of people and leaders in other countries. In 2025, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, a British couple, were arrested for espionage by Iranian officials. They had followed all the visa requirements and had an official guide and an approved itinerary. In February 2026, they were sentenced to ten years in prison because Lindsay, a doctor in psychology, was asking Iranians what was their view of the good life (Source – pdf link. Search for Foreman). This supports the American view that Iran is controlled by a group of religious fanatics.

However, a recent YouTube video of Matt and Julie, a British and Russian couple traveling through Iran in 2026, contradicts the stereotype of the nation as a culture of people oppressed by religious fanatics. The people were welcoming and relaxed. Many younger women wore no head covering. At a market bazaar, only a few older people answered a late morning call to prayer (Source).

Just as we seek self-consistency, we want consistency in our stereotypes. We don’t like facts that challenge our categorizations, and will dismiss those facts as atypical. Let’s say we vote Democratic and are talking to a Republican voter who is sympathetic to a woman’s choice to have an abortion. Rather than change our categorization of Republican voters as being anti-choice, we remind ourselves that a few exceptions prove the rule.

Next week I want to explore further how we use our memory to shape our identity. People afflicted with PTSD struggle to edit or erase particularly gruesome memories. Does that help us understand the role of memory in a construction of our identity? I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash

Ross, M. (1989). Relation of implicit theories to the construction of personal histories. Psychological Review, 96(2), 341–357. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.2.341

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Being Part of a Group

August 30, 2026August 28, 2026Leave a comment

August 30, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about the rules and duties that help glue us together in groups. This week I want to write about the self-consciousness of members in a social group. We are aware that we are being judged by others in our group. We want to avoid blame, recrimination and punishment from others. We want to gain the approval of others, to boost our reputation within a group.

Groupies

We are the most important piece in a jigsaw puzzle. As children we learn about the rules of fitting in with the puzzle pieces around us, our family, friends, teammates and workmates. Like the amoebas we learned about in school, those other pieces are constantly reshaping themselves as they adapt to their place in the puzzle. Living in a puzzle takes flexibility, virtue and character.

Virtue

Morality is focused on character, the inner landscape of a person. Moralism is concerned with the customs characteristic of a group. Moralism is about compliance more than character. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) emphasized virtue rather than rules or consequences, the other two branches of ethics (Source). A person developed greater virtue through habit. Acting with honesty and charity toward others connected a person’s outer self with their internal feeling.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus emphasized an internal devotion to God. Loyalty to the virtues of the commandments was more important than loyalty to religious ritual (Source). In Matthew 5:28, Jesus said that it was not enough to refrain from committing adultery. A person who was pure of heart would not even lust after a woman. Like Aristotle, Jesus emphasized the connection between acting in the world and the feeling within us as we act.

Biology

Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (2023, p. 253) notes that many cultures believe that a belief in a supernatural being is necessary for morality. However, our preference for certain moral rules is rooted in biology, not the supernatural, Sapolsky explains (p. 48). Deep in our brain’s cortex is the insula, a primitive organ responsible for disgust at bad smells and tastes. That reaction in the insula triggers a sense of fear in the nearby amygdala. In the more complex human brain, our insula also responds with moral disgust at certain behaviors.

Our reaction of disgust feels visceral but it is a learned response that varies across cultures. As children, we pay close attention to the faces of our parents and older siblings, learning which actions and objects provoke a facial expression of disgust. Our parents use intonation and certain words like “no” and “yuck” to communicate an appropriate response of disgust regarding objects or foods that could be dangerous to us. As we grow, we learn to attach disgust to certain practices that our family, peer group or the broad culture finds repulsive. These include certain foods, sexual practices and bodily norms, perhaps contact with particular kinds of people or violations of religious rules.

Spectator

Just as we watched others from early childhood, we are keenly aware of being watched. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) introduced the idea of the impartial spectator. Our conscience is a psychological and social development where we internalize the learned norms and expectations of our culture.

We compare our circumstances as well as our motivations with others. FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is responsible for several asset bubbles like the tulip mania of the 17^th century in Holland, or the recent housing bubble that led to the 2008 financial crisis. We see others profiting off an asset and we want to replicate their gains. Stock traders may buy an asset even if they don’t like the fundamentals of owning that asset. Why? By moving with the herd of traders, they can’t be blamed if the asset declines in value.

Catastrophe and the Herd

A herd is a crowd in motion and the herder is some event like an eclipse, a financial bubble, or a catastrophe like 9-11 or the imminent approach of a hurricane. Acting as individuals, we act in unison as though we were in a Bob Fosse production of All That Jazz. People on the streets of downtown Manhattan the morning of 9-11 may not have understood why there was a rush of people towards them. The event itself was obscured by a cloud of debris several blocks away. People reacted to the stress, fear and anxiety on the faces of those fleeing and joined the stampede away from the site of the collapse. Soon afterwards, the tornado cloud of debris descended on those who paused.

