Stories of Senduro Flower: When the People Speak Up (3)

"A girl is chatting with her bestie:

Girl: I hear you broke off your engagement. What happened?

Bestie: Oh, it’s just that my feelings for him have changed.

Girl: Are you returning the ring?

Bestie: Oh, no. My feelings for the ring haven’t changed."

"In general, public opinion refers to, according to Oskamp and Schultz, the shared opinions and attitudes of large groups of people (publics) who have particular characteristics in common," Senduro went on by browsing Prambanan, UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest Hindu temple site in Indonesia and the second-largest in Southeast Asia after Angkor Wat. The first building was completed in the mid-9th century and was likely started by Rakai Pikatan and inaugurated by his successor King Lokapala or Rakai Kayuwangi. Some historians suggest that them temple probably was meant as the answer to the Buddhist Borobudur.

"Values and attitudes play a crucial role in the development of public opinion. A value is an important life-goal or societal condition desired by a person. Values are usually broad abstract concepts, such as freedom, justice, beauty, happiness, or service to others, though sometimes they are more concrete, such as money or material possessions. Values are ends rather than means—the goals people strive to reach rather than the methods that they use to get there.

Because values are a person's goals or standards in life, it is clear that individuals will have strong positive attitudes toward the values they hold. Thus, values can be viewed as very special attitude objects—they involve strongly favorable attitudes being directed toward abstract concepts concerned with one's major goals for oneself or for the world. In addition, values are very important and central in a person's whole system of attitudes and beliefs—that is, they are resistant to change, and they influence many other beliefs and attitudes. For instance, if you have a key value of piety, it will influence your views about many religious concepts and issues, as well as your attitudes toward national leaders, friends, activities, and so on. On the other hand, if patriotism is your main value, you will favor different activities and leaders: You will wave the flag, go to parades, and applaud patriotic speeches.

Values are considered to be a basic aspect of individuals’ belief systems and central in the culture of a given social group and in a given country. People have values they want to emphasize in their own lives (self-centered) but also values they would emphasize in their social environment (societal-centered). This differentiation can be expanded to different domains where we can talk about family values, work values, bureaucratic values, political values, and others. Values may be intra-personal or inter-personal in focus. Some values may relate to the individual’s own life, while others relate to society or even the political sphere. These latter values can then be considered as political values. New Politics values can be conceptualized along three different dimensions: The value conflict between environmental versus economic growth values is firmly rooted in the public mind, and in many West European countries conflicts over environmental values seem to be the most manifest expression of the 'New Politics' conflict.

What then about attitude? Originally the term 'attitude' referred to a person's bodily position or posture, and it is still sometimes used in this way—for instance, 'He sat slumped in an attitude of dejection.' In social science, however, the term has come to mean a 'posture of the mind,' rather than of the body. The central feature of most definitions of attitude is the idea of readiness for response. That is, an attitude is not behavior, not something that a person does; rather it is a preparation for behavior, a predisposition to respond in a particular way to the attitude object. The term attitude object is used to include things, people, places, ideas, actions, or situations, either singular or plural. For instance, it could be a group of people (e.g., teenagers), an inanimate object (e.g., the city park), an action (e.g., eating meatballs), an abstract concept (e.g., civil rights), or an idea linking several concepts (e.g., rights of teenagers to eat meatballs in the city park).

An attitude is a single entity but it has three aspects or components: affective, behavioral, and cognitive. An affective (emotional) component refers to the feelings and emotions one has toward the object. For instance, 'Riding a motorcycle is fun.'

A behavioral component, consisting of one's action tendencies toward the object. For example, 'I ride motorcycles every chance I get.'

A cognitive component, consists of the ideas and beliefs that one has about the attitude object. For example, 'Riding a motorcycle instead of a car saves gas.'

Habits can be easily distinguished from attitudes. They are frequently-repeated patterns of behavior, whereas attitudes are not behavior per se, though they may be shown in behavioral responses. Habits are usually quite automatic and standardized in their manner of performance, but they require the presence of the appropriate stimulus object in order to occur (e.g., saying 'sir' to a superior officer). By contrast, attitudes may be expressed in many different ways, and even in the absence of the stimulus object. Like most attitudes, habits are learned through experience; but, unlike them, they are frequently nonevaluative in nature.

