I often precede an essay or talk that touches on economics by admitting that I am not an economist. In similar vein I must state at the outset that I’m not a psychologist. However, for many years I have been in situations where a slight working knowledge of psychology helps. Commonly, this has involved the issue of individual or group beliefs that have become so ingrained no catechism of facts can sway the thinking.
Polarisation is a universal paathology. It shows up in village councils in India, in WhatsApp groups in Nigeria, in family Line chats in Japan, and in student assemblies in Europe. Wherever we have politics, markets, beliefs and fear, a new sport has emerged: the competitive recital of facts. Election cycles, trade disputes, and battles over identity have become data contests, with each side armed to the teeth with charts, studies and links.
If facts are supposed to enlighten, why do they so often darken the room? What if the assumption that more data will fix our disagreements is not only flawed, but itself part of the problem?
We like to tell ourselves that modern society establishes reality through unassailable evidence, verified by truth‑telling authorities and governed through measurement. That project has brought undeniable benefits. Yet it has also encouraged a peculiar superstition: that human beings routinely change their minds when confronted with “the evidence”. Is that how we actually behave, or is this simply how certain institutions in a particular civilisation justify their power, while older forces of myth, identity, faith and propaganda continue to shape what we treat as real across different cultures?
Across different regions, research in political psychology and cognitive science suggests that when people experience disagreement as an assault on their group identity or moral commitments, they often discount disconfirming information, become more certain of their original view and downgrade the trustworthiness of opposing sources. This pattern has been observed around issues as varied as vaccination, climate, immigration and national history.
If that is even roughly accurate, then the “fact war” is not just futile. It is structurally primed to escalate mistrust. We are not short of information. We are starved of shared meaning.
To restore a semblance of sanity to our conversations, we need to step back from the skirmishes and look at the architecture of belief. Every society operates within a broad worldview: a civilisational story about what is real, what matters and what’s possible. These worldviews are not abstract curiosities. They coagulate into world‑systems—economic, legal, technological and political arrangements that shape our daily lives.
Take the modern growth‑centric economic paradigm. It manifests in trade regimes, corporate governance codes, property rights, advertising, education and even the way we talk about “human capital”. Underneath this system lie a handful of core assumptions: that competition drives progress, that self‑interest is a reliable organising principle, that nature is primarily a stock of resources. Are these assumptions objectively true, or are they habits of thought that faded into invisibility through constant reinforcement?
Different cultures encode different answers. In some Andean communities, the idea of buen vivir (good living) centres reciprocity and ecological harmony rather than individual accumulation. Many Indigenous cosmologies in Australia, the Amazon or the Arctic regard land as kin, not as property. Islamic finance embeds a different understanding of risk and profit than Western shareholder capitalism. None of these worldviews is static. Each is being continuously reinterpreted by people dealing with smartphones, pandemics, algorithmic systems and collapsing ecosystems.
When we argue about trade wars, DEI programmes, immigration, gender, national sovereignty or “wokeness”, we’re rarely arguing about isolated policies. It’s a clash of worldviews. We’re defending or attacking entire systems that shape who benefits, who matters, who suffers and who is ultimately rendered visible. Facts certainly appear in these battles, but mostly as ammunition, not as bridges. We are firing statistics from inside different conceptual universes.
Is it reasonable to expect facts alone to resolve such collisions, or is that akin to expecting a dictionary to reconcile rival theologies?
Those of us trained in strategy, systems thinking or the sciences are particularly prone to a refined arrogance: the belief that if only people understood what we understand, they would see the world as we do. “If they saw the evidence on climate, productivity, inequality, justice or mental health, they would surely change.” But why should they? Why would anyone abandon the narratives that confer identity, dignity and safety just because we have a sharper model or a better graph?
In work with governments, corporations and civil society groups, especially in times of crisis, I have seen the same pattern play out in very different cultures. Prominent individuals call for “evidence- based” decisions. Consultants assemble data. A polished presentation appears. Then, in the room where actual decisions are made, something else takes over. Quietly, older scripts reassert themselves: national mythology, historical trauma, class resentment, religious conviction, fear of humiliation, hunger for status. The facts are acknowledged, rearranged and domesticated, then bent to fit pre‑existing commitments.
