The War on What You Saw: The Psychology of Gaslighting at Scale
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about why authoritarian regimes lie even when the truth is on video and what that does psychologically to the people watching. This is part two of American authoritarianism. Last time, we looked at moral exclusion and the psychology of expanding violence.
Leslie Poston:Today, we're examining a different mechanism, the deliberate obvious lie. One of the stranger features of the current moment is watching officials describe events that flatly contradict available footage. Renee Goode, we're told, viciously ran over an agent, but multiple angles of video show her car turning away from the agent peacefully. Alex Preti, we're told, was a domestic terrorist who intended to massacre law enforcement. But, again, multiple videos show him holding a phone, helping someone up, being tackled and shot while surrounded by agents who had already disarmed him.
Leslie Poston:The gap between the official story and observable reality isn't subtle. Anyone can watch the footage and see the discrepancy over and over again from multiple angles. So why lie when the lie is so easily disproven? This seems like a strategic mistake, but the psychology suggests it's not a mistake at all. The function of an obvious lie is different from the function of a convincing lie, and understanding that difference matters for understanding what we're living through right now.
Leslie Poston:Hannah Arendt, writing about totalitarian movements in the mid twentieth century, made an observation that's become uncomfortably relevant. The point of propaganda isn't always persuasion. Sometimes the point of propaganda is domination. When a regime asserts something that contradicts what people can see with their own eyes, they're not trying to change anyone's mind about the facts. They're trying to demonstrate that facts are irrelevant, and reality is whatever they say it is.
Leslie Poston:This reframes the question. Instead of asking, why would they lie so obviously, we can ask, what does this obvious lie accomplish? Research suggests several answers. First, it sorts the population. Some people will genuinely believe the official account no matter what, especially if they're predisposed to trust authority or distrust the people being harmed.
Leslie Poston:Some will know that the lie is false but repeated anyway because alignment with power feels safer to them than dissent. Some will become confused, unsure what to think, and retreat from engagement altogether. You might say they're protecting their peace, quote. And some will reject the lie clearly and vocally. Each of these responses is useful information for a regime interested in identifying who can be relied upon and who might cause problems.
Leslie Poston:Second, the obvious lie degrades shared reality. Research on disinformation ecosystems at Harvard found that flooding an information environment with contested claims doesn't just spread specific falsehoods it undermines the baseline assumption that we can observe the same events, and think through what they mean together. When every fact becomes arguable, collective action becomes difficult. You can't organize around shared grievances if you can't agree on what happened. Third and perhaps most importantly, the obvious lie forces a choice.
Leslie Poston:You have to decide what to do with the dissonance between what you know you saw and what you're being told. And each option has psychological costs, and whoever's in power benefits from most of them. As a concept has moved from a 1944 film about domestic abuse into widespread usage. But most discussions focus on interpersonal dynamics, one person systematically undermining another person's perception of reality. What we're dealing with now operates at an entirely different scale.
Leslie Poston:Sociologist Paige Sweet's research examines gaslighting as a structural phenomenon, not just an individual one. When institutions deny the experiences of the people they harm, they create what she calls institutional gaslighting. The pattern is familiar to anyone who's tried to report harassment, discrimination, or abuse through official channels. You're told that what you experienced didn't happen, or it didn't happen the way you remember, or it wasn't as bad as you're making it sound, or you're misinterpreting, or you're too sensitive. The effect of this is to make people doubt their own perception rather than question the institution.
Leslie Poston:Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance, the study of how not knowing is actively produced and maintained. White ignorance, in Mill's framework, isn't just the absence of knowledge. It's a cultivated inability to perceive what's right in front of you structured by racial position. The people who don't see police violence, who are shocked when ICE kills citizens, or who find each new death surprising, are not lacking information they are participating in a socially sustained practice of not knowing. Christy Dodson's work on epistemic violence describes what happens on the other side of this dynamic.
Leslie Poston:When audiences consistently fail to recognize certain speakers as credible knowers, those speakers eventually stop testifying. Dotson calls this testimonial smothering, the self censorship that comes from knowing your account will be dismissed, distorted, or used against you. Communities that have been telling anyone who would listen that immigration enforcement is violent, that detention kills people, and that we could all see this coming have been smothered for years. This sudden attention when white citizens die isn't new information entering the system. It's the same information finally being heard by people whose ignorance had been carefully maintained.
Leslie Poston:Racist gaslighting applies this specifically to the denial of racism. When people of color describe experiences of discrimination and are told they're imagining things, being paranoid or making everything about race, the function isn't just to dismiss a specific claim. It's to destabilize their confidence in their own judgment so they become less likely to name what they see in the future. Now scale this up to an entire country watching video of a man being shot and then being told he was the aggressor. The administration isn't just lying about Alex Paredi.
Leslie Poston:They're trying to convince anyone who might witness or record state violence in the future that their footage doesn't matter, and that the official narrative will override observable reality, and that the apparatus of power will describe events however it wants, regardless of evidence. The psychological research on gaslighting documents predictable effects anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, a chronic sense of unreality. We talk about those more in our episode on gaslighting from season one. Victims of this describe feeling like they're losing their minds, which is precisely the point. When you can't trust your own perception, you become easier to manage.