Opinion is an important concept and one closely related to the concept of attitude. Sometimes the two terms have been used synonymously, however, more often, distinctions have been made between attitudes and opinions. Opinions are equivalent to beliefs—quite often, they are evaluative beliefs—that is, beliefs that state a value judgment about an object. Beliefs are statements indicating a person's subjective probability that an object has a particular characteristic.

Imagine meeting someone for the first time. When you first set eyes on her, you would recognize her as being a person and a woman, and you would note certain facts about her—perhaps her height, build, and hair color, or the type of clothes she is wearing. You may also infer other facts about her—estimate her age and activities from her behavior, or guess where she grew up from her accent. In addition, you will probably make other, more subjective judgments about her—her personality, interests, attractiveness, intelligence, friendliness, and so on. Some of your judgments may be influenced by stereotypes that you already hold about different categories of people—about Southerners, overweight people, athletic types, or socialites. Even though you have only just met her, you will already have developed a set of expectations and opinions about her.

All of these types of perception and judgment fall in the realm of social cognition. Social cognition refers to our thought processes about other people, ourselves, and social situations—that is, how we understand and make sense of social stimuli. Social cognition includes the ways in which people gather social information, organize it, and interpret it. It is intimately related to the topic of attitudes, for social perceptions, beliefs, and attributions comprise the cognitive components on which attitudes are based.

Perception of people is unlike perception of objects. We perceive people (and sometimes animals, but not inanimate objects) as causal agents. They do certain things, and they have various intentions and personal traits, whereas objects are not perceived as having intrinsic causal efficacy, inten­tions, or traits.

People use convenient shortcuts in their thoughts and decisions, one of the most common of these shortcuts is the use of stereotypes. The term stereotype has become widely used, it simply as a mental image or generalized set of beliefs that a person holds about most members of a particular social group. People often develop stereotypes about their own groups as well as about outgroups that they do not belong to. Stereotypes develop and persist because they are useful. They reduce the tremendous complexity of the world around us into a few simple guide­ lines, which we can use in our everyday thoughts and decisions. If we 'know' that 'all politicians are crooked,' we can dismiss government scandals without having to think very hard about what should be done to prevent or control them. Similarly, if we believe that 'women are irrational,' we won't hire one to be our lawyer. Unfortunately, however, the simpler and more convenient the stereotype, the more likely it is to be inaccurate, at least in part.

Like other beliefs and attitudes, a person's stereotypes are often not the product of personal experience with the group in question. They may also derive largely, or entirely, from one or more of among others: Explicit teaching, particularly when children are young, they are frequently given explicit stereotypic information by their parents as they are taught about life ('kitties are nice,' 'damn politicians,' 'dirty commies,' 'honest cops,' or 'police brutality'). Later on, peers and teachers may also pass on stereotypes directly.

Incidental learning, particularly from the mass media. This is typically a process of associative learning, in which members of a social group are repeatedly paired with particular personal characteristics. For instance, time after time, images in old movies have shown blacks as lazy or stupid or the Arabs or muslims are terrotists.

How much do you know about Public Affairs? As an educated person, learning is a part of your life. You are used to taking in informa­ tion every day, discussing it, and (we may hope) using it in your regular activities. Most of your friends are probably also educated individuals with an interest in current affairs. There are a few facts that are known to almost everyone. One kind of information that is widely held is exposure to terms and issues, as contrasted with knowledge about them. In answering questions of this type respondents merely have to say, 'Yes, I've heard of that,' rather than giving correct information about the topic. Consequently, percentages of people 'knowing' about the topic are usually much higher than for questions which require correct information in the answer. Rather than merely exposure to terms or issues, one category of information which is widely known is the names of the very top level of national leaders.

Because an attitude is a predisposition to respond favorably or unfavorably toward a given object (person, idea, etc.), you can't have an attitude until you have some feeling about the object in question, and feelings are usually based on at least some fragmentary information. Thus an attitude may be formed if your early experience with an object elicits a favorable or unfavorable feeling about it. However, oftentimes early experience and infor­ mation concerning an object may not be accompanied by evaluative feelings, and if so, no attitude would yet exist toward the object.

