This is what Trump voters said when asked to compare his inauguration crowd with Obama's

[DonViejo]

By Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks January 25 at 6:00 AM

-snip-

On Sunday and Monday, we surveyed 1,388 American adults. We showed half of them a crowd picture from each inauguration (see below) and asked which was from Trump’s inauguration and which was from Obama’s.

If the past is any guide, we would expect that Trump supporters would be more likely to claim that the picture with the larger crowd was the one from Trump’s inauguration, as doing so would express and reinforce their support for him. Further, as some respondents had never seen these photos, uncertainty regarding the answer would likely lead them to choose the photograph that would be most in line with their partisan loyalties.

For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?” Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration.

Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims?

Yes.

The figure below shows the percentage of people who gave the wrong answer to each question. In both cases, people who said that they had voted for Trump in 2016 were significantly more likely to answer the questions wrong than those who voted for Clinton or those who said they did not vote at all.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/25/we-asked-people-which-inauguration-crowd-was-bigger-heres-what-they-said/?utm_term=.3c6df22ff669&wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1

[dalton99a]

1. Good ol' cognitive dissonance.

[Cha]

2. They're just like him.. stupid as a sack of shit

[PJMcK]

3. You're exactly right, Cha

The beauty of proper scientific polling is its accuracy. A representative sample of 1200 people is analogous to 120 million people voting. In other words, half of our nation is stupid.

It absolutely eludes me how anyone could vote for Donald Trump. I can understand how someone could vote for a Republican but Mr. Trump?! It requires a cognitive disconnect to think anything positive about the man.

Of course, the problem with stupid people is that they don't know they're stupid. That's what the Washington Post article shows me. It's real-life proof of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

[IronLionZion]

6. Smart people are filled with doubt

while stupid people are very confident

[mopinko]

4. terrifying.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. RW Authoritiarians & Followers way more likely to seek confirmation. Scientists seek contradiction

The flip side is that RWA and RWAF ignore contradictions that go against their beliefs. They decide first and then seek confirmation while ignoring contradictory evidence.

The WaPo data show that Democrats, progressives, and liberals are much more reality based.

[MrScorpio]

7. There are four lights.

FDT.

[Mariana]

8. So do they really believe what they say

or are they simply lying? I think they're lying.

Listening to my Faux-addicted parents and their Faux-addicted friends griping about President Obama, I got the very strong feeling that NONE of them believed what they were saying. They didn't believe Obama was a Muslim, they didn't believe he was born in Kenya, they didn't believe he was a communist, they didn't believe their guns would be confiscated, they didn't believe in death panels, etc. etc. etc. Still, they sat around a table and said all those things over and over again.

So why do they do this? It's just so fucking weird.

[TheFrenchRazor]

10. i think it's a way of establishing membership in their preferred group. nt

[JI7]

11. but i'm sure they all agreed they don't like black people

and other minorities

[Mariana]

14. That is the one thing they never said.

Not one time did any of them ever mention his race (in my presence, at least), but of course that is why they hate him so.

[NewJeffCT]

13. I'm not so sure

I knew a guy that was pretty liberal on social issues, but always voted for Republicans because he was a gun nut and really did believe that Democrats wanted to take his guns.

[TheFrenchRazor]

9. hey, we create our own reality! they live in a world where a lie repeated 3 times becomes truth. nt

[Friend or Foe]

12. The man was prescient

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984