Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts(pnas.org)

388 points by lobbly 5 years ago | 164 comments

tacitusarc 5 years ago |

It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understand this, so we tend to weight other people's experiences similarly, knowing that those are as proximate to them as our experiences are to us.

dang 5 years ago | |

If I understand it correctly, the claim is not that personal experience narration is a superior form of objective information to facts, it's that sharing personal experience is more likely to create a feeling of relational connection, which in turn is more likely to lead to a shift in position.

Tossing facts in an argument where people don't feel any personal connection is a bit like throwing stones at each other. Maybe the one with more and bigger stones gains a temporary advantage, but it leads to a retrenchment of positions, which doesn't help in the long run.

jbullock35 5 years ago | | |

> If I understand it correctly, the claim is [...] that sharing personal experience is more likely to create a feeling of relational connection, which in turn is more likely to lead to a shift in position.

The last part is wrong. The authors are explicit on this point: they are not studying persuasion, i.e., changes in people's issue positions. (They never measure change in people's issue positions.) Instead, they are studying the effects of sharing factual claims vs. sharing personal experiences on respect: which strategy makes you more respected?

See especially page 3: "we leave aside the question of persuasion to focus on how best to foster respect in moral disagreements with political opponents."

thewarrior 5 years ago | | |

Anecdotally this seems true. Dick Cheney is a hard core neo con but having daughters who were lesbian made him a lot more understanding on the issue of gay rights.

John McCain was similar but his personal experience of being a POW made him a life long advocate against torture.

There’s a famous video of Christopher Hitchens who used to believe that water boarding people was justified in some cases. He volunteered to a mock water boarding session and immediately bailed and said it changed his view on water boarding.

Anti immigrant attitudes are sometimes found among those who have the least contact with immigrants. The cities which are cosmopolitan and full of immigrants are often very pro immigration.

This feels like a very HN zeitgeist where people are just data processors who come to conclusions by analyzing data.

Language is a broken tool. There’s a difference between reading about and seeing the floor plans of the Sistine chapel and actually being there and gazing up at it.

mlthoughts2018 5 years ago | | |

I think the aspect that spans between your comment and the one you replied to is this:

Why should “personal experiences” be a different category than “facts?” (even taking for granted the extra step you mentioned, where it is the use of these experiences within a discussion, not the absolute existence of the experience, at play).

For example, suppose I know you and you are honest and trustworthy, so if you verbally testify to an experience, I’ll believe it.

Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, “I attended a BLM rally and just observed such a clear and obvious peaceful sense of non-violent protesting” vs you coming to me and saying “According to research institute XYZ, statistically almost none of the BLM protests involved violence.”

Both of those things are facts in 100% the same sense, in every way. But because you personally claim to experience one of them, I am likely to give it more weight.

Even though there are plenty of reasonable hypotheses why humans would rely on this heuristic, it is still a big problem and a big source of manipulation, from liars, deceivers, conspiracy theories, debunked cranks, folk wisdom, etc.

If our goal is to believe as accurately as possible then we should not feel accepting or accommodating of a heuristic quirk in which we regard one set of facts that have the door wide open to manipulation (anecdotes of others) as generally more compelling than facts sourced through research, compiling data, journalism and so forth.

If we let up the pressure to thwart this heuristic, the most likely outcome is that people use confirmation bias and folk wisdom to construct false realities - and indeed in the US we have been seeing that play out in a huge violent saga. That didn’t happen because people don’t like being confronted with hard facts, it happened because we have allowed much too weak of a sense of social obligation to align beliefs with accurate predictions, as opposed to merely letting people feel they are entitled to believe whatever they want.

petilon 5 years ago | |

> as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts

There is some overlap but it is not the same space. Humans tend to extrapolate and generalize. For example based on your personal experience with one (or a few) persons of ethnicity1 you may generalize that all persons of ethnicity1 have attribute2. But this is not a fact.

skybrian 5 years ago | |

Many facts are universal claims that are actually pretty hard to prove. It can take many scientific studies to establish a fact. It's often not easy to figure out what to believe.

It's also often the case the whoever is asserting a fact didn't figure it out themselves. They are repeating someone else's assertion. Often, they misunderstood or simplified.

With personal stories, it's simpler: do you believe the person telling the story or not?

danielam 5 years ago | |

N.b. in “An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent”[0], John Henry Newman makes a distinction between real and notional apprehension that would, I think, be useful here.

