When Facts Fall Short
The presidential inauguration is when our nation has traditionally moved past the intense us-versus-them mindset of an election. It’s a moment for us to come together and start finding compromise. But for the past decade—and especially today—compromise feels impossible between our warring political parties.
But there’s hope. Even if politicians seem impossibly divided, many everyday Americans want less division. They want to better understand the other side, especially their friends and family members they disagree with. But there’s a problem for all of us trying to have conversations across differences: we have the wrong intuitions about how best to foster respect.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As social psychologists interested in how to best bridge divides, we first wanted to know how people thought they should connect across political divides. We asked a representative sample of Americans to imagine they were having a conversation with a political opponent about a contentious issue. We posed this question: “What would make you respect them?”
The majority (56%) of people said they would respect a political opponent’s conversation who grounded their views in facts. Americans want the raw statistics surrounding an issue, without any editorializing, because facts seem like the basis of a rational, respectful conversation.
Unfortunately, our studies show that people’s confidence in facts bridging divides is misguided. Facts do not provide common ground because the facts of “the other side” do not seem like facts—they seem fake.
Society convinces us that the way to create respect is by throwing facts at your opponent until they submit to your overwhelming rationality, as if their political convictions could be bludgeoned away by statistics. Congressional representatives, political commentators, and social media influencers all treat data like artillery, trying to smash through the enemy’s defenses. Viral videos of one side “owning” the other side focus on winning the war of facts. While these videos might make one side feel smug, they rarely change people’s minds and certainly fail to foster understanding between political opponents.
Read More: How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America
Facts fall especially short when everyone has their own set of statistics. Modern social media makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reliable information and misinformation, and this allows people to find “data” to support the most extreme of opinions. Today, the very concept of objective truth is being challenged, undermining the ability of facts to create moral understanding.
Even if we fixed the problems of social media misinformation, the weakness of facts extends beyond fake news. In moral disagreement, facts simply provide the wrong kind of truth. Facts are objective information about how the world works, like Galileo showing that both light and heavy weights fall at equal speed. But unlike gravity, morality is not objective, even if our moral convictions can feel “objectively” true. Perhaps we could all agree on the evilness of the Holocaust or the goodness of a parent’s love, but the hot-button issues at the center of moral debates defy an easy objective answer because they are grounded in messy trade-offs about perceived harms. In these cases, it is difficult (or even impossible) to objectively demonstrate the truth of one’s moral beliefs.
There is no fact that can convince everyone we should prioritize fetuses over pregnant women or the lives of Black men over the safety of white police officers. Think back to your own conversations about morality: When’s the last time you had a conversation about a deeply held moral value and came away from it thinking, “I guess I’m wrong; their facts were just too good!”? Probably never.
When we tested the ability of facts to bridge divides, they were not the best route to mutual understanding. People claimed to want raw statistics, but when our participants received them, they simply shrugged them off. When advocates of gun control learned a pro-gun-rights statistic-that civilians use guns to defend themselves up to (or even more than) a million times per year,they said that this stat failed to capture the whole picture, or wasn’t relevant to the topic at hand, or was biased. When advocates of gun rights learned that 73% percent of murders in the United States in 2019 were committed with firearms, they argued that gun control advocates weren’t thinking about the facts correctly, asking in return how many more people would be killed if good people were forced to give up their guns. Facts are easily rejected or seen as irrelevant to the deeper moral truth.
Facts fail to foster respect in political discussions because our moral beliefs are based on intuitions of harm, not objective evidence. Our moral convictions are founded not on statistics but on feelings of threat. Of course, facts remain essential for a functioning society and for making good political policies, but to initially connect with people across moral divides, we need something that appears less “objectively” true and more “morally” true. We oftentimes need stories of suffering that lead to outrage—and then, eventually, change.
The power of harm-based stories and the weakness of facts in moral conversations does not mean that facts are unimportant. Facts are essential to every aspect of life, especially in determining the best policies for society. But our findings show that facts are best presented only after building some initial respect with a person on the other side, and that respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling. Ideally, the story will be about the issue under discussion, but not everyone has a poignant story about a hot-button issue. One good place to start is telling a general story about yourself, about your background, and how your experiences shaped your beliefs. No one goes through life without some suffering or tribulations, and so these stories can touch on these elements.
Importantly, there are some rules for using stories to bridge divides. The first rule of telling and listening to stories is to strive for understanding, not persuasion. Studies find that presenting stories primarily to persuade can backfire, because people can easily see when others are on the offensive, and then quickly become defensive. Instead of trying to change someone’s opinion, make it clear that your aim for the conversation is to understand each other. Making obvious your goal of understanding is a powerful way of creating goodwill.
The second rule of telling a story is that they should not be confused with facts. Facts are objective pieces of information without a point of view. That’s the whole point of facts: They do not depend on who is talking about them. The theory of gravity is a fact no matter who you are or what identity groups you belong to. But stories are not facts. They have a point of view; they happen to someone in particular. When you tell a story, emphasize that it is an experience from your perspective, and that it could help someone understand that perspective.
The third rule of telling a story is that we must listen to other people’s stories, too. Often, in conversation, we focus only on our own irritation while the other person is talking. Instead of engaging with their thoughts and beliefs, we simply rehearse what we will say to counteract their points.
People easily recognize when we are not listening to them. Our social minds are finely tuned to the subtlest of behavioral cues. I tell students in my classes that I can see if they’re cheating—looking at each other’s tests—even if they sit at the very back of the room, because humans are amazingly good at detecting what people are paying attention to. It’s obvious when a student is furtively glancing at their neighbor’s exam.
Likewise, it’s obvious when your conversational partner isn’t paying attention, when their eyes are glazed over and they’re distantly nodding, ruminating on their own feelings. People tell stories because they want to be heard and understood—and so we all need to try to hear and understand.
Despite the importance of telling—and listening—to stories, facts are also important. I’m a scientist and facts are essential to my research. Even if stories first open the door to understanding, facts are essential for the messy work of creating compromises for pressing problems. And as the country moves forward after the election, we must face one especially clear fact: red or blue, we’re all stuck with each other.
This is adapted from OUTRAGED: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How We Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Kurt Gray.