Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
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Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#2Seems 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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#3The 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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#4[deleted]
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#5The 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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#6One of the things we need to face as a society is that facts don't change anyones minds...
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#7Seems 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.
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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#8Key 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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#9It'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.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#10Here is an awesome discussion between Andrew Yang and a moral psychologist named Jonathan Haidt about these issues:
Haidt also has a book named The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.