The limitation here is not a lack of intelligence or integrity. It is that our deepest commitments are rarely formed at the level of information. They emerge from experience, attachment and the stories handed down by families, media, schooling and ritual. A young woman in Lagos, a farmer in Vietnam, a factory worker in Germany and a coder in Silicon Valley may all read the same statistics on globalisation yet draw entirely different conclusions, because those numbers are woven into distinct lived realities.
So when we confront someone with a barrage of facts to prove they are wrong, we misread the nature of the disagreement. We’re not merely inviting them to update a spreadsheet. We are, often without realising it, asking them to loosen their grip on a story that explains who they are and where they belong. Is it any wonder that they cling tighter?
If fact‑flinging fails, what might a more fruitful conversation look like? Not a polite exchange of slogans, but an encounter that can alter how we see the world and each other. This cuts straight to the core of my mission: making the world work for everyone by “turning conversations that matter into actions that make a difference”.
We could start by dropping the idea that the aim of such a conversation is to win. The winner‑loser script mirrors the competitive logic of our economic and political systems. It rewards cleverness over reflection and volume over depth. It leaves both sides more entrenched. What happens if we shift the purpose from winning to understanding? Not automatic agreement, not forced compromise, but genuine appreciation.
That shift changes the texture of interaction. I no longer need to corner you into admission. I need to discover the inner architecture of your belief. What does your stance protect? Which fears, hopes and memories does it express? How does your local reality—your work, your kinship networks, your faith, your media environment—shape your reading of events? Asking such questions is not a performance technique. It’s a deliberate discipline you find embedded in my Transformational Narrative method.
Psychologists and conflict mediators working in very different settings—addiction clinics, community disputes, post‑conflict reconciliation, political canvassing—have all documented a recurring theme. Approaches such as motivational interviewing, deep canvassing and restorative dialogue appear to work better when people feel that their perspective has been understood accurately, that they are not being ridiculed or morally shamed, and that they retain both dignity and agency over their personal judgements. Under those conditions, they are more open to reflecting, admitting uncertainty and sometimes shifting their stance. The size and durability of such changes vary, and the evidence is still clustered in particular regions and issues. Even so, the direction is hard to ignore.
Crucially, this does not mean abandoning rigour or reducing everything to personal stories. It means changing the sequence. Listening first doesn’t surrender reality. It creates the conditions under which reality can be faced together rather than hurled around like a weapon.
Most arguments begin with a what: What do you think about X? What’s your position on Y? What’s your evidence? Yet the conversations that actually reconfigure relationships tend to turn on the why and the who. Why does this matter to you? Who shaped your view? Who stands to gain if your belief prevails? Who is afraid of what I am saying?
If I enter a conversation silently thinking, “What is wrong with this person?” the outcome will be largely predetermined. My curiosity is a façade; my aim is diagnosis and correction. But if I start instead with, “What is it like to be this person, in this place, with this history?” I open a very different line of inquiry. That question doesn’t weaken my convictions. It obliges me to recognise that my own beliefs are also situated, also partial, also the product of conditioning.
Could it be that the most subversive act in a polarised society is not to declare a forbidden fact, but to ask an honest question and wait for the answer? That was what I tried to do in a recent piece analysing antisemitism in the context of our inability to accept truths that chafe against our innermost principles.
From the feedback I learnt how one simple discipline can change the tone of almost any encounter. Before stating your view, attempt to articulate the other person’s position in a way they recognise as fair. Not a caricature, not a clever summary laced with contempt, but a description they would accept. Only when they say, “Yes, that’s roughly how I see it,” do you respond. This slows the conversation, but perhaps slowness is exactly what our feverish discourse requires.
The obsession with “changing people’s minds” hides a deeper premise: that reality is a fixed object and the correct ideas about it must conquer. Yet if world-systems are continuously re‑made through our interactions, then every conversation is a site of world‑making, not just opinion‑swapping.
