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To really understand our media situation it is not sufficient to follow the money, to check the owners and their affiliations, to analyse the rhetoric and arguments, and to read broadly enough to detect the black holes of non-reporting on sensitive issues. Psychology provides valuable additional perspectives. In this part I will summarise and quote at length from one single article from a five part series by Lissa Johnson. The article is quite long, so I have tried to pick the most relevant points.
This is an article of fundamental importance providing insights into what really was going on in the smear campaign against Julian Assange, and why it was quite successful.
The psychology of getting Julian Assange
Lissa Johnson writes:
... every major vulnerability in the human reality-processing system has been leveraged and exploited in order to attack trust in Wikileaks since the DoD launched its mission against the publisher in 2008.
Lissa Johnson has studied psychology and how one person influences another's beliefs about reality. She can see "the fingerprints of psychological tactics all over the smear campaign against Julian Assange".
Moreover, it is the essence of psychological operations, such as a DoD war on trust, to leverage vulnerabilities in human information processing. A military PSYOPS document issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2003, for instance, defines psychological operations as âplanned operations⊠to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviourâ of target audiences.
This manipulation is carried out through propaganda.
Vulnerabilities in human reality-processing can be conceptualised on two broad levels.
First there is a motivational level which "determines which versions of reality a person is psychologically vulnerable to accepting". Then there is a "technical" level:
Technical vulnerabilities are related to efficiency-oriented mechanisms in information processing, which prioritise speed over accuracy. Repetition, for instance, fosters fluent processing, which the brain takes as a quick and dirty indicator of reality, or truth.
Human reality perception serves many other goals than accuracy, such as needs for belonging, connection, or self-esteem.
For example, the drive for connection and belonging renders human beings prone to aligning their perception of the world with those around them. This confers inadvertently conformist leanings in reality-perception, which are readily exploited in propaganda offensives and smear campaigns.
It is important to realise that anyone can be vulnerable to these kinds of skewed perceptions, at least a large part of the time.
There are certain states of mind, and certain circumstances, that foster accuracy-oriented perception, rendering some people, and some situations, more propaganda-resistant. If you are tempted to read on to find out who and why, you may be one such person.
So, how does this work in the smear campain agains Wikileaks and Assange? Or, as Johnson puts it:
How have opinion-shapers turned reality on its head in the eyes of some, such that censorship is a bastion of democracy and free speech a menace to be overcome?
In achieving such an inversion, one challenge for propagandists has been that the smear-artists themselves possess a long history of breathtaking violence and corruption, as exposed by Wikileaks among others.
The list of examples is long and should be familiar by now. What is needed is some form of distraction. Johnson suggests that the propagandists "leverage the human impulse to justify the system".
System justification is the tendency to view your own social, political, and economic system favourably. It is a tendency to gloss over the system's flaws and to glorify status quo. People perceive the system as fair and just, even when they suffer under its consequences.
A counterintuitive finding ... is that flaws in a system typically exacerbate rather than quell system-justifying tendencies. Systemic cracks such as corruption or injustice, termed _system threat_, jeopardise the psychological sense of safety, wellbeing and meaning that a functioning system brings.
Which explains why Wikileaks' exposures of everything rotten in the system is met with less than enthusiasm. Johnson illustrates this with the flaws in US democracy exposed by Wikileaks in 2016 (remember the election rigging and out-manoeuvering of Bernie Sanders).
So as to defend against harsh realities revealed by Wikileaks (eg democracy as sham), system-justifying delusions (eg itâs all Russiaâs fault) were poised to take hold, legitimising a system exposed as unsound.
We know in hindsight how much the Russiagate fable were to distract American newsrooms â for at least four years â and despite no evidence of collusion many firmly held on to their belief. And with current tensions between US and Russia the story is only revitalised as if nothing happened.
Capitalising on self-deceptive defence of the broken status quo, Russiagate has buttressed American democracy with magical thinking, in which mostly unseen and irrelevant puerile social media posts â such as Bernie Sanders in Boxer shorts â hijacked votersâ brains, sowed racial and class division in a land of social harmony, and defiled democracy.
Were Russiagaters suffering auditory hallucinations and hearing the voices of Joseph McCarthy himself, they could scarcely emulate collective psychosis more successfully.
How convenient, then, to have this engaging story to tell night after night, instead of having to mention the climate ... uhm, the "weather", and all the misery of a society cracking into pieces.
More broadly, Wikileaksâ very role in revealing the machinations of power renders it vulnerable to system-justifying responses at every turn. The moments at which Wikileaks exposes systemic corruption and abuse are the very moments at which canny smear artists move in for the kill.
