Stephen Colbert, Scientific Pioneer

The Huffington Post:

In my last post here, I explored what I called the science of “truthiness”: How we can come to understand the denial of science, on issues like global warming, by examining the underlying psychology of political conservatism itself.

But I must confess that in that item, I was relying on a fairly clichéd understanding of the word “truthiness.” Since it was first coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, the term has taken on a massive life of its own — coming to mean, in its broadest sense, the problem of people making up their own reality, one just “truthy” enough that they actually believe it.

Frankly, though, most of us only have a “truthy” sense of what “truthiness” actually meant in its original formulation.

That’s why, when I went back and re-watched the original Colbert truthiness segment, I was so stunned. After a year spent researching the psychology of the right for my book The Republican Brain, Colbert’s words took on dramatic new meaning for me. Frankly, it now seems to me that in some ways, Colbert was ahead of the science on this matter — anticipating much of what we are only now coming to know.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post