Wednesday, October 09, 2019

Rubbernecking & Trump Tweets


Rubbernecking and Trump's tweets.

At an intuitive level you probably sense that these two things have something in common – but what is it?

I was reflecting on a comment by Euan Semple – about the phenomenon of ‘rubbernecking’ – and why it is that people (always other people of course) seem to find it so difficult to resist the temptation to gawp as they pass a road accident.

The answer is that that is how we are designed. Everything is encoded affectively – the fabric of our cognition and our culture alike are affective significances.

This is true at a very primitive level – for example we are ‘hard wired’ to respond to a baby’s cries – much as we might tell ourselves to ‘just ignore it’ we all know that sensation – the absolutely unavoidable sound of an infant screaming ina café or during a long flight.

And it remains true as our affective sophistication develops. Our day is full of stories of the things that matter – the remarkable, the shocking, the funny, the sensational.

And a car accident matters – something went terribly wrong, possibly people were injured, maybe this will appear on the news. It is – undoubtedly – affectively significant, and that is precisely the kind of information we are designed and trained to notice and encode.

Something similar happens with Trump tweets – for example a recent tweet in which he remarked ‘in my great and unmatched wisdom’ We want to ignore them. We know the chap is a fatuous nincompoop, but when the president of America uses the phrase ‘in my great and unmatched wisdom’ it is just so bizarre, so remarkable that even respectable intellectuals feel obliged to stop and stare, and remark on it. 

It is like watching Bertrand Russell commenting on Kim Kardashian’s revealing dress – he might imagine himself above it all, but cognition is fundamentally affective, not rational.

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