""Republicans and Democrats have both been very busy reducing dissonance over the Iraq decision," said Tavris, an independent researcher who works in Los Angeles. "The Republicans who were most in support of the war continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found and al-Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. They reduce their dissonance by rejecting evidence they were wrong."
"Half of all Democrats supported the war," she added. "They have reduced dissonance by conveniently forgetting they once supported the war. . . . That is the way memory works and the way the brain works. We ignore, forget or dismiss information that suggests we might be wrong. We rewrite our memories to confirm what we believe."
Aronson, who works at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said that while self-justification is a universal human trait -- and in some cases quite helpful for retaining our sanity -- the Bush administration had taken the trait to such an extreme that it prompted the two researchers to write a book about the phenomenon.
Aronson said the bias toward self-justification explains the administration's shifting rationale for the Iraq war and why Bush could not have allowed Libby to go to prison: "If Scooter Libby, working with the blessing of the vice president, lied about what he did in order to protect higher-ups, he is a good guy, he is loyal. It is an exquisite example of self-justification because the good guys are defined as those who are loyal to the cause even if the cause is wrong."
For Bush to have allowed Libby to go to jail, he would have had to live with the idea that someone whom he thought was a good and loyal soldier was being punished for being a good and loyal soldier -- a fairly extreme form of cognitive dissonance. The only way to keep such cognitive dissonance at bay, the psychologists said, was for Bush to see Libby's prison sentence as overly harsh and do away with it altogether, even though Bush, both as president and governor of Texas, has long prided himself on refusing clemency to felons." Wapo
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I run into these folks often. They often believe that the WMD are in the bottom of an Iraqi lake. It is clearly impossible that they could have been parties to such stupidity. pl
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/08/AR2007070800742.html
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