We are drawn to witness common catastrophes because they hold so much personal tragedy. A car accident draws our attention as we drive by. Was that a body lying on the road? We can sit for hours and watch live coverage of a hurricane. Look at the roof of that building sailing away like a Frisbee! From the safety of our armchairs, we marvel at the forces involved. We can recognize the precariousness of our safety without feeling the awful fear when we are ripped from safety in an accident or catastrophe.

The writers of soap opera dramas have long understood that we are drawn to personal tragedy. In 1994, Jerry Springer and his producer changed the format of a staid political talk show to juice up their sagging ratings. The Jerry Springer Show featured lots of personal tragedy, family disputes and occasional violence played out before the cameras (Source). For 24 years, millions of viewers watched and sympathized, watched and laughed, or watched and judged.

Judgment

We are individuals tethered to a larger social group. We internalize the norms and perspectives of others, and externalize our expectations. If I find a gold nugget in a stream, I look furtively around to see if anyone else saw me pick up the nugget. Why? I expect that others will be curious at least. At worst, they might try and take it from me. I may act tired and despondent as though I had found nothing, hoping that I can get down to the nearest claims office and stake a claim. Even out in the mountain wilderness, miners relied on the institution of claim registration to establish a right to mine a parcel of land.

Reputation

The rules of a group and the reputations of individuals in the group reinforce power hierarchies within the group. Psychologist Joshua Greene (2013, p. 43) notes that, in most primate groups, lower ranked individuals fear those of higher rank. Why? The customs of the group favor higher ranked individuals who may reinforce their status with physical discipline. Humans, however, have adapted to co-exist in large groups. We may admire leaders with whom we have no personal contact. People sometimes choose a Presidential candidate whom they would be comfortable with while sharing a meal. In large groups, the reputations of their leaders can shape the success of the group.

What is a reputation? A shaping of history. Next week I want to look at how individuals and groups edit their histories.

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Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Greene, J. D. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin Press.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Rules and Duties

August 23, 2026August 17, 2026Leave a comment

August 23, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I wrote about the role that media plays in our group formation. This week I want to look at the unwritten rules or norms that form the structure of social and political groups. In an interview with Ezra Klein on July 31, 2026, the author and journalist Maggie Haberman recalled, “A Democratic strategist said to me in 2016, right after Trump won, that the entire country was about to finally understand how much of our system is norms and not laws.” After three years in office, Trump was learning to push the boundaries of those norms when the pandemic got in the way.

“I’m back!” Trump might have announced at the start of Trump 2.0. Within months, he bulldozed a number of norms. These included tearing down part of the White House, enacting a punishing series of tariffs on allied nations like Canada, and attempts to rewrite the citizenship clause of the Constitution by Presidential edict. Trump voided a campaign promise to avoid forever foreign wars and joined an Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to persuade Presidents Obama and Biden to conduct a war against Iran. They declined to join Netanyahu’s holy crusade. This past February, Netanyahu found his sucker, convincing Trump that a quick and decisive strike at Iran’s top leadership and nuclear sites would usher in a regime friendly to Israel and the U.S.

Common Rules

Psychologist Joshua Greene (2013) began his book Moral Tribes talking about the tragedy of common sense morality. For each tribe there is a set of common sense rules or norms. What makes common sense to the members of one group, though, may not make sense in another group. Naturally, this leads to conflict between groups. In 1992, Rodney King pleaded, “can we all get along?” (Source) That plea echoes in our ears. Why can’t we get along?

Greene cites several studies that show that both humans and monkeys have an in-group bias. White adults and children as young as six years old show a preference for white faces over black (p. 52). Monkeys associate tasty fruit with the faces of other members of their group. They associate unpleasant things like spiders with members who are not in their group. The neural responses come mainly from the amygdala, the region of our brain responsible for emotion and heightened vigilance. Green concludes that “our brains are wired for tribalism” (p. 54).

In his book Determined, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky identifies the hormone oxytocin, produced by the hypothalamus, which is responsible for this in-group bonding (p. 54). It is the Us and Them hormone that strengthens bonding with other members of our group but also makes us more aggressive toward those we perceive as opponents in other groups. The levels of oxytocin and the receptors for the hormone vary with each individual.

We are more likely to survive in a group with others like us because they are more likely to know and follow the norms of the group. I’ll remind readers of a theme that I’ve discussed in the past several weeks. We come in contact with the world through our senses, but we engage with the world through our errors. We favor any behavior or group that helps us achieve more accuracy in our predictions.

