Why Tribalism Trumps Truth

Strange as it might seem, truth is a construct of language. It is not something that exists out there in the world (in the minds of mathematicians excepted). What that means is that truth is a measure of how a statement (about the world) corresponds to a fact or facts about the world. If I say that “animal agriculture is responsible for 26% of greenhouse gas emissions”, it is my statement that is true or false. It is not the case that animal agriculture emissions are true or false; only that my claim can be assessed as true or false based on its correspondence to the facts. So, we inevitably turn to those facts and try to demonstrate how they’ve been collated and whether my facts are better than your facts. However, even when we confidently proclaim one set of facts to be indisputable, we can be left bemused, astounded, or even incredulous that facts don’t change people’s minds. Scientists hoping to dispel anti-science prejudices though ‘science’ alone have a hard enough time; if you are arguing from an ideological position, forget it! Just look at the amount of ad hominin arguments that abound and you’ll get my drift. So, why is the pursuit of ‘truth’ not the answer when it comes to persuading people to change their minds about alternative proteins and what do we do about it?

Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach dispelled the assumptions about humans as the ‘rational animal’ in their book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. The depiction of humans as homo sapiens, the ‘wise’ animal, misconstrues the way that reasoning and intelligence have worked in human evolution. What the authors, and many other evolutionary psychologists and behavioural economists, have demonstrated is that most of our decisions are based on emotional reactions and past information that allow us to get things done more quickly without much rational input from our brains. In fact, our ability to take such heuristic shortcuts has been a great benefit to us as a species. But what this means, Sloman and Fernbach argue, is that humans rarely think for themselves and, instead, think in groups relying heavily on collective ‘knowledge’ and understanding.

Building on the work of the famous Stanford University experiments from the 1970s, looking into people’s self-perceptions of whether or not their opinions are right or wrong and how those perceptions affected future judgments, cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber had a go at explaining The Enigma of Reason and argued that humans’ biggest advantage over other species comes from our learnt tendency towards co-operation. Reasoning for ourselves is difficult to do, so we rely on others. But relying on others requires us to be part of their ‘tribe’ and to have established and sustained our communal ‘belonging’. Espousing the beliefs of my community (imagined or real) is vital to establishing my membership. Our powers of reasoning were developed far more by the requirement to resolve problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

The downside of all this is what Sloman and Fernbach call, “the knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot but, as the world becomes increasingly more complex and more abundant in ‘knowledge’, we rely more and more on the dissemination of knowledge from others and treat it as if it is our own. The collective truth of my ‘tribe’ becomes my own truth. Given this reliance on our knowledge sources, we revert to an implicit “groupthink” and become glued to our community of like-minded believers out of loyalty rather than dispassionate rational inquiry, “as a rule, strong feelings do not emerge from deep understanding”. To cut a long story short, if you think you can convince somebody else, outside of your ‘community’, of your truth by presenting them with all the facts of the matter then think again.

What we can do about this, when our goal is to change people’s behaviour, is not altogether obvious. Whilst appealing to emotions might appear to be an option, it has shown to be equally divisive over certain issues. And yet, hoping that voters and consumers recognise their own ignorance and susceptibility to manipulation by supplying them with more facts doesn’t work. Our approach needs to focus on several pathways towards a solution.

1.?????? Influence the people you can and don’t try to convert the people you can’t. Regardless of what has been said above, there is a sizeable proportion of the population that is agnostic and willing to listen to alternative and competing views. But, they won’t be preached to. They want authenticity, independent thinking, objective assessments of the situation and a full presentation of the options. When told that there is only one answer, they smell a bias and look for whose ‘truth’ is being peddled. When discussing greenhouse gas emissions from the animal agriculture sector, they rightly believe, and want to see, that we are all pulling together in the same direction and working co-operatively to solve the problems from all directions (that includes the meat and livestock industry). An answer that promotes one solution over any other will be treated with skepticism. Members of this group are problem-solving tribalists. They want to belong to a community of thinkers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and followers united by the problem, not the solution. To state the obvious, if you want to use the climate crisis agenda to get those people on board, they first have to believe there’s a climate crisis and, second, they have to believe that it’s within human means to ameliorate that crisis. Once those two criteria are established, they won’t automatically gravitate to one solution; they just want the problem solved by any means.