There is a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts, and this situation known as Post-Truth. Dahlan Iskan, former CEO of Jawa Pos Group, mentions it as the satirical 'New Truth'.

The phenomenon of 'post-truth', says Lee C. McIntyre, rocketed to public attention in November 2016, when the Oxford Dictionaries named it 2016’s word of the year. After seeing a 2,000 percent spike in usage over 2015, the choice seemed obvious. Among the other contenders on the shortlist were 'alt-right' and 'Brexiteer,' highlighting the political context of the year’s selection. As a catch-all phrase, 'post- truth' seemed to capture the times. Given the obfuscation of facts, abandonment of evidential standards in reasoning, and outright lying that marked 2016’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election, many were aghast.

After 2016 United States presidential election, Trump claimed that he had actually won the popular vote (which Hillary Clinton had taken by nearly 3 million votes), if one deducted the millions of people who had voted illegally. And he doubled down on his claim that—despite the consensus of seventeen American intelligence agencies—the Russians had not hacked the American election. One of his handlers seemed to embrace the chaos by arguing that 'there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.'

After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, Trump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high (when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low). The latter seems particularly egregious because it picks up on an earlier fib that Trump had told at the Republican convention, while searching for a way to push the idea that crime was on the rise.

One might imagine a no less chilling exchange in the basement of the Ministry of Love in the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Indeed, some now worry that we are well on our way to fulfilling that dark vision, where truth is the first casualty in the establishment of the authoritarian state.

The Oxford Dictionaries define 'post-truth' as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.' In this, they underline that the prefix 'post' is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are 'past' truth in a temporal sense (as in 'postwar') but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed— that it is irrelevant. These are fighting words to many philosophers, but it is worth noting that this is much more than an academic dispute. In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term 'truthiness' (defined as being persuaded by whether something feels true, even if it is not necessarily backed up by the facts) in response to George W. Bush’s excesses in relying on his 'gut' for big decisions—such as the nomination of Harriet Miers for the US Supreme Court or going to war in Iraq without adequate proof of weapons of mass destruction. When the term was coined, 'truthiness' was treated as a big joke, but people aren’t laughing anymore.

With the largely fact-free campaign over Brexit in Great Britain—where hundreds of buses advertised the bogus statistic that the UK was sending 350 million euros a week to the EU—and the growing use of disinformation campaigns by politicians against their own people in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey, many see post-truth as part of a growing international trend where some feel emboldened to try to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than the other way around. This is not necessarily a campaign to say that facts do not matter, but instead a conviction that facts can always be shaded, selected, and presented within a political context that favors one interpretation of truth over another. Perhaps this is what Trump’s chief surrogate, Kellyanne Conway, meant when she said that press secretary Sean Spicer had intended to present 'alternative facts' regarding the size of the crowd at the inauguration, when Trump seemed miffed by official US Park Service photos showing thousands of empty seats.

So is post-truth just about lying, then? Is it mere political spin? Not precisely, says McIntyre. As presented in current debate, the word 'post-truth' is irreducibly normative. It is an expression of concern by those who care about the concept of truth and feel that it is under attack. But what about those who feel that they are merely trying to tell the 'other side of the story' on controversial topics? That there really is a case to be made for alternative facts? The idea of a single objective truth has never been free from controversy.

We'll continue this 'post-truth' topic in the next session. Bi 'idhnillah."

Senduro then sang,

I wish I could escape

I don't wanna fake it

Wish I could erase it

Make your heart believe

But I'm a bad liar *)

Citations & References:

- Stuart Oskamp & P. Wesley Schultz, Attitudes & Opinions, 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

- Justin Fisher, Edward Fieldhouse, Mark N. Franklin, Rachel Gibson, Marta Cantijoch & Christopher Wlezien (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion, 2018, Routledge

- Lee C. McIntyre, Post-Truth, 2018, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

*) "Bad Liar" written by Aja Volkman, Benjamin Arthur McKee, Daniel Coulter Reynolds, Daniel James Platzman, Daniel Wayne Sermon & Jorgen Michael Odegard

[Episode 4]

[Episode 2]

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