Smith & Engel showed 120 men a photo of a car. For half the subjects, the photograph showed only the car, whereas for the other subjects a sexually objectified woman features. After examining the picture, participants were asked to evaluate the car on several dimensions.
Those who saw the car with the attractive female next to it rated the car as significantly more appealing & better designed. They also estimated it to be more expensive & faster.
When the authors later asked a subset of the participants of their ratings had been influenced by the presence of the model, 22 out of 23 denied it.
One respondent claimed, “I don’t let anything but the thing itself influence my judgments. The other is just #propaganda.”
Another commented, “I never let myself be blinded by advertising; the car itself is what counts.”
Thus, although the model’s presence clearly altered the participants’ ratings of the car, virtually none believed that he had been affected.
Politicians often take advantage of this unconscious transference of emotions to influence how we vote.
Political ads & messages often prominently feature the national flag, in the belief that the positive emotions aroused by the flag will be transferred to the candidate. 🇬🇧
Ron Hassin studied the voting intentions of American voters in the 2008 Presidential election involving John McCain & Barack Obama.
In a pilot study, the authors asked people whether their voting would be influenced by the presence of a flag.
90% said no. In the main experiment, participants first filled in a questionnaire about their voting intentions. For one group, a small American flag was located in the top left corner of the questionnaire; the control group filled in the same questionnaire, but without the flag.
Then, in the week after the election, the participants were contacted again & asked for which candidate they had voted. 83% in the control group reported voting for Obama, but only 73% of those exposed to the flag did.
A single exposure to the flag as they thought about their views appears to be sufficient to alter how they later voted.
Effects were still apparent when interviewed 8 months later: those who had seen the flag were now significantly more conservative than those who had not.
As in the Smith & Engel study, almost no one in the pilot study believed their views could be altered by seeing the flag, but a single exposure was enough to
change how they voted.
This helps us understand why there are flags everywhere, & why there's been a lurch to the Right.
The horror.
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Just two opinion polling companies have put Reform UK on 20% or more: People Polling (owned by Legatum Snr Fellow Matt Goodwin) & Whitestone Insight (CEO Andrew Hawkins).
The links to Reform UK, the Evangelical Christian Right & fossil fuel interests are concerning.
On 18 June, a poll commissioned by GB "News" (co-owned by Legatum), conducted by Snr Fellow at Legatum Matt Goodwin, put Reform on 24%
The average of all polls since is just 16%.
Only two other outlier polls have put Reform on 20% or more - both conducted by Whitestone Insight.
Before revealing the connections between the two outlier polls & Reform UK & fossil fuel interests, some important context.
In 1997, all the polls correctly predicted Blair’s landslide. That most polls significantly overstated the size of his victory passed virtually unnoticed.
Nowhere in the world have private equity firms found a more welcoming playground than in the UK: the volumes of buyouts have over the past two decades weighed more in the overall economy than in any other advanced market, including the US.
Private equity firms have snapped up high street names from grocers Asda and Morrisons to sandwich chain Pret A Manger, and invested in sectors ranging from insurance to nursing homes and infrastructure.
Now their record, and relatively lower taxation, are once again coming under heightened scrutiny ahead of the election. Labour wants to increase taxes on the performance fees that fund managers receive from asset sales, so these 'dealmakers' may be tempted to relocate elsewhere.
Why did they hold a joint event with barking Clare Fox's Battle of Ideas on “Indoctrination in Education” with barking Frank Furedi of Spiked Online as a speaker?
Britain is NOT America. Not yet.
The term 'Judeo-Christian' became widely used in the US during the Cold War to suggest a unified American identity opposed to communism.
The “Judeo-Christian tradition” was a political invention: an ecumenical marketing meme for combating godless commies.
The term 'Judeo-Christian' is now widely & misleadingly mobilised by the far-right to divide people, mainly by demonising 'Others' (especially Muslims).
"My beliefs are based on a Judeo-Christian worldview that’s thousands of years old" - Miriam Cates.
Danny, a leading expert on housing, health, employment, education & poverty, has published with colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to UK social inequalities, & several hundred journal papers - which is probably why he's so rarely on TV.
Middle England has been hit hard by the #costoflivingcrisis. Even people doing comparatively well are struggling.
Across Britain, opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Pre-COVID, life expectancy dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.
The hateful anonymous @X account @benonwine constantly tweets out divisive, inflammatory far-right pro-Farage tweets.
Because it's impossible to find out who is behind the grotesque account, we cannot know who, or what, is behind it. It's the same for @UKUpdates_co_uk.
Now that all the main parties have published their manifestos, rather than actually read them, the overwhelming majority of voters will rely on (almost invariably partisan) third-party accounts to summarise and/or interpret them.
But how accurate & reliable is their analysis?
In 2019, in 'The explosion of the public sphere', Dr Martin Moore (Centre for the Study of Media Communication & Power at Kings College) & Dr Gordon Ramsay (University of Westminster) outlined recent developments in our insufficiently regulated UK media.
A research paper from the University of Greenwich, 'The case for a progressive annual #WealthTax in the UK' (updated 12th June 2024), analyses the revenue potential of a progressive annual net wealth tax on the top 1% in the UK...
A progressive net wealth tax is a tax on the stock of net wealth (assets minus liabilities), that is designed to raise revenues primarily from only the very wealthiest individuals, primarily to fund public & other essential services, which benefit *everyone*.
#TaxTheRich
The authors present a baseline progressive net wealth tax that only taxes the top 1% wealthiest individuals. Individuals with net wealth above £2.2M (the top 1%) are taxed at a marginal rate of 1%; above £3.6M (the top 0.5%) at 2%, & above £11.2M (the top 0.1%) at 4%.
#TaxTheRich