Facts or Feelings?: The Peril and Promise of Intuitive Communication in an Era of Misinformation

Introduction

A common refrain in heated online political arguments is the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings.” According to this meme, reason and emotion are part of a binary, with feelings characterized as obstacles to sound reasoning. Those who circulate this catchphrase do so to characterize their preferred political opinions as rooted in logic and evidence while dismissing opposing viewpoints as irrational or superstitious. Although this snarky put-down is primarily utilized by conservatives, a similar sentiment is often espoused by liberals. Some Democrats have presented “fact-checking” and “challenging right-wing misinformation” as the “key to beating back Republican dominance” (Savage, 2020, para. 8). According to this logic, “the person who has the truth on their side will eventually win the day” (Cloud, 2018, p. 1).

Although the “facts don’t care about your feelings” mentality is present on both sides of the political spectrum, as liberals and conservatives alike wrap themselves in the mantle of rationality, the social intuitionist model cautions that facts and feelings are hard to disentangle. In many cases, feelings prove indifferent to facts. The social intuitionist model is derived from moral psychology and “indicates that human cognition involves a priori automatic and reflexive moral responses that impact post hoc deliberative and reflective moral reasoning” (Zollo, 2020, p. 2). The model implies that individuals form and defend political opinions not necessarily based on the facticity or truth of these positions, but because these positions conform to their underlying worldview and resonate with them emotionally. Although democratic ideals beseech citizens to vote by rationally weighing candidate qualifications and policy positions using a cost-benefit analysis, psychologists have shown that emotions often triumph over reason in the political arena (Fitzduff, 2017, p. 6). For this reason, the social intuitionist model has significant implications for the study of communication. Specifically, this chapter argues that the social intuitionist model reveals the limitations of rational argument and illustrates factors contributing to misinformation.

The social intuitionist model challenges the notion that bombarding the opposition with facts is the optimal route to persuasion and “draws on dual-process theories” that differentiate between intuitive/emotive and deliberative/rational systems of cognition (Haidt, 2002, p. 55; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, p. 19; Zollo, 2020, p. 5). Dual-processing theories explain human decision-making as guided by “two neural systems that operate according to different principles and often clash with one another” (Lobel & Loewenstein, 2005, p. 1046). Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (2011), for example, explains human decision-making using two systems: System 1, which is quick and intuitive, and System 2, which undertakes effortful and complex mental calculations (pp. 20–21). American political culture celebrates slow, deliberative thinking grounded in facts and evidence as essential to the exercise of democracy. The social intuitionist model, however, highlights that emotions, impulses, and unconscious intuitions are powerful influences on the reasoning process. According to this perspective, emotion and reason are not binary opposites but fundamentally interrelated influences on decision-making. These features of human decision-making complicate efforts to persuade partisans by appealing to expert consensus and facts, as individuals are often motivated reasoners adept at dismissing or rationalizing evidence that contradicts pre-existing beliefs (Strickland, Taber, & Lodge, 2011). Through this process of “motivated reasoning” individuals rationalize away or ignore information that challenges their beliefs by conforming “assessments of information to some goal or end extrinsic to accuracy” (Kahan, 2013, p. 408).