Why Can't People Agree on a Shared Set of Facts?
Nir Eyal on the power of belief, the atheist's case for prayer, and the origins of self-confidence
Why do peoples often fight over a shared set of facts?
It’s hard to imagine a question that pops up more frequently in my professional and private life. When I’m covering the day’s news, I’m astonished that commentators on opposite sides of an issue can look at the same set of facts and determine that the Trump administration is either brilliant or bone-headed; that artificial intelligence is or isn’t replacing jobs today; or that abundance represents an faithful effort to jumpstart urban housing and clean-energy production or a corporatist conspiracy to destroy the left. I have my particular biases in each of the above debates, but for the purposes of this article I’m not interested in declaring who is right so much as I’m interested in asking why disagreement seems inevitable when all parties have access to the same information.
This gap between reality and interpretation isn’t contained to the news cycle. I’m sure you know friends, partners, colleagues, or lovers who have passionate fights because there is a disagreement over the meaning of something that was said, even if all parties involved can agree on the literal transcript of the conversation.
We do not live in the world as it exists, but rather we live in the world as we interpret it. Our interpretations are always fragments of the fuller picture. As the author Nir Eyal explains in his new book Beyond Belief, the full sensory input of every second of life is a gusher of information that we are neurologically incapable of ingesting with perfect fidelity:
Your conscious mind can handle around fifty bits of data every second. That’s the scope of your conscious attention. This is roughly equivalent to reading one short sentence every second, just enough information to process a simple thought or instruction.
It seems like a reasonable amount of information to hold in your head at any moment. But compare that to 11 million bits of total raw data collected by your senses in the same amount of time. That’s the equivalent of seeing every word of War and Peace flash before your eyes twice per second.
Put those two numbers together: 50 bits versus 11 million bits. The gap between those two numbers is why we’re aware of only a tiny fraction of what our brains actually perceive. In short, we live life through a keyhole. This extreme filtering is why two people can witness the exact same event and walk away with entirely different experiences.
By this calculation, the experience of life is 0.000045% of reality. Or, put differently, we are doomed to spend our lives fighting over interpretations because in any given moment, we are missing 99.999955% of what there is.
In the following conversation from my podcast Plain English, Eyal and I talk about the power of beliefs, the science of placebos, the contagion of negativity, and why action often precedes understanding.
REALITY IS A BOOK, EXPERIENCE IS A SENTENCE
DEREK THOMPSON: I want you to tell me two theses of your book—the explicit on-the-book-jacket thesis, and the subterranean thesis, the deeper idea the book is scratching at. What’s the above-ground thesis, and what’s the underground idea?
NIR EYAL: The big idea is: beliefs are tools, not truths. Practically speaking, I’m helping people consider the beliefs they hold, ask themselves whether they’re limiting or liberating, and then keep the beliefs that serve them and let go of the ones that hurt them.
The deeper idea—one people are very uncomfortable with when they encounter it in the research—is that we don’t see reality clearly. We all think we perceive reality as it is. And the truth is, that’s just not the case. The brain can’t see reality as it is; it predicts reality. Right now, your brain is absorbing 11 million bits of information—the light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice, the ambient temperature of the room. That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. However, your conscious attention can only process 50 bits. That’s one sentence per second. You are only consciously aware of 0.000045% of reality entering your brain.
How does the brain make sense of all this? It predicts reality. We all live in a simulation inside our own minds. Our reality is filtered based on our beliefs. Study after study shows how people can observe the exact same event and see something completely different. If you’re on a diet, you see food as larger. If you’re afraid of heights, you see distances as further. Watch a football game: the ref makes a call, and fans of one team see it as absolutely correct, fans of the other team see it as ridiculous. Think about geopolitics—people committed to the belief that one side is right see every event through that lens. We do not see reality clearly. We do not see people clearly. We see others as we believe they are.
THOMPSON: That’s a beautiful idea—that reality is manifold and our lived experience is single-fold. Every moment presents a War and Peace worth of information for our eyes and ears and smell to behold, and every moment we are getting one sentence of the book that is reality. Taken seriously, it’s a case for extraordinary patience with other people—with our partners, our friends, our political enemies.
I want to propose another subterranean thesis. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has this concept of “liquid modernity”—the modern world is characterized by how ephemeral our beliefs and our identities are when we’re unmoored from ancient traditions. The single word for a brief negative belief might be anxiety—a brief negative belief about the future. We’ve got plenty of that. What we’re lacking, and this might be directly related to the decline of religion, is durable positive beliefs about ourselves and our future. Not just habits, not just hacks, but durable positive beliefs. How does that idea sit with you?