2.?????? Talk to the communities whose ‘truth’ is already agreed upon. That might sound like a call to only shout within your own echo chamber but it means more than that. Persuading a meat-eater to switch to a plant-based diet because the nutritional profile of plant-based meat is better will only lead to that consumer seeking further rationalisations from within their truth community to justify why they should continue eating meat; hence the increased funded research trotting out study after study on why animal meat or dairy milk is nutritionally better and why plant-based meat is “processed” or plant milks have no nutritional value. But, communicating openly and objectively with the community of the health-conscious, who have decided to cut down in their red meat consumption, can increase their awareness of the potential options so that they might continue to enjoy a meat-centric style of cooking and eating, by switching to plant-based meat options, but meet their health goals. Within that ‘tribe’, consumers need un-biased information to help them with their choices: they don’t want prescription. And trying to convert a meat-eater to becoming a vegan in one easy step, you’re on a hiding to nothing (unless their community of ‘truth’ is around animal ethics).

3.?????? Provide comparative data that enables people to see the options and make their own choices based on their own decision frameworks. Many consumers genuinely and sincerely want to modify their choices in order to do something, within their power, to address climate change. Their motives might be mixed: they might be eco-warriors or they might just want to assuage their guilt and at least say they that are on board with the required changes. For those consumers, the best approach is to let them see how their actions can have an effect. Flora Food Group Foods has done just that on its Flora butter website. What does switching from one pack of dairy butter per month to one pack of Flora’s non-dairy butter mean in terms of miles/kilometres driven in your car; light bulbs left on; or smartphones charged, for example? Let the change-motivated consumer decide on the changes they want to make and let the market determine the impact. Telling them that, "if you want to effect climate change then you MUST switch to plant-based butter" doesn't work.

4.?????? Finally, recognise that our ‘truth communities’ are not singular: we belong to many and they might even be contradictory. One obvious ‘truth community’ is represented by our age demographic. What resonates with a Gen Y is different to what resonates with a Baby Boomer and how you ‘sell’ to a ‘Millennial Mum’ has to take into account that she cares for an Alpha and probably advises, supports and helps her ‘Silent Generation’ relative. Gen Z’s are fiercely critical of politics and corporates, Gen X-ers listen to the lab-coats. No one ‘truth’ resonates across all communities.

The late philosopher and public intellectual, Richard Rorty, argued that knowledge is a linguistic affair and that language is made up of vocabularies that are contingent: they are temporary, socially constructed, and historically situated. His conclusion, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is that the only ‘truth’ is a recognition of the irony that knowledge is dependent on its time and place in history. That doesn’t mean it’s purely relative, nor that we can’t argue for the pragmatic benefit of holding one set of beliefs over another, nor that we can’t suppose that one set of beliefs is an advancement on a previous set. However, the best we can hope for is an expansion of the “we”, who share those beliefs, to as larger group as possible, whilst recognising that there will always be an “other” or “others”.

The protracted arguments on Linkedin, or any other social media platform, and in the press only reinforce the futility of trying to persuade others by an appeal to ‘truth’. Rorty was dismissive of attempts through rational discourse to bind communities together through abstract ideas such as “common humanity” or foundationalist ideas of “justice”. His hope was that diverse communities might be brought together by our shared human virtues of compassion, opposition to cruelty, and an aversion to suffering. Rorty’s idealised “ironist” was the person who recognises that their place in their community and the socialisation that created a believing human has only served to provide them with one language that might just be the wrong language. However, looking out into the world apart from language to find the right one is destined to fail.

If we are to combat climate change; if we are to address ecological degradation; if we are to prevent future zoonotic diseases and humanity-threatening pandemics; if we are to solve problems of food poverty; if we are to feed a growing human population sustainably; we have to communicate across boundaries of ‘truth’ without attempting to prioritise only one solution or only my version of the ‘truth’. Start with who is prepared to listen. Talk about what they are able to accommodate within their world-view. Respect their autonomy and their right to self-determination. Share stories that resonate with our commonly held human values. And start small. As Admiral William McRaven stated in his now infamous 2014 Commencement Address to graduands at the University of Texas at Austin, “if you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right . . . If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed”.