Article Summary
Introduction
One key question is what type of communication can foster respect across party lines. Currently, high polarization leads to opposition against engaging with politically dissimilar others, undermining open discussion and increasing democratic dysfunction. A common lay belief is that providing facts to support one’s viewpoint will lead you to be seen and rational and therefore respected, even by out-partisans. This paper proposes that in actuality, sharing personal experiences causes political others to respect you more. Specifically, they argue that sharing personal stories makes salient harm, and that understanding someone as trying to avoid harm leads you to perceive them as more rational, and therefore to respect them more.
Analytical Approach
The authors employed 15 studies, including survey studies across various political topics, a field study of conversations about guns, an analysis of YouTube comments from abortion opinion videos, and an archival analysis of 137 interview transcripts from Fox News and CNN. Studies 1 & 2 asked representative samples to imagine whether fact-based or personal experience-based arguments from a politically dissimilar other would engender more respect. Study 3 employed a text analysis on comments on YouTube videos about abortion which either emphasized facts or personal stories. Study 4 asked participants to report the stances on tax, coal, and gun policy, and then experimentally varied whether they read about someone with an opposing opinion based either on facts or personal experience. Study 5 involved a face-to-face conversation about gun policy with an experimenter trained to give fact-based or experience based rationales. Study 6 measured the concreteness and specificity of facts versus personal stories in order to rule out the alternative explanation that stories might be more specific and concrete than facts and people might simply respect more specific/concrete explanations. Studies 7, 8, and 9, systematically varied the relevance, level of harm, and closeness to the experience (respectively) of the reasoning behind a gun policy stance to shed further light on what kinds of experience-based arguments lead someone to be seen as rational and worthy of respect. Study 10 employed a representative sample that read about a political opponent who based their moral beliefs either on a personal experience (high or low harm) or a real statistic. Study 11 contrasted reactions to New York Times op-eds about gun control that foregrounded personal experiences or facts, while Study 12 analyzed transcripts of Fox News and CNN interviews. Study 13 examined how truthful participants perceived personal versus fact-based arguments, while Study 14 tested whether the effect replicated when the person taking the opposing political stance was a Black woman. Study 15 examined whether the effect generalized to the domain of immigration.
Main Findings
Participants believed that hearing a facts-based argument from a politically dissimilar other would lead them to respect that out-partisan more and consider them more rational (S1, S2). However, an analysis of YouTube video comments showed that videos containing personal stories, rather than facts, about abortion received more positive comments (S3). Similarly, experimental evidence revealed that people with opposing stances based on experiences were respected more and considered more rational than those with stances based on facts (S4). This effect replicated in the domain of immigration (S15), as well as a face-to-face conversation about gun policy (S5), and was not found to be reducible to a preference for specificity or concreteness (S6). Further studies revealed that respect for people with opposing issue stances increased when their explanation was based on a personal (S9) policy-relevant (S7) experience that emphasized harm (S8). Study 10 replicated the finding that stances based in high-harm personal experiences were perceived as more rational, which led to higher levels of respect. Similarly, NYT authors who based their op-eds on personal experience, rather than facts were more respected (S11) and interviewees on news programs who shared more personal experiences were treated as more rational by the hosts (S12). Further, participants expressed more doubt about the truthfulness of facts compared to personal experiences (S13), and the preference for personal stories persisted when the person with the opposing position was a Black woman (S14).
Implications
The central implication of this research is that people overestimate the extent to which sharing facts will be persuasive to people with differing political opinions. It suggests that conversations designed to evoke personal sharing will be more effective than those focusing on data, and that efforts focused on political persuasion ought to re-focus on personal connections.
Questions left unanswered
One question that was not tested in this study is whether sharing personal stories about non-political topics similarly fosters respect and willingness to engage across political topics. Additionally, the question raised in Study 13 – whether the identity of the person with political differences affects people’s willingness to listen to facts or stories – was not fully explored. While a similar pattern of results was observed regarding a Black woman’s attitudes on gun policy, a stronger test would examine race-related issues.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: No
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: Yes
The main measures here were respect for people with different policy positions, perception that they are rational, and willingness to engage with them.
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: No
Limitations / Weaknesses
The work benefits from its use of a variety of samples, both convenience and representative, as well as its multiplicity of methods. However, despite this variance of samples, there is little attention to how the social identities of opposing partisans affect willingness to hear/accept facts and stories from each other.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: Yes
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: Yes
Article Citation
Kubin, E., Puryear, C., Schein, C., & Gray, K. (2021). Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(6). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2008389118
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@article{Kubin2021,
author = {Kubin, Emily and Puryear, Curtis and Schein, Chelsea and Gray, Kurt},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2008389118},
issn = {10916490},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
keywords = {Moral psychology,Morality,Narrative,Politics,Poltical tolerance},
number = {6},
pmid = {33495361},
title = ,
volume = {118},
year = {2021}
}