(Illustration by Ben Hickey)
Scholars have tracked polarization around the world for decades, churning out data showing historic increases in recent years. Some researchers have linked polarization to declining levels of social trust, while others warn of democratic backsliding and rampant economic inequality. Polarization plagues not only civic life but also workplaces, professional careers, and personal relationships.
A new paper by David Hagmann, assistant professor of management at the Business School of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Julia Minson, associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and Catherine Tinsley, a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, offers an antidote: a communication strategy they call the “self-revealing personal narrative.” Establishing mutual trust and mitigating polarization is possible, the researchers found, when individuals share personal stories that highlight their vulnerability and humility.
“When people realize they disagree with someone on a topic, their first instinct is usually to try and persuade the other person that they’re wrong,” Hagmann says. “Maybe they’re misinformed, maybe they’re stupid, maybe they’re evil.” Hagmann and Minson discussed the mixed evidence on the effectiveness of various persuasion strategies and wondered whether persuasion was the wrong outcome measure. Their research began with a question: What if building interpersonal trust, instead of trying to persuade others, was more conducive to overcoming ideological divides?
In five preregistered studies, the researchers tested the role of the “self-revealing personal narrative” in forging trust between individuals across ideological positions. The phrase means that “it’s not just any story,” Hagmann says. “If I tell you a story about someone I met who has a problem, that doesn’t do anything. But if the story is personal to me, and especially if I admit some weakness or reveal something that is potentially embarrassing, then the other person thinks, ‘He’s not just lying to me. He has an experience that shapes his belief.’”
In their experiments using hundreds of recruited participants, the researchers set out to create narratives spanning a variety of topics, matching each story to a data-driven message. For example, if the source of disagreement was a minimum-wage increase in Seattle, the data-driven message from someone opposed to the policy was shared as: “I live in Seattle, where studies have found that small businesses have had to lay off workers. Prices at some stores have gone up.” But the self-revealing personal narrative, also from a Seattle resident, expressed that after the minimum-wage hike, the speaker had lost their job and continued struggling to find work. The only positions they had seen were part-time and lacking benefits. As a result, their family was going through a hard period. For the listener, vulnerability increased credibility.
“As society and workplaces become increasingly diverse and ever polarized, finding ways to bridge divides is more crucial than ever,” says David Broockman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “This insightful new research powerfully illustrates the potential for narratives to help address this challenge.”
The researchers discovered that data-driven narratives did not lead to higher credibility evaluations. Instead, humbling stories about personal difficulties boosted perceptions of trustworthiness and even the competence of the speaker. The more personal the revelations, the greater the speaker’s perceived vulnerability and the higher the measures of their trustworthiness. The researchers also found that adding data-driven rational arguments to self-revealing personal narratives did not diminish trust.
The researchers’ findings indicate that overcoming interpersonal mistrust is critical to building collaboration across ideological divides. Data should be embedded in a personal story about why the speaker holds a particular view, and that story should divulge their vulnerability or experience of hardship. Ideological differences increasingly appear in personal and professional contexts, affecting collaborations of all kinds. Working to build trust can help individuals see one another in a new light.
For Hagmann, the findings also suggest that small shifts in research questions can yield big answers. “There must be hundreds of papers written about stories and persuasion, and about political disagreements and persuasion,” Hagmann says. “But thinking about dimensions beyond persuasion—we can count those papers with our fingers. It’s just so natural to think about changing minds when we believe others are wrong that we forget other outcomes may be just as or even more important. Sometimes insights are hiding in plain sight.”
Find the full study: “Personal Narratives Build Trust Across Ideological Divides” by David Hagmann, Julia A. Minson, and Catherine H. Tinsley, Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.