According to new research, stories, not statistics, hold the key to finding the solution. According to a new set of experiments, people respect someone with whom they disagree more when their viewpoint is based on human experience rather than statistics and figures. This is particularly true if the individual stories are based on incidents of abuse or vulnerability. Kurt Gray, a psychologist and the head of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina, stated that “in moral debates, experiences seem truer than facts.”
People Hardly Change Their Political Views And Ideologies:
Over the past few decades, partisan divides have widened on matters ranging from race relations to the role of the government in assisting the poor. The average difference in opinion between Democrats and Republicans on the 10 issues studied by the Pew Research Center since 1994 has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 percentage points. According to Gray, a lot of research on political differences focuses on persuasion and how people’s ideas shift, yet this rarely happens. We need to consider a more fundamental core aim in the current political argument atmosphere, which is just being willing to have a courteous conversation with a political opponent.
Stories Hold More Influence As Compared To Statistics:
In their latest study, Gray and their colleagues looked at how people’s opinions of the reason and respect of their opponents were influenced by the information and experiences they were presented with. They discovered through 15 different trials that, contrary to what people believe, individuals value those who share personal experiences more than those who present facts. Experience-based political arguments gained greater respect from opponents than arguments based on facts in real face-to-face meetings, online discussions, and disputes between talking heads on television.
The Power of Personal Experiences :
Further research revealed that relevant, harmful, and personal events most strongly linked to enhanced respect in stories. People valued opponents more when they recounted their own experiences, followed by those of a friend or family member. And least impressed when someone based their argument on anecdotes or stories of strangers that they had read. The researchers then looked at the possibility that certain people’s experiences might be more reliable than others. Recent movements, like Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, have been inspired by personal experiences. Even if a person’s personal experience does not eventually result in persuasion, civil discourse is a crucial component of democracy.