[0] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-1.html

MaxBarraclough 5 years ago | |

> this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts

As a matter of neuroscience, from a quick search it appears that they do not, [0] although as a philosophical point sure, personal history narratives consist (at least partly) of beliefs of facts.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952732/ (or if you like paywalls: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2FS1355617710000676 )

api 5 years ago | |

It usually doesn’t. Most facts today are outside most people’s personal experiences. Many like scientific facts are outside their economic reach to experience or verify. This is one of the major roots of the “post-truth” thing. Since facts can’t be verified we rely on trust, which is collapsing.

hntrader 5 years ago | |

In a literal sense, personal experiences (when accurately described) are a proper subset of facts.

AmericanChopper 5 years ago | |

Every “fact” contains an element of subjective interpretation. It is literally not possible to present a fact in a way that is unbiased by subjective reasoning. Or if it is possible, we certainly have discovered a way to do it.

Udik 5 years ago | |

Personal experiences are not facts- they can be cherry-picked, they can be biased, they can be exaggerated and even just made-up. When reporting a supposedly objective fact, you have at least the benefit of multiple independent points of view over it- something observable happened and multiple people reported on it. When you hear a personal experience, you're often hearing an unconfirmed and un-confirmable recount of things that are entirely outside of public verification.

dang 5 years ago | | |

Facts can very much be cherry-picked (there are infinitely many of them, after all), so facts alone don't get you closer to the truth. On the contrary, the way people use facts is by selecting them after the fact (no pun indended) to bolster a position they've already settled on. Everyone does this, and with a little self-honesty anyone can easily observe themselves doing it.

drdeca 5 years ago | | |

I’m a bit unclear on what the word “fact” means. Does it mean “known true proposition”, or “independently verifiable true proposition about an event”, or what?

UncleOxidant 5 years ago |

Key point:

"The problem is that facts—at least today—are themselves subject to doubt, especially when they conflict with our political beliefs (21). In the past decades, America has seen a decentralization of news and information (22) that has allowed people to gather their “own facts” (i.e., alternative facts; ref. 23). Most recently, claims of “fake news” allow people to distrust any information that fails to align with their political beliefs (24, 25) and to trust fake news that aligns with their beliefs (26)."

This is the epistemic crisis we're currently facing. Up until about the late 70s we had 3 news networks that were all pretty much middle of the road politically. Newspapers could have more of a discernible political leaning, but even there most of the mainstream ones we're pretty centrist. People who hewed to an extreme political position in either direction were ostracized and thus had a very small audience. We had more of a common narrative which is now gone.

auggierose 5 years ago |

A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias.

A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust. Even if I trust the source of that fact, I am often not sure if I understand the fact properly. Anyone who has ever tried to understand a math theorem might relate.

It is entirely rational to trust more in your personal bias. In fact, I would argue that the only way to trust a fact is to make it somehow into something that you can personally experience. For example, to understand a math theorem, it helps to look at lots of different kinds of examples where it holds (and where it doesn't).

hntrader 5 years ago |

What bridges divides the best is unfortunately a common enemy that has agency, which unites previously warring factions against a common outgroup. This is the unfortunate reality of our tribal brains. Just look at how this whole GME episode (common villain - hedge funds) has brought the US left and right closer together (even though the gulf remains large) than they've been in years. COVID was a missed opportunity, we had an opportunity to cleverly frame as an outgroup threat (which lacked agency, so it's not an ideal driver of group cohesion), which we didn't do.

tootie 5 years ago | |

On that note, the stonks crowd have already sentenced Robinhood to death even though the facts of the case have been wildly misrepresented. The belief that Citadel et al was out to get them and pulled strings to make it happen took hold with religious fervor even when the evidence says that's not what happened at all.

hntrader 5 years ago | | |

I mostly agree, but the only evidence we have is Robinhood's word which industry people seem to have taken as gospel. It's not implausible that they're lying, given that Citadel is their biggest customer, and they could've done what they did without breaking any laws, e.g. by purposely failing to arrange the appropriate credit lines in time, thereby guaranteeing that they'll be able to go "oops, we don't have the capital, we have no choice but to shut her down now".

tchatyo 5 years ago | |

Having a “common enemy” may be effective in bridging old divides, but it also creates a new divide. Having the common enemy of Japan in WWII was effective in uniting the US nation, but it also resulted in the persecution Japanese Americans.

