Chapter 5 explores the common stereotype that LGBTQ+ people flaunt their sexuality, or behave sexually inappropriate in ways that heterosexual and cisgender people do not. This stereotype undergirds the rationale for recent anti-LGBTQ+ bills such as Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill and anti-transgender legislation which is part of the backlash against the progress of queer rights in the early 2000s. Various shortcuts in thinking that contribute to the reckless and false belief that queer people flaunt their sexuality are discussed. Lesbian and gay parenting and children of queer parents is discussed as well. Heterosexual privilege is examined. The empirical work on child sexual abuse is also considered. The chapter concludes with strategies to reduce heterosexism and homophobia.

In order to understand the Romantic fascination with prophets, we begin with an influential eighteenth-century figure poised on the cusp of neoclassicism and Romanticism: the English biblical scholar Robert Lowth – also a medieval historian, a shrewd politician, and the author of a bestselling English grammar handbook, who was destined to become the Bishop of London. Lowth is a key figure in the creation of the modern “poetics of prophecy.” Taking an approach which would become known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as “the Bible as literature,” Lowth initiated and represents an important new way of regarding the Bible aesthetically, one which we encounter through his construction of Isaiah as a strong prophet. Yet examining the fissures in Lowth’s ideal Isaiah – who he reads as a perfect combination of elegance and sublimity – can also help us think more critically about the literary study of the Bible.

This chapter considers how Fantasy is rooted in language’s ability to describe things that do not exist, arguing that this same ability is crucial for constructing the value systems that allow human cultures to operate. In intervening in conversations about meaningfulness and identity, Fantasy plays with heady stuff, but by explicitly parading its impossibility, it creates productive and revealing abstractions that can both playfully and critically interrogate received norms and languages of power. Fantasies ask whether the world we have made through language is the one we want, holding open imaginative spaces for alternatives that are by turns utopian, dystopian, revealingly similar and radically different. Key works discussed in this chapter include Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Plato’s Republic, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.

What happened when oracular consultations “failed”? Modern scholarship tends to emphasize how ancient Greek oracular consultation provided clarity and a sense of control for its clients. In contrast, myriad tales about oracles from across ancient literature tell of hopes raised and dashed, mortals who misunderstand, and oracles that mislead. This essay suggests that we might productively explore these stories as responses to an important aspect of ancient lived experience: specifically, when the events that an oracle had foretold did not occur. Focusing on oracles concerned with the foundations of settlements, this essay begins by examining how scholars have previously explained such apparent oracular failures by appealing to a combination of “structural blocks to falsifiability” (e.g., mortal misunderstanding) and ancient piety. Drawing on psychological theories and anthropological studies of failed prophecy, this essay offers an alternative account of the ways in which failed oracular pronouncements were explored, explained, and managed by those who received them. Stories of oracular failure reveal how creatively cultural resources – from storytelling to cult foundation – were employed to preserve the core concepts of communities and their cultures.

In this chapter we summarize how economists conceptualize beliefs. Moving both backward and forward in time, we review the way that mainstream economics currently deals with beliefs, as well as, briefly, the history of economists’ thinking about beliefs. Most importantly, we introduce the reader to a recent, transformational movement in economics that focuses on belief-based utility. This approach challenges the standard economic assumption that beliefs are only an input to decision making and examines implications of the intuitive idea that people derive pleasure and pain directly from their beliefs. We also address the question of when and why people care about what other people believe. We close with a discussion of the implications of these insights for contemporary social issues such as political polarization and fake news.

Problems and potential solutions do not speak to themselves: people recognize them and size them up in an active process of cognition. The open-ended nature of problem-solving activities requires that our minds can avoid being paralyzed by several infinite regress problems that conventional economics overlooks. This chapter explores how people allocate their attention between implementing solutions to problems and scanning for new problems and how they judge whether incoming information signifies a problem. It draws parallels with how scientists and object recognition technologies operate via systems of rules, and it presents an original synthesis of Hayek’s theory of the mind (a forerunner to modern theories of brain plasticity), Kelly’s personal construct psychology, Koestler’s work on creativity, Simon’s theory of satisficing and the dual-system view of thinking, and of the role of associative memory processes suggested by Kahneman. The analysis explains how “what comes to mind” is determined as we try to find matches between incoming stimuli and templates from our memories and how we resolve cognitive dissonance between what we expect and what initially seems to be going on.

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.

Chapter 10 dissects Kevin Spacey’s YouTube video posted on Christmas eve in 2018 to defend himself against sexual assault accusations. It shows how dangerous the second-person pronoun can be when it is used to numb ‘cognitive vigilance’ all the more so as the actor fakes to embody his House of Cards character (Netflix 2013–2018) and charmingly threaten the audience into trusting him by virtue of their past history. Spacey asserts he knows what his audience wants: they want him back. In the YouTube clip, the second-person pronoun loses its ethical bond-creating force, turning instead the viewer into a hostage to the character/actor’s perception. This chapter offers a fine-grained analysis of the video, highlighting where Spacey breaks the fictional contract by offering a show outside the show that is authorised by no ‘collective sender’, authoring himself so to speak and forcing the audience to adopt a ‘third consciousness’ as both fans and citizens. The doubly deictic ‘I’ he uses, ambiguously superimposing references to himself as a fictional character (Frank Underwood in the political series) and as a citizen (in the real world) indeed problematises response from the viewers.

