Latest In Rebuttal Shopping: Trump’s IQ

I’m playing with this idea of Facebook posting as “rebuttal shopping”. The idea is that a lot of stuff that goes viral on Facebook is posted as an implicit rebuttal to arguments that the poster feels are being levied against their position. This stuff tends to go viral on Facebook because the minute the Facebook user sees the headline they know this is something they need, an answer to a question or criticism that irks them.

Maybe the idea holds together and maybe it doesn’t. But I’ll occassionally be looking at new things that are trending on Facebook and seeing how they do or don’t fit that pattern.

Today in rebuttal shopping we have this, on Trump’s IQ:

trump

I don’t think I have to prove this fake: there is no official record of Presidential IQ scores throughout history, and of course intelligence tests didn’t become common until well into the 20th century. Outside that, we even have the card description here, which references a “think thank” that proposed this, and the weird phrase “Intelligence professors”. But if you want to click through, it is a blog post on Prntly.com that references a “report” that turns out to be someone talking on a forum.

Number of shares on this are not groundbreaking, but clearly in viral territory for something posted two days ago: 24,836 shares.

One of the comments on it, liked 59 times, seem to support the rebuttal shopping idea:

“Democrats love to talk about IQ’s. Well they won’t be talking about Trumps. They thought Obama was the smartest president ever.”

However, a lot of the other comments rant about unrelated things, so maybe comments aren’t the best result here.

This IQ issue seems to be a ongoing thing. A satirical article on Empire News last year claiming that Obama scored the lowest on an IQ test of any president in history garnered over 30,000 shares, and a chain letter hoax in the early 2000s had George W. Bush as the the lowest in history.

Where does this leave “rebuttal shopping”? I’m not sure. The new Trump fake news seems to follow the rebuttal pattern, as does the Obama story. The Bush story confirms something that wasn’t much disputed at the time, however, and looks more like shopping for confirmation than rebuttal. It certainly is not resolving any cognitive dissonance.

We’ll play with the idea a few more days and see what it brings to the fore.

 

 

6 thoughts on “Latest In Rebuttal Shopping: Trump’s IQ

  1. It makes sense that any claim resolving dissonance will likely get reshared when so many people are affected and feeling uneasy with the overall outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

    Then again, cat pictures and coupons seem to do well, too 🙂

    If you develop a web persona on Facebook, anything that can give identity and confirms your avatar’s appearance will likely be shared. (See Turkle’s “Alone Together”)

  2. We certainly do rebuttal shop.
    “The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.” Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090

  3. I remember a different Bush IQ email widely circulated in bulk address forwards, 2004 I think, claiming his IQ as one of the highest. My takeaway: polarizing candidates will be either dumbest or smartest (sometimes both) who ever fell off the back of a melon truck.

  4. In a modern day shopping website is great to get our desire requirements to find out and I’m so glad with this site on the basis of its benefit there are lot of daily life accessories and this makes it advantageous for people who choose to shop there instead of a single store. Families who decide to visit a shopping mall in the weekend or on a holiday for a family outing are because it’s a more convenient option especially because parking is provided and so on.

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