In a recent New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert raises the question, does the ability to perceive harm, which helped our ancestors survive, now underlie our current moral/ethical/cultural divisions?
She finds her answer in a recent book, Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Bookshop affiliate link and Amazon affiliate link).
Kolbert writes:
“Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger,” he writes. “But without saber-toothed cats to fear, we fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.”
Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion. Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm.
“If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,” Gray writes at one point. At another point: “All people share a harm-based moral mind.” At still another: “Harm is the master key of morality.”
If people all have the same ethical equipment, why are ethical questions so divisive? Gray’s answer is that different people fear differently. “Moral disagreements can still arise even if we all share a harm-based moral mind, because liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization,” he writes.
It is reasonably easy to see how this framework can be applied to America’s great gun debate. It also seems to have some parallels with Daniel Kahan and Donald Braman’s cultural cognition theory (see, e.g., “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions”). Kahan and Braman argue that individuals’ views of guns (and so of gun policies) are profoundly shaped by fundamental cultural worldviews that orient them in different ways to risk.
One consequence of Kahan and Braham’s argument is that worldviews are not strongly influenced by empirical evidence; rather, individuals interpret empirical evidence based on whether it agrees or disagrees with their pre-existing cultural worldviews.
This, again, parallels Gray’s perspective on cultural divisions in America, including over guns. Kolbert writes:
The book’s tantalizing promise, as its subtitle announces, is that it will help us “find common ground.” Gray tries to make good on this with a section on the do’s and don’ts of “bridging moral divides.”
He starts with the don’ts. A big one is: Don’t imagine that facts are convincing. Gray cites a study from 2021 in which researchers argued with strangers about gun control. Half the time, the researchers tried to bolster their case with facts. The rest of the time, they offered stories, one of which involved a relative who had been wounded by a stray bullet. (The relative, though made up, was presented as real.) The encounters were taped, so that the conversations could later be analyzed. Strangers who were offered anecdotes were, it turned out, much more willing to engage with the researchers than those offered data were. The group that got stories also treated their interlocutors with more respect.
“Sharing personal experiences instead of facts improved cross partisan perceptions by about 0.7 to 0.9 on a 7-point scale,” Gray writes, trotting out statistics to argue against trotting out statistics. “This may not seem like a giant effect, but it’s actually quite substantial.” Gray’s takeaway from this is that the best way to reach across a moral divide is with a narrative, preferably one that features suffering: “Respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling.”
Having spent 12 years trying to understand U.S. gun culture, I am currently trying to find ways to bridge the gun rights/public safety divide in America. So, I find any ideas along these lines welcome.
But, as Kolbert insightfully observes, “harm-based storytelling” in an outraged culture might just as easily create division as healing. She recalls a disgusting lie perpetrated in the form of a harm-based story by Donald Trump in September 2024: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
So, the diagnosis of the root of the problem has some promise, as does the proposed cure. But both require more consideration before I would accept them outright based on this interesting book.
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Gun Culture 2.0 
That all hangs together.
Stories are more able to engage people than facts, as they put a human face on danger, thus triggering that “harm gene”, but as you show with the Trump example, one can make up stories out of whole cloth, i.e., propaganda for political purposes. I guess we’ve known about that since that Schicklgruber guy figured it out with The Big Lie.
My empirical evidence about the dangers of guns was formed early on, when the only living being in danger of being shot was a grouse or pheasant. If one grew up in a high crime inner city area, one’s empirical evidence of gun harm would be based on seeing the wrong end of the gun.
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I ask this question in earnest: why is there such a desire (or at least a dominant narrative) to find “common ground?”
In my experience, “common ground” is often some sort of blended average of a diverse range of opinions that often doesn’t amount to much. In my corporate career of almost 25 years, I’ve learned that “common ground” type “solutions” are generally good in very high risk situations where risk avoidance is paramount, but in most negotiations that’s not a “win” for either side and it generally doesn’t usually yield a good result. Maybe it’s different in this context, but I’d need to be persuaded of that.