Someone close to me runs a hedge fund - I guess that makes him the bad guy somehow, the “common enemy.” He’s a one man operation working from home. He made a bad judgement call and shorted too much GME. Now his personal financial stability has been rocked. WSB really showed him. They really defeated those evil hedge fund managers.

faeyanpiraat 5 years ago | | |

Isnt this a scenario that a hedge fund manager should know about?

He took the risk of a short, and the market went the wrong way, there is nothing more to it.

grahamburger 5 years ago |

Seems like we abandoned this type of emotional, personal rhetoric not because it didn't work but because it worked too well at manipulating people's opinions. I wonder if we can return to it without losing our grasp of reality.

UncleOxidant 5 years ago | |

I'm imagining YouTube (or maybe even HN) comments becoming dominated by stories of harm supposed people have supposedly experienced. There's no way to tell if a person you're interacting with in these kinds of contexts has actually experienced the harm they claim or if it's just being used to manipulate. So I'd agree that in the case of internet forums I'm not entirely sure this is a step in the right direction. For person-to-person, face-to-face interactions IRL it would be a different story as you could rely on non-verbal cues to help determine validity and you might have a history of relationship with the person you're interacting with.

ssivark 5 years ago |

This paper just validates as “fact” something that I strongly believed by “personal experience” :-D

As humans (evolutionarily social creatures), we have a natural empathy that’s hard to circumvent unless the discussion turns into very abstract statements about belief & facts & rationality. IME, all but a narrow segment of people are typically very receptive to hearing about and empathizing with other’s experiences. Over time, this might also significantly change perspectives through osmosis.

Very rarely do perspectives change in any significant manner before and after a “logical argument” — and for good reason https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

croissants 5 years ago |

The upshot of these experiments appears to be: communicating a "relevant, harm-based, and personal experience" leads people to rate you as more rational and respect you more. Maybe because it reframes the interaction from "who will win this fight, you or me?" to "gosh, I'm a vulnerable human, and here's part of how I got that way", which makes beating them at this game or demonizing them...somewhat less appealing.

civilized 5 years ago | |

So we politely validate the other person's personal experience and go on our way, forgetting about the whole thing and cleaving back to our original ideas within a few hours.

That is to say, maybe neither of the interventions in this study has any long-term impact.

TameAntelope 5 years ago | |

Vulnerability has been popular for a while now as a way of successfully navigating crucial conversations.

ilaksh 5 years ago |

Here is an awesome discussion between Andrew Yang and a moral psychologist named Jonathan Haidt about these issues:

https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw

Haidt also has a book named The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

indymike 5 years ago |

In politics, there's a saying, "A story is worth 1000 spreadsheets."

offtop5 5 years ago |

Actually when it comes to personal experiences, and human to human offline interaction I've just noticed I don't need to agree with everyone.

I have liberal friends, conservative friends. I've dated liberals and I've dated conservatives. Well I still vote, I'm not nearly as political as I used to be. I don't use social media ( including online dating) , if only because I found people to be insanely mean. I don't want to be called slurs when discussing politics, and that's what happens online. Now if I'm at a bar, I might actually even buy a voter from the other team a beer. I can see his or her humanity. Online the other team is literally a group of evil villains who want to destroy all that is good in the world. And I'm at the point where I think social media needs to be heavily regulated to stop society from imploding. It's just too powerful, too harmful of a tool as is.

space_rock 5 years ago | |

I would just not take your own and others political opinions too seriously. Most ideologies and political opinions are just broad, highly speculative, poorly informed guesses about the best way a government should run a country. Stick to things you actually have personally experience and are an expert in to have more serious opinions about

andrewjl 5 years ago | |

> And I'm at the point where I think social media needs to be heavily regulated to stop society from imploding. It's just too powerful, too harmful of a tool as is.

Heavy regulation would seem like a good solution, except it does nothing to shift incentives. Those remain unaddressed.

stonecraftwolf 5 years ago |

This is only true if someone deems you or your experiences credible, and this in turn is highly related to existing biases and relative places in social hierarchies.

nickhuh 5 years ago | |

It's a good point and the study does some investigation of the question in Section 7 [1]. They find the trend seems to generalize across multiple speaker identities. Personal experiences appear more effective than facts at fostering respect for a wide range of different speakers.

