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Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

pnas.org

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Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#51

Post by saalweachter »

wazoox wrote: post #43
MegaButts wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is of course despite both an excellent safety record and lack of safer alternatives, asserted by many studies and meta studies from the FDA and the European equivalent. Leaded gasoline had an extraordinary safety record for decades before suddenly being recognized as dangerous. The story is actually fascinating. But my point is this is actually not as strong of an argument as you might think, especially since…

I think that the patents on glyphosate itself expired recently. The RoundUp-ready seeds are still protected, though.

Glyphosate itself was discovered back in the 50's; patents around that would have expired ~50 years ago.

The patents around glyphosate resistant soybeans expired five or ten years back; someone immediately produced and released an unencumbered version. (I don't think it's as popular as you'd think; the yields are a bit lower than the state-of-the-art varieties available now, and farmers purchase new seeds every year for a lot of reasons beyond patent encumbrance.)

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#52

Post by nickhuh »

stonecraftwolf wrote: post #12

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.

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

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#53

Post by gweinberg »

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.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#54

Post by joe_the_user »

starkd wrote: post #41
umvi wrote: post #5

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 argue…

Sure, this is the obvious takeaway if you are solely interested in how to persuade others and advance your agenda. But the reason why personal experiences are better at bridging moral/political divides is because shared experience makes it possible for to hear another viewpoint. If all you get from this study is an improved approach to advancing your issue, that's a shame.

...shared experience makes it possible for to hear another viewpoint.

That's specifically why personal experience is a persuasion tool and an effective one - which isn't an absolute bad thing but also doesn't make it an inherently good thing.

The average person, debating on the Internet or off, tends to start in an intensely emotional state. Giving your own personal experience backs them down from that intense emotional state.

Once the person has backed-down a bit you can give your pitch and your pitch can be anything, either a plea for rational inquiry into the situation or your own intensely manipulative, emotional and off-kilter claims.

I personally try to go from polarized emotional shouting matches to "let's make a model of the world and consider what makes sense in it" approaches. I think if you can get someone to start thinking about things that way, you have given them thinking-tools and not simply openness.

Something to think about is that simple openness is by no means an inherently good thing. A lot of New Age ideologies talk about the need to stay open with upshot that people open themselves to all sorts of poisonous and delusional crap. Being open but selective in what you let in is much better.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#55

Post by jcims »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #47
starkd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this is the obvious takeaway if you are solely interested in how to persuade others and advance your agenda. But the reason why personal experiences are better at bridging moral/political divides is because shared experience makes it possible for to hear another viewpoint. If all you get from this study is an improved approach to advancing your issue, that's a shame.

I have lots of shared experiences with my parents, but there is no bridging our moral/political divide. The assumptions they use in their model of the world, as well as the data, are completely inappropriate. At least to accomplish my goals. I think unless conversations agree on the assumptions and agree on the data sources and data itself, and even the logic, it’s going to end in disagreement. My parents can hold co…

Viewpoints are typically the intersection of a number of values. Your interpretation of conflict might just be a function of how your values are weighted vs those of your parents.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#56

Post by R0b0t1 »

gweinberg wrote: post #53

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.

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.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#57

Post by stakkur »

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.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#58

Post by dang »

Udik wrote: post #48
tacitusarc wrote: post #9

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 understan…

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…

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.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#59

Post by dang »

tacitusarc wrote: post #9

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 understan…

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.

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