In terms of this book: does the author talk at all about the five big personality traits and how this can cause different people to see the same issue very differently? To wit: I rate very low on the trait of agreeableness, while my wife rates very highly. This one small facet of our personalities often colors how we an approach and solve problems so differently. I imagine that fear (or my preferred term: risk aversion) would also be colored heavily by a blend of these personality traits and one’s lived experiences, in the same way that a photograph is just as much about the film and the lens as it is about the subject matter.
As for statistics: I am not in favor of throwing statistics at policy issues. Statistics, too, are like photographs: they’re as much a reflection of the person taking the photo as they are of the subject matter being photographed. It’s far too easy in statistics to tell the story that one wants to tell, and for this thin veneer of “science” to become a cudgel against differing opinions. The CDC study about “guns being the number one killer of kids!!!” is an excellent example of this: if one peels back the emotional bullshittery and looks at the data, what one finds is a single statistical outlier (black kids in their late teens) that skew the mean pretty wildly.
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Thanks for this comment, Michael…..it really saved me a lot of writing.
The “common ground” issue reminds me of the “Dodo bird verdict”; “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.” Such “common ground” is often good for community relations and a kumbaya moment, but less so with regard to productive outcomes. Just because all move together, it does not validate the direction. Lemmings would tell us that.
I also agree that individual differences – the “biopsycho” part – genes, environment, and their interaction – of a “biopsychosocial” model are often neglected. Much of this seems to reflect work on persuasion from social psychology. How the information is presented is one thing, but the characteristics of the receiver are also critical. For instance, different routes to persuasion are more or less effective based on individuals’ intrinsic motivation to engage in effortful cognition. I suspect such interest is at an all-time low.
Statistics? Based on my long history in academia, as statistics have gotten “fancier” they have become less believable. They should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism. I often have to remind my students that their dissertation is not a project about what they can do with statistics, but about human behavior. Then I ask them to persuade me that I should care.
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Your comment on statistics reminds me of that Kalesan paper published in The Lancet about a decade ago. Cherry picked data, some of it flat wrong. But it was picked up as gospel by the popular press. Or for that matter, a book a college math major friend of mine had on his shelf: How to Lie With Statistics.
There seems to be a lack of good, impartial peer review in this field.
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I think the anecdote over statistics/facts isn’t so much that facts “don’t work” at all, it’s that anecdotes with some evidence allow people to “evolve” their position on an issue without having to all at once acknowledge they were simply incorrect. They can start adopting the facts and integrating them into their new position at their own pace. Reasoning following emotional reaction.
No one wants to feel stupid, or credulous in believing false information, particularly if that belief was based on emotion and might have been seen as obviously wrong if they had bothered to look at the situation at all. “What a fool I was!”
Debate Clubs work because you are essentially playing a game. Debating normal people with an emotional or ego investment in their beliefs, particularly if they have a rational degree of not really “caring” about the subject except in the abstract, is unlikely to generate anything more than resistance and a shutdown. The facts may crack the ego wall later, but it takes a lot of character to admit being wrong even if they do.
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As for being influenced by “facts” — that can only work if one trusts the other side not to try to deceive. To promote gun control, I have seen statistics being used in ways that would never be considered acceptable in, say, medical nutrition — “Is this food healthy or unhealthy? We must carefully test the correlations we discover to avoid falsely assuming causation.” (That’s aside from the withholding for information that supports the pro-gun side, and the out-and-out lying about what legislative proposals will or will not accomplish._
As for me, I supposed I became predisposed to support the pro-gun side even when I had never owned a firearm upon being disgusted by people claiming that high rates of burglary and robbery were things we simply most tolerate because — What could anyone do about it?
American pioneers and settlers had not police and few neighbors, yet were able to deal with rattlesnakes, packs of wolves, bears both black and brown, cougars, bobcats, hostile Indians, and all sorts of desperados. If we could tame the Wild West, it’s just not plausible to me that Americans today can have not choice but to live at the mercy of street criminals.
And when I learned that “shall-issue” concealed handgun carry permit laws did not cause any problems (beyond those inherent in a society where gun ownership in the home is permitted) — yet were viciously opposed — I realized that it was the intention of those on the other side to force us to live at the mercy of street criminals.
And I don’t think that’s ethical.
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