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Doublespeak, or the use of euphemisms to sway opinion, lets leaders avoid the reputational costs of lying while still bringing people around to their way of thinking, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that the use of agreeable euphemistic terms biases people s evaluations of actions to be more favourable. For example, replacing a disagreeable term, torture, with something more innocuous and semantically agreeable, like enhanced interrogation. Like the much-studied phenomenon of fake news, manipulative language can serve as a tool for misleading the public, doing so not with falsehoods but rather with the strategic use of euphemistic language, said Alexander Walker, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in cognitive psychology at Waterloo. The avoidance of objectively false claims may provide the strategic user of language with plausible deniability of dishonesty, thus protecting them from the reputational cost associate
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is essentially open to a carbon tax, a significant shift in the business groupâs strategy as it seemingly moves to get ahead of aggressive action favored by the Biden administration.
In remarks to the Washington Examiner, Martin Durbin, Chamber of Commerceâs Global Energy Institute, said, âThe business community has got to be a big part of the solution to climate change. . Clearly, there is consensus favoring a market-based approach, as opposed to a command-and-control regulatory approach.â
While the Chamber of Commerce is still not ready to endorse carbon pricing outright, it appears the group sees it as more favorable than mandates and regulations preferred by some Democrats.
Daily on Energy: Questions we have as Biden is sworn in Print this article
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QUESTIONS FOR BIDEN: President
Joe Biden, yes it’s official as of this writing, will immediately
take aim at more than 100 Trump-era actions weakening climate and environmental regulations in his first step toward implementing his aggressive climate agenda.
We have a few questions on how Biden proceeds in the coming days and weeks.