Assange and Wikileaks were cast as dangerous terrorists with blood on their hands, gratuitously targeting the poor defenceless US war machine.
When Wikileaks exposed the CIA spying on us through our iPhones and Smart TVs the CIA cast itself as a victim of Wikileaksâ espionage.
Johnson refers to research by John Jost who has studied system justification.
https://nyuscholars.nyu.edu/en/persons/john-jost
According to Jost and colleagues those most apt to system-justify are those with high needs for order, structure, certainty and control.
And that leaves out the rest of us, those of us who tolerate some mess, ambiguity, complexity, in short, anarchy. Those people you might find as engaged artists or activists. They also may be targeted by smear campaigns by way of a psychological mechanism known as "derogation of moral advocates".
According to psychological research, those who draw attention to their societyâs failings tend to be viewed negatively by the very groups they seek to enlighten and assist.
Fortunately for smear artists, this process packs a double punch. It applies not only to publishers of systemic critique such as Julian Assange and Wikileaks, but anyone who sticks their head above the parapet to defend Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
If anything, this explains the strong feelings aroused by the sight of Greta Thunberg.
Advocates for Assange "are perceived as more annoying, offensive, arrogant, selfish, self-centred, obnoxious, greedy, insulting and traitorous than other people".
In short, those less vulnerable to system-justifying processes, and more inclined to stand up for Wikileaks, are simultaneously more vulnerable to being shamed.
Then another psychological vulnerability comes into play. As individuals belonging to a group we tend to align our views with our peers. We want to "share reality" with others.
Once a system-justifying narrative has been deployed and enforced through derogation, the perception that all âright thinkingâ people agree must be imposed. This tactic exploits the human vulnerability to _shared reality_.
Accordingly, in a smear offensive such as that against Julian Assange, it is critical to foster the perception that the majority of desirable others hold derogatory views, while suppressing coverage of favourable attitudes and support. Suppressing coverage of rallies to free Assange, with international support from respected figures, is a case in point.
Preventing such realities from being shared is pivotal to smear campaigns, lest reality be tuned in unofficial directions, and populations determine reality amongst themselves. Instead, dissenters from official narratives must be made to feel isolated, and alone.
Shared reality not only unites, it also separates groups from other groups with worldviews they wish to dissassociate from.
Pairing Wikileaks supporters with the right for a leftist audience, or anti-Americans for a patriotic audience, or with misogyny for an egalitarian audience, or with âtruthersâ for any other audience, functions by tuning reality perception away from Wikileaksâ supporters, in a range of directions.
But of course the smears against Wikileaks come not from the left or the right, nor from pro- or anti-american sentiments, but from the elite. And those who share reality with elites are the ones who aspire to become part of the elite themselves, such as established media, or academia. This vulnerability, Johnson writes, is not a conscious conformity:
It involves a subconscious process by which officially anointed narratives and smears, such as those on Russiagate, Wikileaks and Assange, feel subjectively more real and true to the brain.
Johnson then discusses our inescapeable classification of the social world into the in-group and the out-group, and how this has been applied to Assange. It is well known that we are more prone to help those in the in-group, and more likely to treat members of any out-group as enemies.
In the efforts to exploit intergroup psychology for purposes of smear and censorship, Julian Assange has been paradoxically vulnerable to group-based framings by virtue of the fact that he is ânot a groupistâ, to use his words. This has made it possible to define him as an outgroup member from a range of angles. As has the fact that Wikileaks is a non-partisan media organisation, with no group-based, state-based or political ties, publishing exposĂ©s across social and group boundaries, upsetting groupists across the board.
Propaganda narratives are simple, even over-simplified when you stop and think about them. At the same time, Johnson notes, the stories are filled with confusing details. This focus on details (the wrong ones, the unimportant ones) was very much the hallmark of the way the Russiagate story was told. The method can be described as "take what is clear and make it confusing."
The point is that in psychological research, feeling bamboozled by complexity on sociopolitical issues leads to increased feelings of dependence on government. Confusion over details of current affairs has been found to foster greater trust in government authorities, avoidance of the information in question, and faith that the government can be relied upon to sort things out.
Although a few years have passed since this article appeared little has changed. The psychological mechanisms still apply, and always will. Only the targets of smear campaigns shift according to the dayly need.
The studied use of psyops and the strategy of "war against the brain" as previously discussed at the end of Part 8 of this media guide should be seen in light of Lissa Johnsons article. If cognitive science can be used for mass manipulation, being aware of how it works should dampen its efficiency.
Part eleven (internet censorship)
Part twelve (conspiratorial thinking)
Part thirteen (this one)
Part fourteen (information warfare)
The Oxymoronist Media Guide is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This part first published on February 1, 2022.