Blue lies strengthen in-group cohesion by attacking rival groups

Evidence

Perhaps it is no coincidence that many scientific works on such claims come from the country where Donald Trump would become president. Back in the 1980s, philosopher Harry Frankfurt coined the term bullshit for claims where the person making them doesn’t care if they are true or false, as long as they are convincing enough . Thus, the bullshitter does not even claim to have evidence for his allegations – verifiable facts are replaced by perceived truths. More recently, the concept of the blue lie has come up, which is based on the established English idea of the harmless white lie, which is beneficial to coexistence. A typical white lie would be, for example: “Your boiled broccoli tasted very good, grandma.” Blue lies also serve coexistence, but only within a group, while excluding and attacking other groups . For example, the tale of leftist Capitol stormers was uncontroversial among many Trump supporters because it exonerated everyone from accusations of supporting an attempted coup and thus served group cohesion while attacking supposedly violent leftist anti-fascists. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘blue lie’ concept, distinguishing it from white lies and from Frankfurt’s bullshit.
• XREF: The blue-lie mechanism echoes the author’s earlier work on tribalism and the fake-news literature on group-serving falsehoods.