Leslie Poston:And what about the people who don't buy it? Who watch the video, recognize the lie, and refuse to participate in the pretense? The research here is about moral injury, a concept originally developed to understand the psychological damage experienced by veterans who witnessed or participated in acts that violated their moral code. Researchers found that moral injury is distinct from PTSD, though they can co occur. It involves shame, guilt, a sense of betrayal, and the collapse of basic assumptions about how the world works and what kind of person you are.
Leslie Poston:Witnessing injustice, you feel powerless to stop, especially when that injustice is then officially denied or celebrated, produces its own version of moral injury. The dissonance between your perception and the institutional response is in itself a wound. You saw something happen, and you know what it was, and you're being told by everyone with authority that it was something else, that it was justified, or that the person deserved it, and you know better. There's also the exhaustion factor. Maintaining your clarity in an environment of official lies takes continuous, sustained, difficult effort.
Leslie Poston:If people around you start to accept the false narrative, your family, your coworkers, your social media feed, every interaction then becomes a choice between friction and silence. Research on minority opinion holders shows that people can maintain dissenting views, but the social cost is real and cumulative. People stop pushing back sometimes, not because they've changed their minds or believed the lie, but because they're legitimately tired. And this exhaustion is strategic. Every additional lie, every official statement that contradicts video evidence and what you know is true, every spokesperson repeating the propaganda raises the cost of dissent slightly.
Leslie Poston:The goal isn't to convince everyone. It's to make truth telling so effortful and costly that you give up. The obvious lie effectively forces people into one of three positions, and each position comes with psychological consequences. The first is to accept the lie, either genuinely or performatively. This might happen because someone trusts authority or because they're motivated to see state violence as justified or simply because going along can be easier than fighting.
Leslie Poston:The psychological cost here is the slow erosion of your own epistemic independence, erosion of your confidence that you can perceive reality accurately and act on your perceptions. Research on cognitive dissonance shows us that when behavior and belief conflict, belief often shifts to match behavior. If you act as though the lie is true, you may come to feel less certain that it isn't. The second response is to recognize the lie but stay quiet. This preserves your internal sense of reality, but it creates a different kind of dissonance.
Leslie Poston:You know something is true when you're not saying it, and you're watching others be misled, and you're not intervening. Research on moral disengagement shows us that this requires psychological work, minimizing the harm and telling yourself that it's not your place to speak, diffusing responsibility out to others. But that silence changes you even when it feels like the neutral option. The third response is to reject the lie openly. This is the most psychologically coherent position where perception, belief, and behavior all align.
Leslie Poston:But it's the most socially costly, especially if the people around you have chosen one of the other two options. You become the person who won't let things go, who makes gatherings uncomfortable, or who can't just move on. Even outside of what's happening with immigration enforcement right now, you can see this happening to the people who still choose to participate in community care by masking. They know that the truth is that COVID is still running rampant, but most of society has moved on. And so the people still masking for their own and other safety are paying a social cost.
Leslie Poston:The structure of the obvious lie makes the third option as costly as possible. And that's the point. I don't want to paint the situation as entirely bleak, because research also points us toward what helps. Social connection is the most consistent protective factor against gaslighting like this at any scale. When other people affirm what you saw, when you're not alone in your perception, the lie loses its power to destabilize.
Leslie Poston:And this is why authoritarian movements benefit from polarization and isolation, why they work to separate people into bubbles that can't communicate, why they attack the credibility of any institution that might provide shared ground. If you've noticed the rise of laws being proposed in countries for digital ID, keeping kids off social media, the COSA Act and the COSMA Act, and a bunch of other bills to negate section two thirty in The US, the way the Washington Post just fired a bunch of staff so that the media is less focused on truth, etcetera. All of these things are working towards separating you from your community and from the way you can be grounded in truth. Jose Medina's work on epistemic resistance is useful here. And I mean, Medina the philosopher, not the MMA fighter.
Leslie Poston:Medina argues that the same social positions that make people vulnerable to epistemic injustice can also produce epistemic advantages. He calls it epistemic friction. People who have been gaslit, dismissed, and smothered often develop sharper perceptual skills, greater sensitivity to bullshit, and more practice in maintaining their grip on reality against pressure. The communities now organizing in Minneapolis, for example, aren't just angry. They've been cohesive as a community focused on care for decades.
Leslie Poston:And frankly, they've been right about that for a long time, and they know it. Documentation also matters. Even when it doesn't produce immediate accountability, the videos of these killings exist, and they can be watched. They create a record that persists beyond the current news cycle. History is full of examples where documentation that seemed futile in the moment became critical evidence later.
Leslie Poston:The act of recording, preserving, and sharing what actually happened is a form of resistance to any regime's attempt to control the narrative. And there's a strange vulnerability in the obvious lie and that it can backfire. When the gap between official story and observable reality becomes too absurd, it can jolt people out of complacency rather than confusing them into submission. The brazenness of the lies about good and pretty seems to be producing exactly this effect in some quarters. People who previously trusted the system are now confronting evidence that the system lies even when the truth is on camera.
Leslie Poston:In part three, we'll look at what happens when people stop accepting the lie and start acting. The psychology of resistance, collective courage, and why the bystander effect is actually mostly a myth. Minneapolis is showing us something important about what communities do when they decide to stop being gaslit. Look for that episode tomorrow. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Posteon, signing off. And as always, until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical, and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss an episode every week and send this to a friend if you think that they would enjoy it.
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