People widely absorb that ideas co-occur without knowing why they do

Evidence

Where transmission of information is at stake, it becomes important to distinguish between two classes of information. Simply put, these two levels are what goes with what and why. Such levels of information logically stand in a scalar relationship to one another, in the sense that one can hardly arrive at an understanding of why two ideas go together without being aware that they are supposed to go together. On the other hand, it is easy to know that two ideas go together without knowing why. For example, we can expect that a very large majority of the American public would somehow have absorbed the notion that “Communists are atheists.” What is important is that this perceived correlation would for most people represent nothing more than a fact of existence, with the same status as the fact that oranges are orange and most apples are red. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1870

Such levels of information logically stand in a scalar relationship to one another, in the sense that one can hardly arrive at an understanding of why two ideas go together without being aware that they are supposed to go together. On the other hand, it is easy to know that two ideas go together without knowing why. For example, we can expect that a very large majority of the American public would somehow have absorbed the notion that “Communists are atheists.” What is important is that this perceived correlation would for most people represent nothing more than a fact of existence, with the same status as the fact that oranges are orange and most apples are red. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1870

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes two levels of ideological information: knowing that ideas co-occur versus knowing why they co-occur.
• XREF: The ‘what goes with what vs. why’ scalar distinction illuminates the reader’s core bind: strategic essentialists deploy identity labels knowing their contingency (‘why’), whereas a mass uptake would hold only package-level correlations, collapsing irony into taken-for-granted naturalness. — connects to: Instant likes and dislikes often arise without any introspectively accessible basis. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 107; Conventions, not instincts or rationality, best explain much human behavior — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 186; People follow adaptive taboos without any shared causal understanding of why — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 332
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1870; John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1870