A fond farewell to facts
I love facts. I evangelize in hopes that others will see them as I do – clearly and without distorting filters -- and then agree with me. But here’s the thing . . .
It doesn’t work.
These days, people don’t just have views – they are wed to them. They have a World-War scale arsenal of facts to shoot down other ideas. If equating conversation to war seems harsh, there are many examples of people fiercely defending their stance as if it were their soul. As a recent Guardian editorial put it, “an attack on your opinion is an attack on the very fibre of your being.”
Persuading anyone to a different view seems futile, which dooms my goal to improve the lives of people living in poverty. When people’s facts say that poverty comes from each person’s choices, they will not notice (let alone change!) the systems that create and maintain poverty.
Feeling discouraged, I came across a book with the hope-filled title, How Minds Change. It describes deep canvassing, which is a technique for talking about contentious issues with people who disagree with you. Instead of facts, the focus is on having a person explain their own views to themselves. Like many things, we think we know the explanation but when we have to describe it to someone else, we get lost. It’s called “the illusion of explanatory depth” and was famously shown in a study where graduate students were asked to explain how toilets worked. (Try it and see how far you get or watch this 90-second cartoon to get the poop, so to speak.)
After bumping into the limits of their own explanation, a new view can emerge. A person who is against same-sex marriage remembers his former very nice neighbors who were a lesbian couple; a pro-life woman recalls a friend who needed help after a botched abortion. The canvasser facilitates the discussion without pressing the person to a particular view.
The great thing about deep canvassing? It works.
About 10 percent of people will shift their view after a 15-minute conversation. That might seem like a dismal failure rate – 90% -- but 10% shifting their view is often enough to move mountains, to change the outcome of referendums, to swing a swing state in another direction. From the book, a shift of one percent could start a “cascade of attitude change that could change public opinion in less than a generation.”
In other words, we might have a lot more agreement than it appears. From the Guardian editorial: “ . . .when you put down your weapons, relax, and have nothing to prove, then you can work toward consensus on the big issues.”
For the sake of the big issues and with great fondness, I bid my beloved facts farewell. I can still have fun with facts but only with people who already share my views. For everyone else, I know better.