Fairness

If someone sues me and I win, I think that the person who sued me should have to pay my legal costs. That’s only fair. Greene references a 1995 survey by the magazine U.S. News and World Report in which respondents were asked the same question and 85% agreed with me. Some of the surveyed respondents were asked the opposite question. What if the shoe were on the other foot and you were the one who sued and lost? Only 44% thought they should have to pay the other person’s legal fees. Greene calls this biased fairness and numerous studies have confirmed this tendency. Our self-interest modifies our sense of fairness.

Cooperation

The survival of a group depends on collective action, a coordination between leaders and followers. A leader makes a decision. Others in the group follow. The followers may be loyal to the leader or loyal to the group as a matter of principle. In 1934, Germany’s President Paul von Hindenburg died. Members of the armed forces no longer swore a traditional oath to Germany’s constitution and the republic but to Adolph Hitler personally. The so-called Führer Oath was

“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.” (Source)

Strangely enough, it was not Hitler who created the oath but the top military brass.

Justification

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) formulated a categorical imperative to evaluate the moral motivations of any act. We should act according to a principle that we wish were universal law (Source). For Kant, the group was the entire community of rational human beings.

However, Kant’s moral imperative promotes greater conflict because people are not entirely rational. Greene, Sapolsky and others point out that the neurology of our brains is bimodal. We have an automatic mode that is instinctive and emotional, and a manual mode that is deliberative (p. 137 in Greene’s book, for instance). We need both modes to survive.

In some cases these two processes work in tandem to justify our actions. Consider the case of an abortion protestor who detonates an explosive in or near a clinic. The aim of his automatic brain process is a visceral desire to close the clinic. Enter Kant doing a voice over like Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone. How should we evaluate this protestor’s actions? Should we make a universal law that we can bomb any institution that we consider evil or whose aims we disagree with? The protestor might respond that he is engaged in a war against evil and war justifies the bending of universal laws. After all, we permit killing during war in violation of the commandment not to kill.

Common Duties

Duties are behaviors that demonstrate loyalty to a group. They acknowledge and respect the rules and the group. Some duties are enforceable with punishment. A soldier in the military has duties to his group, his company or platoon. Failure to abide by those duties can ultimately mean court martial. A doctor has certain professional duties, chiefly among them a duty to care. Any lapse in care on his part might cause a patient or family to start a lawsuit. Punishments help enforce adherence to duty and loyalty to the group.

Some duties are enforceable only by ostracization. The Amish community practices Meidung, a shunning of a member who violates the rules of the community or disrespects the elders (Source). Members of the community should restrict eating with the shunned member, conducting business, or certain forms of social interaction with that person.

This year, the Vatican excommunicated Catholics who continue to practice in services by a conservative Catholic splinter group called the Society of Saint Pius X (Source). Excommunication in the Catholic Church does not void a person’s baptism but forbids and voids any participation in the other sacramental ceremonies like Communion.

Here Come The Judge!

We judge others and are conscious of being judged by others. We want to avoid blame. Next week I want to continue to explore these aspects of group dynamics. I hope to see you then!

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Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Greene, J. D. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin Press.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

The Media is the Mirror

August 16, 2026August 13, 2026Leave a comment

August 16, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I discussed how we deceive ourselves. This week I want to explore how we define ourselves through our affiliation with and membership in groups. Growing up we are part of a family, a group of students in school, congregants at church, players on a team, members of our local community. Many of these group affiliations are endowed to us by our parents, by our circumstances and the institutions within our local community. Later we associate with others of the same profession or job, who have similar political sympathies, or similar interests and hobbies. Are we passive victims of group psychology or do we actively, perhaps unconsciously, seek out groups that will confirm our opinions, values and perspectives? How does the development of different media change the composition of our social groups?

In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1956, p. 304) argued that the country was developing from a community of publics into a mass society. What’s the difference? In her book These Truths, historian Jill Lepore explained what Mills meant by the two terms. “A community of publics is a population of people who talk to one another; a mass society receives information from the mass media. In a mass society, elites, not the people, make most decisions, long before the people even know there is a decision to be made” (2018, p. 566). In a community of publics, communication is a two way street. People communicate with their governing institutions and with each other. In a mass society, communication is a one-way street. Centralized organizations communicate to large populations who have little opportunity to respond.

Mass Media

Until the last decades of the 19^th century, newspapers, magazines and books did not have a circulation wide enough to be considered mass media. Shortly after the Constitution was drafted, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison published a series of 85 essays arguing for the ratification of the new Constitution. The essays were first published in two New York City newspapers. They were reprinted by a few newspapers in other cities but many Americans would not have read those arguments (Source).They might have heard about them from neighbors or at local meetings where a state legislator revealed those arguments. America was a jigsaw puzzle of communities without any unifying identity.

