They don't care about facts — and neither do you

Beacon Media's approach based on cognitive science and moral psychology.

Hi friends! It’s been far too long since I’ve posted on Untold Story. Lately, I’ve been busy working on Beacon Media, new nonpartisan nonprofit in North Carolina that is working to regularly syndicate content around the state and works with grassroots advocates to elevate their voices in English and Spanish. I think we’re going to change the world. It feels good to work with these folks who are fighting for a better future and elevate their voices directly.

I’d like to get back to doing more of my own writing … but we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, Beacon recently started posting its work regularly on Substack and you can subscribe there. If you want our weekly newsletter which has highlights of our work and is focused on how we are working to bolster democracy in this time, please subscribe on our website. But I’ll also do more cross-posting here when something is particularly interesting or important to me personally.

If you want to connect individually about Beacon Media’s work, I’d love to hear from you: jeremy@beaconmedianc.org.

This is the piece I’ve been wanting to write for a LONG time summarizing key work that should inform all of our worldviews about how persuasion works. Enjoy!

‘If they just knew the facts … they would be on our side.’

I’ve heard lots of versions of this in the past few months from people. And, honestly, I used to be there with those of you who earnestly believe this.

I based most of my career as a journalist around a long-term vision that if people just knew the truth … it wouldn’t necessarily set us free, but it would at least hold the guilty accountable and lead to a better world in the long run.

I now know it’s not so simple. To be clear, the truth and facts are as important as ever in this time. This is not an argument for propaganda — that’s what the other side does, and we’ll let them own the lies and disinformation while we stick to facts and the truth. Our arguments should be logical and our facts should be sound because you will lose people who mostly agree with you if they are not and, well, we do our best to have integrity around here.

But the truth is, the truth doesn’t persuade people. Why not? If, just to choose one example that might be top of mind, everyone knows that a convicted sex offender tried to steal an election through violent force, why would that person be deemed by a majority of a country that prides itself on morality worthy of that country’s most powerful office?

The answer is because those who voted for him and those who endorse policies “against their best interest,” as it’s often said about conservatives in rural areas, are doing the moral thing.

And they are doing a moral thing, even if that feels wholly wrong for those of us on the other side.

That’s not my opinion — it is based on decades of rigorous scientific research in moral psychology and cognitive science.

The best in that field as it applies to politics is George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of An Elephant” and Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Divided By Politics and Religion” and are part of a cornerstone of research that shows emotions and intuition trumps reason and logic.

Not coincidentally, these are the two books Beacon Media Founder Graig Meyer keeps on hand to give out when the subject of media and communications comes up at his legislative office in Raleigh. He handed them to me three years ago. Today, these books — and the decades of messaging, cognitive science and moral psychology that they are based on — form the basis of Beacon Media’s approach.

You should read these books if you want to understand them fully — I promise, you will not understand the depth of their research in this (relatively) short newsletter.

But it will give you a glimpse of why the truth is not enough when it comes to getting people to join your cause or winning them to your side.

One big section of Haidt’s book is called, “There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.” The book’s recurring metaphor is the “elephant and the rider.” The rider (your rational mind) sits atop an elephant (your moral core and belief systems). When you — or, say, through the form of a news article — approach someone with an argument, or “the truth,” like an elephant, they cannot pivot quickly because the elephant’s weight is still carrying so much momentum. But if you can change the direction of the elephant, the rider has much more control over finding a specific path.

These section headers guide part of this argument, based on the moral psychology research Haidt dived into across political divides:

• Our In-House Press Secretary Automatically Justifies Everything

• We Lie, Cheat and Justify So Well That We Honestly Believe We Are Honest

• Reasoning (and Google) Can Take You Wherever You Want to Go

• We Can Believe Almost Anything That Supports Our Team

The book dives into how shocking Haidt found it when, raised as a liberal, his research led him to understand and even empathize with conservatives’ morality once he understood it.

From the book:

Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals march for peace, workers, rights, civil rights and secularism. The Republican Party (as we saw it) was the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self interest (lower my taxes!) poor, thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.

Haidt’s goal is to figure out how to reach across the political divide. And he does so because his research finds that his arguments can appeal to people if he understands the moral framework that they are situated in. That has little to do with the facts presented but has everything to do with how he frames his arguments around shared values.

Lakoff, whose book was first published in 2004, makes Haidt’s somewhat more academic arguments concrete. I reread it recently and can’t believe it came out more than 20 years ago. We would be in a very different place if the powers that be had read this book, understood it, and implemented its recommendations.

It’s never too late.

Lakoff blows up the work of most political consultants by showing that the people in the “middle” are a fiction the way that most people conceive of this group. He broadly groups the two camps of morality of each sides of the political divide as the “strict father” model, or conservatives, versus the “nurturant,” or liberals. Haidt would generally agree but he breaks down the types of morality much more granularly.

Around 40 percent of the electorate are one side or the other and the “middle” is about the other 20 percent, which Lakoff calls “biconceptuals,” conservative on some issues and liberal on others, in lots of different combinations.

Here’s how he described how conservatives campaign: “The real reason for their success is this: They say what they idealistically believe. They say it; they talk to their base using the [values] frames of their base. Liberal and progressive candidates tend to follow their polls and decide that they have to become more ‘centrist’ by moving to the right. The conservatives do not move at all to the left, and yet they win!”

Lakoff’s prescription: “What you want to do is get them to use your model for politics — to activate your worldview and moral system in their political decisions. You do that by talking to people using frames based on your worldview.” [Emphasis added].

There’s another way to say that, to steal a line from Graig: focus on moral clarity and emotional authenticity.

This isn’t trickery. We’re not growing messaging in a lab based on Lakoff and Haidt.

We are building around Beacon Voices, North Carolina’s most effective and talented grassroots advocates and thought leaders, because they need no instruction on how to be authentic and how to convey the reasoning and actions that will lead to a better North Carolina. I love talking about Lakoff and Haidt, but I don’t need to do that with the Voices we work with. They are already doing the work because of their convictions and we want to work with them because of their authenticity and track record on issues that will make North Carolina a more inclusive democracy.

If you read Martin Henson’s column on the legacy of George Floyd or Gwen Frisbie-Fulton on the cost of childcare, these are people who don’t need to hear from academics about how to convey what they believe.

The second part of our model is championing and ensuring our Voices are on the print and digital pages and radio airwaves of community media because those are the institutions, regardless of their owners’ political leanings, that are closest to the people. They want their communities to thrive and are usually in the news business because they believe in exposing their readers, listeners and viewers to ideas of all kinds.

I know some of you won’t believe me or won’t agree with me — you’ll lean back into your elephant, so to speak. But we don’t have to agree to be on the same side. And maybe today you’ll see a part of my argument that you like, or realize that my words are coming from a genuine place, regardless of whether you agree.

And for those reasons, perhaps you’ll support our mission with a donation, forwarding this to a friend or encouraging others to sign up for this newsletter — not because you think we’ve figured it out on every issue, or because you agree with everything I am saying, but because you are swayed by the notion that we need to think and do differently in this moment in our democracy.

That’s how you build long-term coalitions. And that’s how we’re going to build across North Carolina, one Voice and one county at a time — one newspaper and one radio station at a time, in English and Spanish — to reach audiences with authenticity and moral clarity.

That part of this journey is both art and science.