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Sharing a link to a piece on calbuzz.com, a sometimes tongue-in-cheek insider look at politics in the Golden State. If you read this article and think it is simply an attack on Fox News, you’ll have missed the larger point: When we construct our reality to conform to the beliefs we already hold, we stop living — and thinking — in the reality inhabited by others and we stew endlessly in our own narrow stereotypes uninformed by knowledge or facts. Thinking through labels simply doesn’t work.

Click the link for Leon Festinger in the calbuzz piece and read about cognitive dissonance.  And to remind us how unchanging human behavior can be, here’s a great quote, written about 90 years ago, from Pulitzer Prize award-winning journalist Walter Lippmann:

It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience, seen through our stereotypes, that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition.

Here’s the link:   why-watching-fox-news-will-in-fact-rot-your-brain