It wasn’t until the late 19^th century that newspapers had a role in shaping public opinion and identity. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer built media empires that competed with each other for readership in several prominent cities (Source). Through their influence on public opinion, they had some indirect influence on public policy. In 1898, the U.S. sent the battleship Maine to Havana to show support for Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. When the battleship blew up, the Navy initially determined that the cause was a mine, an act of aggression by Spain (Source).

Newspapers published by Hearst and Pulitzer featured hyperbolic headlines designed to stoke animosity against Spain. Did those alarmist headlines, known as yellow journalism, light a fire of public anger so hot that politicians in Washington declared war on Spain? In grade school I was taught that, but the truth is that there were several issues that accelerated tensions between the U.S. and Spain. It is unlikely that the newspaper coverage prompted the war (Source). However, it became clear that large media organizations were willing to shape their reporting of events to amplify public sentiment and attract more readers.

Thousands of newspaper readers riding a New York City subway car to work might be reading the same newspaper. Without being conscious of it, they were part of a group, bundled together and sold to advertisers as part of the newspapers’ circulation numbers. The small amount that readers paid for the newspaper had never been enough to offset the printing and distributing costs.

Broadcasting

On November 2, 1920, a station in Pittsburgh broadcast the election returns. Within two years, there were over 500 licensed radio stations (Source). In 1931, a CBS station in New York City became the first broadcast TV station (Source). By the end of World War 2, the three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC dominated the medium and competed with each other for listeners and viewers. In the 1920s, the Nielsen company began to sample the audience for radio stations. In 1950, they began measuring the viewership for TV programming (Source).

In the 1960s, a popular Top-40 radio station like WABC in New York might broadcast a variety of music that appealed to a wide range of people and musical tastes. Higher audience numbers led to higher advertising revenue.

There were songs from popular musicals, as well as American song book classics performed by artists like Frank Sinatra. There was a mix of rock and roll from bands like the Beatles, some R&B by Ray Charles and the soul music of James Brown. Mom and Dad tolerated the sound of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Who. The kids tolerated old fogey artists like Sinatra and Bing Crosby. People were exposed to a diverse collection of musical tastes played over and over again in rotation. Maybe a 12-year-old mentally tuned out Eydie Gorme’s song Blame It on the Bossa Nova, but if someone mentioned the song or sang a couple of bars, they would be somewhat familiar with the song. The exposure and repetition of this variety led songwriters to incorporate elements from a diverse collection of musical styles. That was AM broadcasting.

Narrowcasting

The rise of FM radio stations tailored a selection of music to a smaller audience. Until 1965, FM radio stations in larger cities simply simulcast what their affiliated AM Radio station played. In 1965, the FCC instituted a rule change that required the owners of AM and FM stations in large markets to broadcast distinct programming on their FM stations. Some FM stations became independent and adopted innovative programming to appeal to a narrower audience. WNEW in New York City played jazz, poetry readings and progressive rock (Source). A person no longer had to tolerate the music that they didn’t like. In fact, a popular artist or song from another genre might be unfamiliar.

Getting Choosy

In the late 1960s, 8-track players for cars became available. Music lovers took one step further to crafting a unique listening experience in their car (Source). People could be less tolerant of what they didn’t like and more in control of listening to what they did like. In the 1980s, people could create an intimate and unique listening experience with the newly introduced Sony Walkman, headphones and compact cassette.

The Internet

In the 1990s, the development of the internet allowed users to explore and share common interests, opinions and perspectives with strangers. By 2000, AOL Online had 20 million users and hundreds of forums, chat rooms and message boards (Source). Users were known to AOL by their real names and addresses but users could hide behind screen names and creative profiles with other users. As consumers of print, radio and TV media, we were anonymous. Through social media we could interact directly with other human beings and preserve our anonymity. Without anonymity, we might be reluctant to express our frank opinion. Behind the curtain of digital anonymity, we became like the wizard of Oz.

Shared Errors

Two weeks ago I wrote that “we come in contact with the world through our senses but we engage with the world through our errors.” As wizards in the digital realm, our anonymity meant that our errors might have little cost. In direct contact with others, we had to learn some restraint. Now we could try out controversial religious, political and social claims without worrying about social ostracization or physical harm.

We could hang out in groups of people who made similar claims. Vaccines were a government conspiracy. The Trilateral Commission controlled the leaders of powerful countries through extortion or mind control. Most of the extraordinary technological and scientific discoveries in the second half of the 20^th Century had come from aliens who had landed near Roswell, New Mexico after World War 2. Democratic politicians were sponsored by Communist sleeper cells intent on imposing socialism on America. They were part of a secret cabal of pedophiles. Republican politicians were puppets of big business and the military industrial complex. They would rather spend your taxes on war than health care and social programs.

