Why Voters Don’t Care About Facts
Winning in the “Post-Truth” Era
“Please, fact-checkers, get to work.” That was Hillary Clinton’s exasperated plea during her first debate with Donald Trump. They dutifully complied: Trump was endlessly called out on his constant falsehoods by professional fact-checkers. Here’s the harshest fact-check of them all: all the fact-checkers in the world couldn’t stop Donald Trump from becoming president.
A similar dynamic was at play in the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. Arron Banks, a British businessman who spent millions supporting the Leave campaign, explained that his team of strategists made the conscious decision to not care about facts: “What they said early on was, ‘Facts don’t work,’ and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally.”
How do you connect with people emotionally? By telling a compelling story. Despite our modern pretenses of being rational and evidence-driven, most humans fundamentally don’t understand the world through disinterested analysis of data, but through narratives that we connect with and find useful. Objective reality just can’t compete with a good yarn.
Researchers have found that facts are ineffective at convincing people with strongly held beliefs. There is evidence that, in some cases, fact-checking can backfire, causing people to double-down on incorrect ideas. In other words, fact-checking may have actually helped Trump. That’s assuming someone even finds out the facts: a recent psychological study has discovered signs that we generally don’t want to hear the other side’s argument at all. People across the political spectrum “are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information.”
Why do facts seem to have such little influence on people? It may be that nature has bred concern for reality out of us. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness.” Along similar lines, anthropologist Robert Trivers suggests our capacity for self-deception has Darwinian advantages: for example, “a positive form of self-deception may serve to orient the organism favorably toward the future.”
The human mind did not develop to discover truth for the sake of truth, we accept truths instrumentally insofar as they help us navigate our environment and accomplish our goals. If a belief helps us do these things, we accept it as true until something better comes along. As the pioneering philosopher and psychologist William James put it a century ago, “truth is what works.”
It makes sense then that if a belief helps us make our way through the world and gives us benefits, simply telling us “this is wrong” generally fails to persuade. Our powers of self-deception are so strong that even incontrovertible proof can’t convince hardcore believers. In the 1950s, three social psychologists published When Prophecy Fails, a landmark study of cognitive dissonance among the members of a cult. The cultists believed the end of the world was imminent. After the apocalypse failed to occur on schedule, you might expect them to become disillusioned. Instead, the opposite happened: most of the cult’s members held onto their beliefs; many even became more fervent. Because they were so invested in their beliefs, they concocted stories to explain why the prophecy had failed. The stories they told influenced them more than actual events.
Like those cultists, our attempts to understand the world lead us not just to examine facts, but to tell stories: we construct narratives about the universe, ourselves, and others. We favor facts which play into narratives we support and we try to discredit or ignore facts which contradict our beliefs.
This is something successful marketers already know. Facts alone don’t sell — narratives do. This is why marketing guru Seth Godin has declared that “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” According to one study, 92% of people prefer ads that tell a story.
Just think of successful commercials: they tend to be memorable because of their narratives, not because of what they are actually selling. McDonald’s doesn’t give you a bunch of statistics about their food, they show Ronald McDonald cheering up a sad child who can’t ice skate. It’s a good ad because it tells a tale we can all relate to. It also has absolutely nothing to do with hamburgers.
Does the refreshingly minty flavor of Mentos actually help you think of clever solutions to embarrassing situations? Not really. Does staying at a Holiday Inn Express really make you better at trivia? Of course not. But these commercials are still memorable, regardless of their factual basis, because we connect with them on an emotional level.
Humans are fundamentally storytelling beings: stories shape how we experience the world. As the CEO of content marketing company Skyword puts it, “Stories help you to understand life and the complexities and nuances of life better… Story is the form in which we experience and record the world, and it’s the form in which we forecast the world and make decisions. So, the brain is really a storytelling and story-consuming machine.” We are wired to believe compelling narratives that help us interpret our experiences and provide us with meaning.
As Virgil wrote in the Aeneid 2,000 years ago, “trust in the tale is old.” For our ancestors, tales about deities, spirits, and monsters helped explain the seeming chaos of the natural world. These stories also often allowed for audience participation: the gods may be capricious, but by performing the right rituals you could perhaps win their favor. In this way, people could gain a degree of perceived agency.
Clever politicians can play to our desire for an explanatory story. Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828 by campaigning as an outsider challenging a corrupt East Coast establishment of “over-educated elitists who are not beholden to the will of the people”. Sound familiar?
Jackson used a simple narrative to explain people’s problems by pointing to easy scapegoats. He then cast himself in the role of the people’s hero, winning their support. As with sacred rituals of olden times, people who felt powerless were able to participate in the story in order to reclaim a sense of control in their lives. Whether these narratives are factually accurate or not is less important to their appeal than how people feel about them — just like whether a clown ice-skating with kids has anything to do with hamburgers is irrelevant to why that commercial works.
Trump used our preference for narratives over facts to his advantage. He built his campaign around a simple, powerful slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which tapped into the powerful emotional forces of nostalgia and hope, while letting listeners subjectively fill in the blanks as to what “great” actually meant. Clinton supporters responded that “America is Already Great” and had all sorts of stats on crime, terror, and the economy to back their point up. Democrats brought charts to a story fight.
If facts alone don’t have much persuasive power, can progressives craft a winning story without completely ignoring reality? To borrow a phrase, “yes we can.”
Look at Obama’s 2008 campaign, based on a compelling narrative of “hope and change.” He didn’t have to create his own reality of “alternative facts” to succeed: he embodied change by being the first African-American nominee of a major party and by opposing Bush’s signature foreign policy blunder. The facts fit into the context of a larger narrative — the data reinforced his story. Supporting Obama felt like being a part of history. This helped voters connect with his message.
In marketing, narratives are often successful because they promise to fulfill basic human desires. How much more successful would they be if they actually did? Progressive policies have the potential to realize the wildest promises of advertising: staying at a Holiday Inn Express doesn’t actually make people better at Jeopardy!, but increased access to higher education would. Ronald McDonald doesn’t really make lonely kids feel more loved, but raising wages so that single parents don’t have to work multiple jobs just might. Mentos can’t actually save you from embarrassment, but universal healthcare could save your life.
Facts alone are unconvincing, but the right framing can give them power. The appropriate Democratic response to Republicans’ fact-free narratives isn’t to direct people to Snopes, it’s to create a better narrative — one which is all the more powerful because it is true.
