We’re not post-truth, we’re post-empathy.
‘Post-truth’ was voted Word of the Year for 2016, acknowledging that public opinion, as expressed through a series of recent polls and debates, is shaped more by emotions and beliefs than facts. For a company like ours, whose main work is to visualise and communicate facts, it could provide a bit of an existential crisis. If we’re post-truth, how can we present data in a way that can build more sustainably minded worldviews? As Vizzuality’s social scientist, it’s these kinds of question that keep me up at night.
The good news is, from my experience over the last two years at Vizzuality, I don’t think there is too much to worry about. If anything, this moment is a fantastic opportunity to re-acknowledge that humans are emotional beings, and that people don’t simply consume information and act in consequence, like some kind of formula. There’s a myriad of social and behavioural filters that have always dictated how people get informed, how they interpret that information and how they act.
In this blog I’m going to unpack what I think about ‘post-truth’ and how Vizzuality is embracing this opportunity to help people see the world in a new light.
Facts and expertise are still important.
First off, it’s good to note that people are not sick of experts. A recent study by the Pew Research Centre showed that US adults wanted scientists, more than any other group, to play a major role in policymaking decisions about climate change and Genetically Modified foods. More than industry voices. More than the general public. And much more than elected officials. This is mirrored to some extent in the UK: while general distrust of most professions has gone up, nurses are trusted by nearly 93% of people.
But forming a world view has always been a social process.
The thing that annoys me most about the definition of ‘post-truth’ is the assumption that objective facts were previously more important in shaping public opinion. We’ve either always been post-truth, or lying to ourselves about how people understand the world.
Take just one fascinating study conducted in Canada in 2003. In many cases, the decision to act on a certain complex health problem isn’t just a one-way relationship between ‘fact’ (medical science) and the body (the patient). Often there will be at least one other person involved in the discussion — a spouse, partner, family member or friend. Only 6% of people in the study made a decision solely on the advice of a physician. And when you look at the types of information people looked for, it wasn’t just information about the health issue they were after. Over half of people wanted to know about the decisions other people made. The way people understand the world, or specific problems within the world, is always filtered through a social lens of discussion, doubt, and affirmation from the lived experience of others.
This study on the uptake of climate science in policymaking adds to this point. If the example above shows us that people make decisions with some social influence, this study demonstrates that not using social influence or elements limits the uptake and use of that data. They identified constraints like:
- a disconnect between producers and users of climate information
- the way the science is communicated to policymakers
- the timing of information release, in the context of political cycles
- credibility of the source
- people unwilling to use the data
In a situation like this, the facts could have been more effective at changing people’s worldviews if more appeals to emotion and personal belief had been employed: making the data irrefutable, un-ignorable and compelling.
In addition, there are always constraints on access to information.
On top of all this knowledge about how information is interpreted, there’s also a number of studies looking at the social processes of accessing information, which I wrote about previously. Imagine you’re on a farm in Somerset with bad broadband signal or a smallholder in rural Uganda an hour from the nearest town: you’re someone without full access to all the world’s resources. In these situations you’re going to prefer asking friends, relatives or neighbours. You’re also likely to see people relying on sources that satisfy them, whether the source is accurate or not. For a whole range of reasons — education, hours in a day, poverty, social constructions limiting who you can talk to — you have to make do with what you can get, using your emotions and lived experiences to judge what to trust and what to do next.
So how do we change people’s worldviews in a ‘post-truth’ world?
With all this in mind, I think there are a number of ways we can use data visualisation in 2017 (and beyond) to make sure we communicate information well.
More Stories — rather than communicating truths as cold hard facts, we need to spend more effort on creating data-driven stories. Looking at the coverage of climate change on platforms like Vice and Buzzfeed, a new model of success is being created: one where the data are contextualised and enriched by the narrative woven around it, a dual-pronged approach to capture the head and the heart.
More democratisation of knowledge — creating worldviews is a social process. One thing facts don’t do very well is provide the room for interpretation and discussion, which then allows people to form a shared worldview. At the same time, the fact people can co-produce the knowledge should help make the ‘truth’ less ignorable, instead of letting beliefs and emotions rule the perception of climate change.
More accessibility — being able to reach more people is also critically important. To some extent this is achieved through a focus on stories: people are more likely to understand and accept a new, abstract concept if they can easily relate it to their lived experience. But it’s also about making sure people can discover and access the information — despite technological or other barriers.
More understanding of users — I think above all, we need to re-commit to user-centered ways of thinking. Thinking of your audience in generalities and stereotypes, without the granularity of an actual person’s lived experiences, harms our ability to speak with them on a level which is likely to actually change their worldview.
Moving past post-truth with more empathy.
Ultimately I think, as we start 2017, we are in a similar world to the one we were in this time 12 months ago, or 24 months ago. Despite the votes and campaigns that have happened, people are not making decisions in a vastly different way, or forming a worldview in a new way. Instead, we’ve forgotten how to listen, and to understand the ways people actually learn about the world; and we’re seeing that manifest in surprising outcomes. We want to help everyone move towards a more collaborative method of fact communication, with emphasis on democratised interpretation, shareability and accessibility. We think that is what’s needed to engage people with a more progressive worldview: like the hopeful vision expressed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Check out this post by our CEO reflecting on 2016 and what Vizzuality is committed to doing in 2017.