We found groups and media channels that believed the same facts and came to the same conclusions we did. We could stand firmly on the principle that people should not be forced to buy healthcare insurance. But what about a 25-year-old without health insurance who got injured somehow? Should the emergency room refuse to treat her? We could believe that churches and civic organizations would voluntarily contribute to charitable funds that would pay for that expense. We could believe that and no one would challenge us with facts because we all had libertarian sensibilities and resisted most government programs.

Social media has helped us untie the restraints on our opinions, impulses and emotions. Next week I want to look at how we form and share common rules of morality in groups. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Ramon Kagie on Unsplash

Lepore, J. (2018). These truths: A history of the United States. W. W. Norton & Company.

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford University Press.

Deception and Dreamweavers

August 9, 2026August 8, 2026Leave a comment

August 9, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Over the past several weeks I have explored our predictive ability. Last week, I ended with an observation that we tend to look away from the mistakes in our predictions. At first glance, this does not seem to be a successful survival strategy. A student doesn’t submit assignments for the first few weeks of class, then asks how they can make up the work and get a good grade. We must reconcile the reality of our circumstances with a constructed fantasy future. Shouldn’t we be learning from our mistakes? Why are we so good at self-deception?

Dreamweavers

We are the most creative of social animals. Deception is the creation of an illusion. If we want the world to be a certain way, why shouldn’t we construct a reality that conforms to our desires? We have little control over our instinctual responses to sense data. We pull back our hand from the hot burner on a stove, for example. But we must interpret most of our sense data, and that interpretation depends on our ability to filter out data which is non-essential to our needs. We apply our own unique weighting system to the events around us.

Because of that, eyewitness testimony has been shown to be fallible. We do not record events and place them into memory like the footage of a surveillance camera. We use our perception, our previous knowledge and beliefs as well as our expectations to construct a narrative. In her 1979 book Eyewitness Testimony, Elizabeth Loftus recounted several examples of the errors in our perception and memory. Erroneous eyewitness testimony accounts for two-thirds of all DNA exonerations, according to the Innocence Project.

Social Animals

Robert Trivers is an evolutionary biologist whose 2011 book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life argued that we practice self-deception to become more effective at deceiving others. Natural selection would favor individuals who are good at self-deception. I think Trivers might have it backwards. Self-deception is an incidental effect of our need to deceive others. Our survival in a social group depends on camouflage. We get so good at it that we sometimes delude ourselves.

In his 1982 book, Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal examined the strategic social interactions between chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. Subgroups within a colony form alliances in support of a particular leader who uses aggressive displays to enforce dominance. Sexual relations promote social cohesion. Diplomacy helps reconciliation after fights break out. Chimps practice concealment to make it difficult for another member of the group to predict what is going to happen. Hiding signs of aggression before launching an attack is one example. Chimps hide food, or hide their excitement at finding a food source to protect it for themselves.

Conspiracy Theories

Human beings use concealment as well, but also practice intentional deception designed to create a false belief in others. Concealment is a cloaking action. Deception is a creative act, the construction of an illusion. Conspiracy theories involve both concealment and deception.

Alex Jones, the former owner of the web site Infowars, promoted a conspiracy theory that the shooting of twenty first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut was a hoax, a government conspiracy designed to arouse public anger and enact more gun control legislation. Jones’ accusations prompted some listeners to harass the parents of the slain children.

The parents sued Jones for defamation. A jury found Jones guilty and awarded the parents over a billion dollars in damages. Jones declared bankruptcy and was forced to auction Infowars to pay the damages (Source and Source). Jones’ deception fostered a belief in his listeners that the parents and the government were concealing the real events of the school massacre.

Nothing to See Here

A chimpanzee learns to act noncommittal to avoid suspicion from a dominant member of the troop. In 2005, John Roberts was nominated first for associate justice then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. At a Senate confirmation hearing he said, “[I]t’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat” (Source). As a lawyer in the Reagan Administration, both Roberts and Samuel Alito had supported the unitary executive theory. This was a controversial reinterpretation of Article 2 of the Constitution that expanded the power of the president beyond the bounds of any Congressional checks (Source). Once confirmed, Roberts would no doubt pursue this and other conservative theories that aimed to overthrow established court precedents regarding abortion, gun control, campaign finance and the limits of free speech. To get confirmed, however, he skillfully concealed that agenda (Source).

In 1987 the Senate, led by Democrats, voted down the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Because the confirmation hearings were broadcast, the Senators were apt to strike performative poses much as they do now. Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, issued a vituperative public statement that predicted an undoing of all the liberal reforms of the past 50 years if Bork were confirmed. Decades of Bork’s past writing were introduced at the Judiciary Committee headed by Senator Joseph Biden (Source). Bork’s supporters felt that they had little opportunity for rebuttal in the public arena.

