A single face is easier to hate than a concept or group.
The Goldstein Effect reflects a more general point, which is that people are especially likely to respond to an identifiable perpetrator-just as they are especially likely to respond to an identifiable victim. Joseph Stalin understood the point: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. What is true for victims has close parallels in the context of perpetrators. If a wrongdoer has a clear identity-a face and a narrative-the public is far more likely to support an aggressive response. With respect to risks of all kinds, political actors show an intuitive understanding of this point, mobilizing public reactions by giving a face to the source of the problem. Terrorism is only the most vivid example.
And it’s the same reason marketers use buyer personas, why politicians pull up “Mary Jones with her 3 jobs and 4 kids” to talk about living wage during stump speeches, and why I use individual stories to drive clients to respond to what the data say.
Everyone in close contact with Donald Trump has their soul rotted out from the inside.
It’s not exactly a secret anymore that Kellyanne thought Trump was a joke and was badmouthing him to everyone in campaign politics who would listen literally up until election night, but prolonged exposure is morally fatal even if you were once an exemplar. And she wasn’t.
The fact-checking team does not report to Roth. He’s not even in their hierarchy.
The CEC has you angry at the wrong guy. There’s no relationship between Roth and the fact checkers that’s analogous to the relationship between Trump and the CDC or Trump and Cuomo.