When a parent in Jakarta and a teenager in London manage to talk about gender without contempt, they are not merely updating beliefs. They are negotiating the boundaries of dignity in their respective cultures. When a trade unionist in Mexico and a supply‑chain manager in China speak about automation and jobs without reducing each other to stereotypes, they are quietly redesigning what “progress” might mean in their interconnected worlds. Such micro‑shifts as these rarely make the evening news, yet they accumulate. They shape which policies become thinkable, which technologies are welcomed, and which public figurehead we tolerate.
What if we treated every difficult conversation as a laboratory for a different society? A society that is not trapped in the brittle opposition between “traditional values” and “modern freedoms”, nor between “local identity” and “global integration”, but is capable of holding multiple truths at once without dissolving into paralysis or confused fury. Not an easy relativism, but a mature pluralism that recognises the partiality of every viewpoint, including our own. The precondition for such a society is not an endless supply of new information. It’s a different quality of attention.
In almost every culture I visit, people report a similar experience: being surrounded by data yet starved of being seen. The world is saturated with content, but very thin on presence. Technologies connect us faster than ever, yet partition us into echo chambers where we encounter genuine difference mainly in its most hostile form.
To restore productive conversation, we must relearn an ancient capacity: staying present with another human being whose worldview threatens ours, without immediately resorting to fight, flight or freeze. Presence is not agreement. It’s the refusal to reduce the other to a category: racist, woke, nationalist, globalist, believer, heretic. It’s the refusal to outsource judgement to the latest trending outrage.
Can such presence be cultivated at scale? Structured experiments in deliberative democracy, citizen assemblies, truth and reconciliation commissions and community mediation—from South Africa to South Korea, from Ireland to Mongolia—indicate that under certain conditions, ordinary people can hold difficult differences with a depth of listening that outstrips much of our political theatre. Participants often report higher trust in each other and more considered positions after these processes, and in some cases measurable attitudinal change has been documented. Yet these initiatives are fragile. They can be co‑opted, underfunded, or drowned out by polarising media ecologies and unresolved material grievances. Their long‑term impact on whole societies remains uncertain.
This points to a disconcerting truth. Dialogue practices can help to improve the conditions for mutual understanding. They do not, on their own, neutralise power asymmetries or remove the incentives of actors who profit from polarisation. When economic insecurity, corruption or historical injustice are extreme, can even the most skilful conversations achieve more than a temporary truce?
If I have a personal bias, it’s towards heresy—not for its own sake, but because systems in crisis cling to their myths like barnacles to a sinking hull, even when those myths are dragging them under. One common myth is that we’re rational creatures who simply need better facts. Another is that our divisions are purely ideological, rather than expressions of deeper collisions between implicit worldviews and the systems that enact them. A third is the belief that technology will somehow rescue us from the consequences of our own immaturity.
Challenging these myths doesn’t offer instant comfort. It implies that we need to refine our arguments, but also, and far more importantly in my opinion, evolve our capacity for shared meaning‑making. That evolution will not be led solely by algorithms, nor by charismatic saviours like the Nigel Farages or Donald Trumps of this world, but by countless conversations across kitchen tables, community halls, factory floors, boardrooms, refugee camps and digital platforms.
So the next time you feel yourself gearing up for a data‑driven duel over politics, identity, trade or any other live wire, you might pause and ask: am I trying to win, or am I trying to understand? Am I treating this person as a problem to be solved, or as a participant in the same turbulent experiment called life? Which worldview am I defending—perhaps unconsciously—and which system does it reinforce?
Then, perhaps, you may risk a different move: set aside your favourite statistic, just for a moment, and ask, with genuine interest, “How did you come to see it that way?” What follows will not be tidy. It may not end in agreement. It may be shaped and limited by the larger forces in which you are both entangled. But it’s likely to be more real than any exchange of weaponised facts.
In an age choking on information, influence may well shift to those who can still listen—and who can turn that listening into new ways of living together.