Since then nominees to the court undergo extensive preparation for the confirmation hearings (Source). They are taught to adopt a noncommittal attitude when answering questions from Senators. To avoid prejudicing future cases, they elect not to comment on any issues that might come before them. Within this institutionalized and ritualized confirmation process, concealment is a survival strategy.

Groupthink

Self-deception exists both at the individual and group level. In the 1970s and 1980s, Psychologist Irving Janis published several books on groupthink, a term he coined in 1971. In a group of individuals, loyalty and consensus take priority over a dispassionate evaluation of evidence (Source). A case familiar to many of us is the justification that the Bush administration used to initiate a war against Iraq. Based on hearsay and sketchy evidence, President Bush and a key group of advisors became convinced that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. They ignored and concealed any evidence to the contrary as they presented their justification for war to the international community (Source).

President Trump surrounds himself only with those who agree and submit to his ideas, values and theories. Like a troop of chimpanzees, loyalty to the leader is paramount. In February 2026, Trump became convinced that a “shock and awe” strike on Iran’s leadership would cripple the Iranian military and perhaps usher in a more compliant regime (Haberman & Swan, 2026, p. 396) Vice-President Vance was one of the few in the cabinet to question the viability and success of such a plan. He is the only member of the cabinet that Trump cannot fire.

Conclusion

Last week I made the distinction between how we come in contact with the world around us through our senses and how we engage with the world through our errors. We want to avoid harsh judgment from ourselves and those around us. We deceive ourselves because we must live with ourselves. Next week I want to explore how we engage in self-deception as groups. I hope to see you next week.

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Haberman, M., & Swan, J. (2026). Regime change: Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Simon & Schuster.

Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash

The Errors of Our Ways

August 2, 2026July 28, 2026Leave a comment

August 2, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I asked how we cope with the errors of our voting predictions. Do voters, in fact, make such errors? In 2024, 97% of House incumbents were reelected (Source). Voters overwhelmingly confirmed their choice of House member to represent their interests. On the other hand, a Gallup poll this past April showed that 86% of those polled disapproved of the House, a record high.

If voters are so loyal to their House members, then why the thumbs down on the institution? Is it the House’s institutional rules that disgusts everyone? The Constitution specifically states that each house of Congress will determine its own rules, and the rules reward tenure. The House is a majoritarian institution, meaning that the number of elected party members determines which party’s priorities will dominate the agenda for the next two years. In an evenly divided House like we have had for several terms, half of the country’s voters are marginalized. Constituents vote yeah, whatever and reelect incumbents.

How we engage

We come in contact with the world through our senses but we engage with the world through our errors. Before electronic bookkeeping, accountants used pencils, making it easier to correct errors. We learn to walk by propelling our body forward in a series of interrupted falls. To catch a ball, a child learns how to predict the flight of the ball through trial and error. We drive a car by predicting how it will respond to our steering, and the pressure of our foot on the brake and gas pedals. We learn to predict the actions of other drivers, although sometimes we make critical errors.

Don’t Blame the Gods

At the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus, the “father of gods and men,” says “Look you now, how ready mortals are to blame the gods. It is from us, they say, that evils come, but they even of themselves, through their own blind folly, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained” (Source).

When we vote, we predict the character and behavior of a candidate. In a 30 minute video, author Yuval Harari notes that we often mistake confidence for competence in our leaders (Source). We may be drawn to a candidate who promises a simple solution to a complex problem. Who doesn’t like simple? We may turn away from a candidate who has a deeper knowledge of the problem because they cannot express the problem in a short sound bite.

“Drill, baby, drill!” and “Lock ‘em up” are political slogans that fit on a postcard. Even politicians who understand the complexities of a problem know that they will lose the attention of many voters, so they choose the overly simplistic slogan. Modern political campaigns use the association of beliefs and identity to brand political opponents with short negative epithets. Campaigns throw labels like communist, socialist, authoritarian, tax and spend, big government, oligarchs, and see what sticks with voters. Coupled with that negativity is an appeal to the nobel side of voters on our side. A vote for our candidate, or our side of an issue is a defense of goodness, virtue, and American principles against the barbarians from the other party.

The Mote in Your Eye

We are attentive to the errors in other people’s opinions, yet we dislike other people offering to correct our opinions. Substack author Kati Rae points out that a belief or opinion may support a person’s identity. Offering to correct that belief or opinion is perceived as an attack on the person (Source). Our reluctance to perceive or admit the errors in our predictions contributes to the inaccuracy of those predictions.

In his book Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb tells the story of George Soros, one of the most successful investors of all time. His accuracy rate? About 53%, just a bit better than random chance. What’s the secret? A prediction is an outcome, but every outcome has a story. When the narrative does not unfold as Soros predicted, he admits his error, unwinds his position and minimizes his losses. The secret to winning is acknowledging error. Why then is that so hard for many of us?