Theories of democracy all insist on some basic conditions in order for citizens to hold their elected officials accountable. One of the first ones to mention is an openness to new information about the world that might influence beliefs about a politician’s performance, character, intelligence and the like. In recent decades, BPS has discovered that this basic assumption is regularly violated. Citizens and elites often resist new and credible information in favor of their existing beliefs and viewpoints even when they would greatly benefit from updating those stands. In this chapter, we review a related set of theories captured under the umbrella of motivated reasoning that attempts to understand why, exploring the role of cognitive dissonance, self-esteem, and group identity in shaping individuals’ goals when processing information. While the field has no concrete answers yet, we at least have begun to estimate the often dire consequences of arguing from our existing attitudes to our perceptions of the world – top-down processing – instead of the other way around.

Chapter 8 fills in the last piece of the theoretical story of this book. It looks at the various normative tensions and governance gaps in contemporary state sovereignty and asks how sovereignty can be maintained as a set of broadly recognized norms, rather than simply as rights claims, in the face of those tensions. It introduces the idea of normative dissonance and connects this idea to arguments from political psychology about the cognitive mechanisms people use to navigate dissonant information and beliefs. It runs the idea past normative tensions in questions both of what sovereign property rights are and of who should hold those rights. This introduction of political psychology into the story of the sovereignty cartel provides a mechanism for thinking about state sovereignty as a system that cannot be reduced to a rational set of rules or to a simple discussion of interests, but that reconstitutes itself nonetheless. It is in this sense like any other social system; it does not make coherent sense, but it functions, so we make what sense of it that we can.

Chapter 7 deals with the most pressing and most prominent social influence in our time, persuasion. The modality of persuasion is oft considered as the epitome of social influence processes with a long past of rhetoric analysis, and a short history of experimental demonstration of effects arising from speaker, message or audience characteristics. The chapter starts by reviewing the moderator variables of persuasion initiated by the Yale Programme. This is followed by considering mainstream dual-process theories that investigated fast or slow, hot or cold cognitive processes resulting in successful persuasion. Following this mainstream overture, the chapter reviews studies of forced and non-forced compliance that precipitate conviction by cognitive dissonance. The chapter ends with reviewing lay epistemic theory and the unimodal of persuasion, making the case for argumentation processes that form attitudes and the appraisal of behavioural inclinations beyond the exercise of mere message tactics of a box of tricks. This leads us to consider the necessary insights into the common ground and the moral community of speaker and audience as a precondition of successful persuasion.

Every clinician encounters patients compromised by marijuana, whether fully addicted or not and whether recognized by the individual or not. While adult heavy users usually seek help themselves (often in response to a partner’s pressure or for reasons seemingly unrelated to marijuana use), the parents of heavy adolescent users usually make the initial contact. The Cannabis Youth Treatment Study (CYT) demonstrated that several manualized brief treatment protocols have similar, but limited, success treating adolescents and recommended greater focus on long term monitoring and care. Although CYT established an evidence base for treatment, it was unable to evaluate the skill of individual therapists to engage patients and develop mutual ground for discussion. A motivational interviewing (MI) framework is presented emphasizing engagement and nonjudgmental exploration of patients’ experience and attachment to marijuana. The clinician’s curiosity about each individual’s favorite subjective experiences when high is used to discuss explanations for marijuana’s effects. Scientific information paves the way for introducing the concept of downregulation and potential negative side effects that create cognitive dissonance. The goal is to avoid evoking defensiveness and to help patients struggle with their own internal doubts about marijuana’s ability to help reach their life goals.

Clinicians who hope to modify patients’ unhealthy use of marijuana face potential frustration and difficulty trying to engage people in meaningful dialogue. The stages of change outlined by Prochaska and Di Clemente provide a useful guide for understanding how to initiate conversation with someone addicted to marijuana, whether they are in the precontemplation, contemplation, preparation (for change), action or maintenance stage. Utilizing the stages of change to guide the approach to promoting behavioral change introduces clinicians to one of the most essential principles of motivational interviewing (MI), often described as “meeting patients where they are”. Developed by Miller and Rollnick, MI shifts the focus away from resistance and denial in order to focus instead on ambivalence and moves clinicians away from confrontation and toward a more collaborative approach that is less likely to stimulate a patient’s defenses. Engagement through empathy for patients’ suffering enables clinicians to increase the cognitive dissonance between their behavior and their goals. Ultimately, the practice of motivational interviewing is an art, and not merely a set of techniques, that requires clinicians to explore their fundamental attitudes toward addiction.