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/6/e2008389118#sec-7

specialist 5 years ago |

From this article, "motivational interviewing" is supported by actual research.

That's a nice change.

My people on the left keep doing the "fat shaming" equivalent (scolding) for politics and policy. Stubbornly wrong.

Most of the advice about debating and persuasion is worse than wrong. This article calls out the "backfire" effect.

I was one of them. I eventually figured out it doesn't work. I've been trying to find and learn better strategies.

I've tried to apply lessons learned from Camp Wellstone, Prof David Domke, http://www.heroesnarrative.org. (I even study people from the other side, like Frank Luntz, Ben Shapiro, Grover Norquist. Know they enemy and all that.)

I'm also very impressed by ideas from deradicalization, cult deprogramming, Chris Voss' (hostage negotiator) "radical empathy" and others. Guarded optimism that this stuff will help.

I'm just so sick of the food fight. Alas, there's still real work that needs to be done. And I'm forever trying to figure out how to sneak progress thru the chaos of war.

jmcqk6 5 years ago | |

I think one way to distill down the simplest change is this: listen in order to understand and not to judge.

tunesmith 5 years ago |

I keep on feeling like I'm following the argument, but then I keep stumbling across the "supporting moral beliefs with facts" part, and it just seems like it's missing something basic.

You can't ever "prove" moral statements just with facts to begin with, that's the whole point of Hume's Guillotine or the is-ought problem. A moral statement with supporting facts is always, by definition, going to also have moral statements supporting it as well, and it's turtles all the way down; the moral statement is ultimately going to be resting on at least one "moral axiom" aka value aka opinion. So of course focusing on facts isn't going to be wholly convincing.

And personal subjective experience is an appeal to emotion. Those are convincing in the moment, but they're rather ephemeral. Any moral conclusion needs to be recognized for what it is; if the reasoning is valid, it rests upon values that might just be different than yours.

One anecdote... I recently had an extremely disappointing multi-day discussion with an old friend who I discovered attended the insurrection. (Did not enter, but made it to the Capitol steps.) I was at first shocked and dismayed, but then through the bonds of our friendship we were able to empathize with each other's emotional experience, why his community was important to him, etc. We thought afterward that maybe we really would be able to have a respectful exchange of views. But then after that it was just disappointment again - it became clear that he just wasn't going to let go of the belief that it was all staged by Antifa, no matter how much I disproved his various meme jpgs. So at least in that case, that intermediate phase of sharing personal subjective experience only really went so far. (We're not in touch anymore.)

zwaps 5 years ago |

The work of James G. March is also very interesting in this regard. In particular, he wrestled with our description of rational decision-making. Instead of seeing bounds to rationality as some defect to be worked&modeled around, his contention was that rational people may not actually what we want, or even want to be, when we organize, collaborate, inform ourselves and others and, of course, make a decision.

If you are interested in this angle, I can recommend the collection "Decisions and Organizations".

space_rock 5 years ago |

This is because people are rational. Things you personally observe are your only source of fundamental information. You are an expert in very few things and one of them is the things you observe. I'm glad people understand this intuitively

Political opinions are broad highly speculative guesses about subjects you're not an expert in

discodave 5 years ago |

I totally agree! I recently wrote a blog post saying something like this:

http://blog.drgriffin.com.au/posts/2021-01-13-facts-will-not...

LatteLazy 5 years ago |

One of the things we need to face as a society is that facts don't change anyones minds...

roenxi 5 years ago |

I see a potential source of bias in this paper - the study is of the use of facts in political topics. This means that they are studying topics where facts have proven insufficient to settle the debate.

stakkur 5 years ago |

Yes; beyond a (very) small in-group of people we are part of, larger groups of people relate mainly through shared stories, not 'facts'. Hence religion, nation myths, etc. Likewise, they fight over conflicting stories.

Yuval Harari does a concise and brilliant job of explaining this in Sapiens, which I seem to recommend to everyone I meet.

TL;DR: facts are not how humans interact.

AcerbicZero 5 years ago |

It seems the root of things is that emotions beat thoughts, and personal experiences help deliver the emotional argument without having to directly argue the emotions.

brian_cunnie 5 years ago |

Personal experience allowed me to bridge the gun-control divide.

I was a strong advocate of gun control, and was dating a rancher's daughter, and she said, "my dad keeps a pistol in the glove compartment because there are rattlesnakes all over the ranch, and when he sees one he kills it so that it doesn't bite his granddaughters."