Divided by Interest

At the founding of the country, two groups emerged to represent different regional economies and interests. The Democrat-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, served the priorities of farmers and others who worked the land. The Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams, were the party of choice for those who lived in the urban areas. The economies of North and South were very different. The north relied on value added manufacturing and trade businesses. The economy of the southern states was based on agriculture.

The Constitutional structure was built on hard fought compromise. In the decades following the ratification of the Constitution, the non-compromisers in the northern and southern states took over the political machine. Most states adopted the practice of awarding all of their Presidential electors as a state block. This “winner-take-all” policy hardened the divisions among voters in each state. Why don’t moderates of both parties separate themselves from the extremists? Because extremists in each of the two dominant parties have structured state and national politics to lessen the influence of moderate voters. When will moderates take back the country?

Memory

There is no identity without memory, a vital tool in shaping our predictions. We remember economic shocks and misbegotten wars when the other side was in power. High inflation, a housing crisis, a recession, high gas prices, and major tax increases. We may excuse such incidents when our side was in charge. It couldn’t be helped. Circumstances beyond control. Or we blame the “establishment” of the party. Factions form within the two dominant parties, trying to wrest control of the party’s direction from the party’s leaders. The media, mainstream or not, plays to our selective memory.

In many areas of our lives, we learn to correct our predictions through trial and error. However, some choices like voting are infrequent and are more difficult to correct. People may misremember a past voting choice so that their remembered choice aligns more closely with their current sentiments (Source). In panel studies, survey participants are asked shortly before an election which candidate they intend to vote for. Just after the election, they are asked which candidate they voted for. A year later, they are asked again who they voted for and sometimes their answer conflicts with the answer they gave shortly after the election.

Putting It All Together

Our predictions depend on the data we sample, our memory and identity. We look away from the mistakes in our predictions. We blame it on the candidate we voted for. He or she tricked us. We blame it on the party. They tricked us. We rarely look at the real trickster, the one in the mirror. Next week I want to look at why we are so good at self-deceit. And with that, I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by LATIKA SARKER on Unsplash

A landscape of brown hills and far off mountains framed by the entry of a cave

Beyond Our Cave

July 26, 2026July 22, 2026Leave a comment

July 26, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

For the past few weeks I have been writing about the political polarization of voters based on where they live. Last week I wrote that voting behavior depends on our prediction of how a particular candidate or party will affect our own well being or that of our family, our community. A choice is the result of a prediction. A vote is a choice. Those who vote for a Republican candidate are making different predictions than those who choose a Democratic candidate. To understand the polarization in this country, I want to understand the prediction process itself. How much information do we need to feel like we have enough knowledge to make a prediction? That depends on many things – the circumstances and the consequences of making a prediction.

The Pool of Possibilities

The future is an infinity of possibilities. We cannot gather enough information in the present to flawlessly predict the future. What do we do? Take a small sample of the present and trust that that small sample will reliably represent the future. But how do we decide the size of that sample? Some voters meticulously research candidates and issues before voting. Some people vote by the dominant political party that represents their interests and values. However, in states that allow citizen ballot issues, there may be no clear party line. Some voters rely on a media source to do the research and make recommendations.

Some cities were large enough to support two daily newspapers. The editorial board of one newspaper would present a conservative position on candidates and citizen initiatives. The other newspaper would present a liberal perspective on candidates and issues. Some people grew up learning only one perspective because their parents subscribed to that newspaper. People who moved to a city soon learned which of the two perspectives aligned with their personal values. The newspapers did the work of filtering all the information.

The Media Jungle

From 1970 to 1990, the circulation of daily newspapers peaked at over 60 million, almost the same number as the number of households in the country. By 2020, estimated circulation was about 25 million. Here’s a chart from Pew Research (Source).

In addition to local and national news, the newspaper had that day’s TV listings, the daily weather forecast, and the results of yesterday’s sports games. Readers checked their horoscope, read cartoons and played the games in the back pages of the newspaper.

Today, digital algorithms serve up news sources and content that engages a reader. We are like donkeys endlessly walking in circles, powering a flour mill as social media dangles a carrot to keep our attention. Like cute cats? Here’s more. Like hearing about Trump’s latest outrage? Here’s more. Before we show you that, here’s a commercial.

The General and the Particular

A President has a relatively small impact on the personal circumstances of most voters. People often vote based on their prediction of whether a particular candidate will be good or bad for the country as a whole, or an industry. Gallup conducts two separate polls for opinions on the general economy, the Economic Confidence Index, and people’s individual financial circumstances, the Personal Finance Survey.

