Like Dr. Suess’s Grinch, I’ve puzzled ‘til my puzzler is
sore. The source of my puzzlement?
Contrary to what I’ve thought for much of my career, facts—no matter how
well presented—don’t necessarily help meet communication goals. In fact, facts
may hurt.
On the same day I was reviewing the keynote
address from the recent North American Congress on Conservation Biology (NACCB),
I ran across a New York Times article highlighting an issue prominent in the
keynote—the same facts mean different things to different people.
The New York Times piece, Why facts don’t
unify us, describes the findings of a study titled
How People
Update Beliefs about Climate Change: Good News and Bad News. In
this study, people with different beliefs on climate change became more
polarized in their views after being given the same scientific facts. While
this finding helps explain the wide rift on the subject of climate change, it
vexes the communicator in me.