As a result of that conversation I changed my view on gun control, though I still firmly believe in strict gun control in urban settings.

I find that friendships also allow me to bridge moral & political divides. When the anti-police movement (ACAB = All Cops Are Bastards) erupted in San Francisco, I became angry at my fellow liberal kindred--some of my friends are cops, and they're good cops, and I didn't like seeing them being demonized.

Friendships help bridge many divides: It's hard to be homophobic when half my friends are gay. It's hard to hate Trump supporters when at least one of my rugby teammates is a Trump supporter (I don't agree with him--I think he's misguided--but I don't hate him).

mensetmanusman 5 years ago |

How meaningful are facts when most of politics is about preference.

umvi 5 years ago |

The problem with "objective facts" is that they are often carefully selected or pulled out of context to bolster the arguer's position. I'm sure everyone can think of objective facts related to covid that both make the disease seem more deadly, and also objective facts that make it seem less deadly.

Appeals to emotion with subjective experiences have the same problem. You can use them to bolster support for the arguer's position even if it's only representative of a tiny sample.

The actual optimal policies we should be making over a wide variety of issues (environment, immigration, healthcare, and more) are very difficult to ascertain from objective facts or subjective experiences alone since both reflect the agendas and biases of those presenting them.

For any given issue there will be enough facts and stats to tell the story you want to tell, and for any given issue there were be some heartwrenching experiences of how someone was screwed over by the issue/policy.

oblib 5 years ago |

Our political divide has little to do with facts. More than anything it's driven by the hyperbole produced by popular media.

I have watched the right and left respond to the media's outrage of the day, week, month, on cue, and stop just as fast, for years now.

More than anything our political divide is a result of our fandom based culture and "fans" don't care about facts. We grow up with this. If you're born in New York you're either a Mets or a Yankees fan and the other team sucks and always will no matter what the facts are.

Every night CNN and FOX compete to see who can stir up the most outrage in their fan base. We've got to the point where you're either a "fascist" or a "socialist". There is no middle ground for the hard core fan and they make the most noise.

QAnon is another fine example. Those fans love to wallow in their shared insults and disdain for those who don't "follow Q". They're "smart" and everyone else is a fool. The find great joy in believing that and they will not give it up for anyone's "personal experiences". They'll give it up when it "goes out of style".

Most fans move on eventually because trends go stale and fandom feeds on trendiness. Our "Media" is constantly looking for "the next trend" ("outrage of the month" in the case of politics) and when they see one with potential they'll push it for all it's worth and squeeze it til the last nickle is made out of it.

We all love the concept of "free speech" but we live in a time where bullshit goes viral and can be deadly when it does. Where I live 55% of my neighbors believe "masks don't work" while 1 in 70 of them who've gotten infected with covid-19 have died. Last year I saw them claim "the vaccine has a tracker chip in it", "proof that mask don't work is I can smell my farts when I wear one", "the virus is a hoax".

We have to figure out how to deal with these issues. With over 400,000 lives lost to covid-19 just here in the U.S. de-platforming bullshitters has to be on the table.

austincheney 5 years ago |

> Both liberals and conservatives believe

Upon seeing that I stopped reading.

Most people abhor objectivity and cannot perform self-reflection within anything remotely close to any outside observation. Asking people to self-identify against loaded (poorly understood) political labels only compounds the otherwise commonly stupid behavior at play.

Data does not exist for the general population to make better decisions. It is there only for the trained analyst, leader, manager to make better decisions. I know that sounds elitist, but in discussions of behavior data elitism seems to take on radically different definitions compared to social contexts, and I am fine with that.

known 5 years ago |

Facts are what Parents/Teachers "teach" us;

gweinberg 5 years ago |

Personal experiences are facts. What the article refers to as "facts" are more properly known as "factoids". Approximately 73% of quoted statistics are simply made up, and an unknown percentage are deliberately misleading.

An actual personal experience is a very different thing from a second-hand (or worse) anecdote.

R0b0t1 5 years ago | |

Many many people reject personal experience of any type as specious and constantly reject opinions contrary to their own when shown contradictory evidence on this basis. It is a large part of the reason the country is the way it is.

1) a media outlet that repeats government lies about why we are fighting a war (or how it is going) 2) a media outlet that ignorantly repeats mistruths that are present in the (sub)culture 3) a media outlet that makes up its own lies