People believe that facts are essential for earning the respect of political adversaries, but our research shows that this belief is wrong. We find that sharing personal experiences about a political issue—especially experiences involving harm—help to foster respect via increased perceptions of rationality. This research provides a straightforward pathway for increasing moral understanding and decreasing political intolerance. ....In moral and political disagreements, everyday people treat subjective experiences as truer than objective facts.The paper makes the assumption of goodwill; if you want to convince someone of the truth of your position, enhance your facts with personal experience. The authors suggest that narratives can increase political tolerance.
But it doesn't consider how malicious people weaponize this knowledge in order to lead people away from the facts to begin with - and how propagandists can use this to increase intolerance.
A commentary on the paper in PNAS does touch on this:
The power that story has over facts to capture the imagination and create respect for an individual’s position is easily exploited. ...Narratives are easily weaponized by propagandists and other bad actors. From this perspective, Kubin et al. may not have uncovered a feature in human discourse that might bridge moral divides but rather a bug that could be easily exploited. While presenting facts garners more respect than claims with no backing at all, these studies still find that narratives beat out facts in creating a greater perception of rationality and even perceived truth. Yet, a position backed by one personal anecdote is no more objectively true than one backed by no anecdote or facts at all. More crucially, a position backed by a personal narrative is not more true than a position backed by facts.While both narratives and facts can be cherry-picked to support a position, personal narratives, as the authors point out, are unimpugnable. A conclusion drawn from facts, on the other hand, can be disputed and disproven and, thus, science and society should prefer fact-based positions. Yet, when it comes to respect, feelings are prioritized over facts. As these studies show, what is true gains less respect than what one might feel to be true.Are we to get into a battle of cherry-picked narratives of harm to promote our policy positions, amplified by social media and the ease with which these narratives can spread? How can such narratives be combated? The counter to a story of harm is, by definition, a story of lack of harm (e.g., a vaccine that reduces future infection). However, the larger problem is that the real counternarrative for any anecdotal evidence is found in the data (e.g., a peer-reviewed paper showing the benefits of vaccination for the treatment condition). As such, a troublesome implication of this work is that a false personal story will have more power to create respect than facts, including those facts that would serve to correct the narrative.
This is accurate - but it doesn't go far enough, either.
If narratives are more effective than facts, and personal narratives about being harmed are most effective of all (because no one wants to impugn a personal story about how someone was harmed,) then over time the cumulative narratives of alleged harm by a specific certain group will create hate for that group.
The original study hoped that using personal narratives would increase tolerance. It didn't anticipate that large groups were already weaponizing that as a propaganda method that increases intolerance - towards Jews. Because the Palestinian propaganda machine promotes antisemitism with a torrent of stories about humiliation at the hands of the Jews.
When a Palestinian goes through a Jordanian checkpoint, they are angry and upset. But when they go through an Israeli checkpoint, even though they are treated with more respect, they claim they are humiliated - because they resent Jews on what they consider their land to begin with. So the only stories the world hears are those of humiliation, whether true or not. And over time the followers of that topic start to believe that Jews are deliberately humiliating Palestinians, because that is what the Palestinian stories say.
NGOs also weaponize this propaganda tool against Israel. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports against Israel are far more detailed and longer than those on other countries. I once did a comparison between two Amnesty reports released around the same time:
|
Amnesty reports |
Israel/WB |
Syria/Yarmouk |
|
Title of report |
|
Squeezing the life out of Yarmouk
|
|
Number of pages in the report |
87 |
39 |
|
Number of civilians killed according to Amnesty |
22 |
194 |
|
Time period covered |
12 months |
8 months |
|
Circumstances of their deaths |
Mostly while participating in or near violent
acts |
Starvation, sniper fire, bombings |
|
Number of extensive personal stories given for
victims |
At least 18, some three pages long |
Zero |
|
Number of photos of victims (dead and injured) |
At least 14 |
Zero |
|
Video produced to support report? |
Yes, 4 minutes |
No |
|
Placement on Amnesty webpage |
Linked from front page two weeks after report
issued |
On front page only the day it was released |
Palestinians are humanized and their stories are told. Those stories are detailed and centered on showing how they were harmed and at creating empathy for them.
Meanwhile, to Amnesty, Syrian victims are just statistics.
Along with the empathy for the subjects of heart-rending stories comes anger at the victimizers. This is especially true when the storytellers themselves are angry at their supposed tormentors. Just as the audience wants to identify with the victim, they want to share in the anger the victim has towards those they blame for their pain.
So it is no surprise that the Western narrative about Israel, over time, has become more explicitly antisemitic. These same NGOs are now completely at ease in claiming that Israel has a policy of "Jewish supremacy," meant to evoke white supremacy, one of the most evil crimes possible. Singling out Israel as the only current state practicing (a made up definition of) apartheid is another example of normalizing antisemitism in the name of supporting the victims of Jewish greed. Gaza children are only victims of Israeli war crimes; their being cynically used as human shields by terrorists who were the target of the bomb is not mentioned.
The decades of favoring narrative over facts has created conditions ripe for increased Jew-hatred.
Also, in this world where narratives are favored over facts, there is little penalty for lying. After all, the victims are describing the facts as they claim that they experienced them, and arguing with that is considered to be adding to their victimhood.
One of Israel's reasons for existence is so that Jews will no longer be hapless victims of a world that doesn't care about them. Israel has helped achieve that goal - so now Jews are at a permanent disadvantage in the discourse about which side is in the right exactly because we can no longer claim the same degree of victimhood. And victimhood is the coin of the realm.
There is no defense. Ben Shapiro's famous quote "facts don't care about your feelings" may be true, but facts cannot argue with feelings, either. People want to empathize with and support the real or imagined victims.
Israel's success at protecting Jews is itself its unforgivable crime, and the Israel-haters are using that success as a reason to try to destroy it.
