Social Construction, Cognitive Dissonance, etc.

The other day I posted on this blog about the idea of "cognitive dissonance" which comes from social psychology and the idea of "social construction of knowledge" which comes I think from Sociology. We might add in Maslow's theory of a Hierarchy of Needs from psychology, which contends that people with limited attention spans attend at any given moment to those needs which rise to attention at the moment as a result of their relative importance and the degree to which they are already satisfied; notably, Maslow suggested that safety needs, when perceived to be unsatisfied (that is when a person did not feel adequately safe) are attended to in preference to all other needs. Propaganda and public opinion theory from political science also come into play. Together these theories may suggest why politicians suggest that there are threats to public safety as they try to mold the social construction of reality in ways that support the policies that they advocate.