• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    People perceive as important that which is given lots of exposure.

    I believe it’s called the “Halo effect”.

    That’s why people pay attention to, say, what movie celebrities say in subjects that have nothing to do with acting or movie making, to the point of paying much less attention to what subject specialists say than to what those celebrities say. If you thing about it, in absolutelly logical terms, the opinions of a well know movie actor on, say, poverty, have about as much value as the opinions of the local street cleaner (in fact, probably less value, as said street cleaner is likelly to actually be poor him or herself and thus know more about it) and yet people will actually pay much more attention to what said actor has to say on that subject.

    So Trump and others like them don’t even need much more airing of their actual words for this to work: the more they’re talked about the more important they will be perceived to be and hence when they do get their actual words aired the more attention people will pay to their words and even the more likely they are to trust those words (because he’s an “important” person).