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Remember Barney Frank telling a lunatic right-winger who was holding up an image of President Obama in Nazi gear that talking to her was like talking to his dining room table?  Well, here’s the psychology behind Frank’s statement.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

Hoffman describes another psychological phenomenon which I believe is commonly found in the right, lunatic fringe or otherwise.

“We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,’” says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). “For these voters,” says Hoffman, “the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.”

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

After reading the above, anyone following the health care debate would have to come to the conclusion that a good 90% of Republicans in Congress suffer from cognitive dissonance.  I imagine the other 10% are just liars.  Don’t know.  But hey, what about the whackos attending the town hall meetings? What’s the story with these people?

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let’s remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he’s leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama’s health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors’ bank accounts?

Obama’s opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on “confirmation” that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

Most of us are already aware that birthers, teabaggers and Bush apologists, to name a few, are first class wingnuts but it’s kinda nice to be able to give their mental condition a highfalutin sounding medical term .  Very cool I think to be able to look at one of these people directly in the eyes and say, “Hey bud, I think you might be suffering from inferred justification.  You might want to get that looked at before it develops into something more serious, like cognitive dissonance perhaps.”

In any case, it’s reassuring knowing that psychologists are studying this mental disorder.  Also, it helps to absolve us from any guilt associated with having to call wingnuts wingnuts repeatedly.

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