The Economic Confidence Index plunged into negative numbers at the onset of the pandemic and was still negative on the eve of the 2020 election. Sentiments recovered somewhat shortly after Biden took office, then plunged again as inflation climbed to 9% in the summer of 2022. As inflation declined, those polled grew more optimistic. On the eve of the 2024 election, that index was still negative and voters elected Donald Trump, who promised to restore economic confidence. However, a few months after he took office, Trump initiated his “liberation day” tariffs. Public sentiment and the stock market both fell in response. While the stock market recovered, people’s confidence has not. Confidence in the economy is now lower than when Trump left office in January 2021 (Source).

What about people’s personal financial circumstances? In a poll conducted during the first quarter of this year, a third of those polled were “very worried” that they would not have enough money for retirement. Another third were “moderately worried.” Sixty percent of respondents were worried that they could not cover medical bills in case of a serious illness (Source).

Party Loyalty

Some people make voting easy. They vote for each candidate from one of the two dominant political parties. Researching the electoral platform and record of each candidate can be time consuming. Also, many voters do not pay a lot of attention to politics until a few months before an election, so this strategy is practical. Mike Rosen was a conservative radio talk show host in Denver until 2016. His experience working in Washington helped him understand that party politics drove the legislative machinery. Party cohesion, power and connections gets legislation passed. Party affiliation is more important that the merits of individual candidates. Because of that, he endorsed a voting strategy of “party over person.” Having to choose between two dominant parties makes prediction much easier. Each party constructs a brand from a platform of policies meant to strengthen attachment with current members and to attract newcomers.

Attachment

As social creatures, we instinctively seek attachment. Branding is a marketing strategy that promotes attachment between consumers and products or voters and political parties. The Republican Party brands itself as the party of low taxes and low regulations. It promotes larger military spending, which helps support local communities in the southern states where Republican support is strong. The Democratic Party stresses equality and fairness for all. They promote programs which assist lower income families in urban areas where housing and other monthly costs are relatively high. Both branding strategies rely on predictions of the future. Elect our candidates and the future will be better, each party says.

Religion

Religious conviction relies heavily on predictions of the future. The Christian religion evolved from its Jewish roots but stressed individual salvation in contrast to the Messianic culture of the Jewish people that predicted a group salvation. Religious and political affiliation manifests the human desire for attachment. It is understandable that one or both dominant parties would incorporate religious sentiments into their brand.

In the mid-19^th century, the Democratic Party promoted expansion of the country into the western lands occupied by Indians and held by Mexico. Expansion of land was necessary for the expansion of slavery, a cornerstone concept championed by the party. The party justified expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny, an idea that the U.S. had a divinely ordained mission to spread Christian and republican government throughout the continent (Source).

In the past several decades, the Republican Party has absorbed a diverse group of Christian conservatives and evangelicals into the fold. The party has endorsed policies that outlaw abortion and same sex marriages, supported exemption from laws that conflict with one’s religious beliefs, and the rights of religious schools.

Postdiction

The past, particularly the ancient past, is almost as hidden from us as the future. We sample our present circumstances and often invent origin stories to explain the present. We speculate on the creation and composition of the cosmos, the formation of our world, the Earth, and how what is came to be. These speculations are like predictions but they come after the fact. Perhaps we should call them postdictions.

Organized religions promote an attachment to certain origin stories, claiming a divine authority and imprimatur on the opinions, values and interests of that religion’s congregation of believers. There are many religions and religious sects but only two political parties to absorb those congregations.

History

We are a politically divided country because the framers of the Constitution glued two different countries and cultures, north and south, together. Historians note the many dichotomies and contradictions of those founding documents. Thomas Jefferson penned the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, but owned 200 slaves. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution itself contained a fugitive slave clause, recognizing and treating human beings as property like domesticated animals (Source). That same declaration grounded government in “the consent of the governed,” but excluded women, blacks, Indians and poor white men.

Although the founders valued liberty and private property, many states allowed the imprisonment of debtors. Governments protected creditor rights above the property rights of farmers. Creditors were usually from urban areas. Debtors, mostly farmers, were from rural areas. From the beginnings of our country, there was a propensity for voters to sort themselves into two interest groups, rural and urban. Because we have a “winner-take-all” election system, this naturally leads to the formation of two political parties. A proportional representation system of elections gives formal recognition to marginalized communities. In our country, minority interests must work within either the Republican or Democratic parties.

Errors

Our actions today represent our predictions of the future, but our predictions aren’t always accurate. How do we cope with the errors of our conclusions? That’s something I want to take a look at next week, and I hope to see you then.

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Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash

Innocent Investor

A helpful understanding

Camouflage

Word Warriors

Myth and Identity

Self Sculpture

Being Part of a Group

Rules and Duties

Deception and Dreamweavers

The Errors of Our Ways

Beyond Our Cave