EYAL: This is exactly the intellectual habit that changed my life. So much of our suffering is self-perpetuated—we build these intellectual cages of suffering of our own device. Whether it’s personal problems, interpersonal problems, national geopolitical problems, they all have the same source: we are creating our suffering.
It doesn’t mean we need to accept things as they are or agree with everyone. It’s that we want to reduce our suffering and increase our motivation to continue to participate. Maybe it’s useful if I tell a quick story of how this changed my life.
REALITY VS. INTERPRETATION VS. TRUTH
My mom had her 74th birthday. She was in Central Florida, I was in Singapore. I went through a lot of trouble to get her flowers—found the florist with the best reviews, called to confirm delivery, made sure they wouldn’t wilt in the heat. I went to bed at 1 a.m. and said, “Nir, you put in some good effort, she’s going to love the flowers, you’re a good son.” That’s not what happened.
I called her the next day: “Mom, happy birthday—did you get the flowers?” She said, “Yes, thank you. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead, and I wouldn’t order from that florist again.” To which I blurted out, “Well, that’s the last time I buy you flowers.” That went over about as well as you’d expect.
My wife Julie was on the call and afterward said, “Nir, do you want to do a turnaround on this?” I said, “No, I do not want to do your touchy-feely hocus-pocus. I need to vent.” But I knew enough about what the research says about venting—that it does nothing but solidify this effigy of the person. We don’t see people; we see our beliefs about people. Venting only reinforces, “She always does that, that’s so like her.” I had enough sense not to vent, and instead I did what’s called a turnaround.
A turnaround comes from inquiry-based stress reduction, developed by Byron Katie, with roots going back to Aristotle. The technique uses a few questions to help us see things from a different belief perspective. We’re not trying to change our minds—the brain hates changing its mind; it always wants to retreat into what’s kept it safe. We’re collecting a portfolio of perspectives.
Question one: is your belief true? My belief was: my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Question two: is it absolutely true? 100% of the time, no exceptions, no other possible interpretation? Well, I didn’t have perfect certainty. Maybe there was another explanation. Question three: who am I when I hold onto that belief? Short-tempered. I become this 13-year-old version of myself. Question four: who would I be without that belief? More patient. I’d feel lighter. I’d be more myself.
Then the turnaround itself: consider whether the exact opposite of what you believe could also be true. My existing belief: my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite: my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? She did thank me for the flowers. She was telling me a statement of fact—the flowers didn’t look so great. Does that necessarily mean it’s a judgment? Maybe not.
Here’s a third perspective: I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? I had rehearsed exactly the script of effusive praise I was expecting from my mother—
THOMPSON: “Oh my gosh, these flowers, they’re the greatest I’ve ever seen in my life.”
EYAL: Exactly. And when I didn’t get that, I lost it. So who was judging who? I was judging her response. Fourth perspective: I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That one wasn’t fun to consider at all, but turned out to be the most true. When I had spent all this time and money doing something nice and it didn’t work out perfectly, I judged myself—I was incompetent, I couldn’t even get nice flowers for my mother for her birthday. This is called a misattribution of emotion. I felt crummy about myself, and so the first person I could take it out on was going to get it. That’s exactly what I did.
Now I have four beliefs—a portfolio of perspectives. Which one is true? It doesn’t matter. Which one serves me best? That first belief had only one way out: she had to change so I could be happy. With the other three, I had agency. Instead of a belief that hurt me, I picked a belief that served me.
THOMPSON: I think a lot of people with experience in clinical psychology are going to hear what you just said and recognize it as DBT—Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, from [Marsha] Linehan. That idea, particularly useful with borderline personality disorder but broadly used in clinical practice, is about being comfortable sitting with two interpretations of reality that are in conflict with each other. One classic example: you walk into a room and your wife and daughter look at you and laugh. Interpretation one: they’re laughing at me, I’m always judged in this family, even though I work so hard. You can imagine the self-talk spiral that follows. Interpretation two: my wife and daughter were watching something and laughed as they turned to look at me. I don’t need to know which interpretation is reality. I need to be emotionally secure enough to live with the fact that both are plausible, without having to drill down to one truth. That ability to sit with opposite truths is really important for making one’s way through an emotional life.
