Opinions, Facts, Beliefs
“There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you. ”
Do you sometimes find yourself in a conversation that begins to feel like an argument?
What you thought was an exchange of ideas begins to feel like you are being asked to change your mind in favor of the other person’s ideas.
You are being persuaded and the process starts early.
A second grade class I visited was learning about opinions, facts, and beliefs. Their assignment: What is your favorite season? Why do you believe this season is the best? Choose four facts to support your opinion? You are going to write a paragraph to persuade someone to agree with your opinion. While this assignment may seem like pretty heavy lifting for second graders, we, as initiators or recipients, engage in this persuasive process of asserting an opinion based on selected facts daily. Persuasive activities range in seriousness from what to eat for dinner to when to send military force to reinforce a political stand.
We use our beliefs, which are based on the facts we choose to support our opinions, to explain and negotiate life. One of the best statements I ever heard from a mental health provider: We are all on the spectrum. Perhaps if we think about opinions as being on a spectrum, one we can slide along depending on knowledge, values, and life circumstances, we can suspend judgement for those whose opinions are in a different spot on the spectrum than our own.
How do we accomplish this? Let me describe how I would have structured the lesson for the second graders. Once each student had completed the graphic organizer to show the four facts listed to support their preferred season, the students would gather by season to compile their reasons into one list, solicit ideas to add, and discuss why they picked the facts they did. After the composite lists were compiled, each group would share their list with the class, ask clarifying questions, and discuss meaning and experiences supporting choices. As a class, students would collectively write a poem about seasons. Each student would have the option of writing and illustrating an original poem or copying and illustrating the class poem.
In this process, students individually decide what they believe and the important facts to support their opinion. By working with others of similar opinions, they discover additional facts and explore the contexts of those facts. Students learn more about why people believe the way they do and become aware the same word can hold different meanings for others.
Perhaps the student knows the holidays occurring in each season. Perhaps the student knows about astronomy and the seasonal night skies. Maybe the student knows when different events and exhibits occur throughout the year. Maybe the length of sunlight during the day is important knowledge for choosing a season. Perhaps the family has a seasonal adventure plan.
Perhaps the family attends church services on Sunday or maybe multiple days during the week. Another family does not attend services except on special occasions. Maybe a family does not attend services and is agnostic if not atheist. Maybe the student’s family has lived in the United States for generations. Perhaps the student is the first generation to be born in the United States. Maybe families observe different holidays, have different traditions, or use different languages for home and celebrations.
If a student enjoys playing soccer, baseball, or flag football, spring means the return of sports. Spring is a favorite for those who enjoy flowers, planting, and longer hours of light. If school is hard or boring, then summer may be a first choice. Summer is a choice for playing every day with neighborhood friends or at the parks. Those who suffer miserably from grass allergies, may welcome the rain cleansed air of winter. If Christmas is the only time a student gets to spend time with dad, then winter may be the choice. An only child of working parents may look forward to seeing friends when school starts in the fall. A child with uncertain days may welcome the return of the routine and certainty of a school schedule.
Through sharing across season choices, students begin to understand and appreciate that similarities and differences in beliefs reflect different knowledge, values, and life circumstances. Creating a composite product helps students understand and value the process of using different opinions to see a whole picture. Examining beliefs as an individual’s opinion supported by facts contributes to each student becoming more self-aware. Expressing an opinion and sharing facts while constructing shared understanding builds a student’s sense of agency as well as skills of empathy. Instead of taking a position and persuading someone to change theirs, this process is designed for appreciation – “Now I understand why spring is your favorite season!”
Understanding and appreciation does not mean you need to change your opinion. It does mean you create space for those whose opinions are different from your own. It does mean you realize facts are selective and are relative to beliefs and experiences. It does mean you can extend your knowledge and see a bigger picture. At the immediate and low level, it means less bickering and squabbling at school, at home, and in meetings. At the high level, it means opportunities for realizing a satisfactory and engaged life, creating accessible communities, and contributing to political processes unsupportive of WAR – the extreme outcome of We Are Right persuasion.
At the operative level of daily life, knowing the relationship between opinions, facts, and beliefs supports autonomy and balance despite the onslaught of marketing experienced in every aspect of life – what to purchase, what to do, what to feel, and what to think. Edward Bernays rightly identified the power of marketing as “The Engineering of Consent”. Understanding the belief process of choosing facts to support opinions provides us with a fundamental way to negotiate what Amanda Taub identified as information tribalism – the tendency to learn facts that support our world view rather than facts that challenge it.
Why is knowing and incorporating this process of understanding and appreciating other’s world view into our way of negotiating life important? In a politicized environment of complex problems with seemingly unending needs, immediate time frames, and insufficient funds, it is difficult to choose a collaborative rather than a competitive process. Yet, while the question is never as easy as “What is your favorite season?”, the frame of who benefits and how they benefit may be. When the goal is to persuade someone to change their opinion and accept yours, there are winners and losers, a smaller range of acceptable opinions, and individuals have fewer choices of how to express their thoughts. When the goal is to explore all opinions and create a composite product, everyone is a participant, the range expands to include all opinions, and individuals can choose how they want to express their thoughts.
If you are trying to sell someone a product, then persuasion is an important skill. If you are working on a complex problem, then inclusive and collaborative thinking is the starting point of seeing the whole problem from multiple perspectives, creating a full range of questions, generating short- and long-term solution goals, and planning a course of action to align and leverage resources. If you are short on time or have a power position to reinforce, persuasion is the tactic of choice to align support with immediate goals to benefit you and selected participants. If you value effectiveness over efficiency, leadership over authority, and community over self, you choose a process to align support with long term goals to benefit all.
Like the second graders, we need to know “What do I believe and why do I believe it?” Unlike the second graders using their facts to persuade others to change their opinion, we need to understand the relationship between selected facts, development of beliefs, and formation of world view. We need to understand we are on points along a continuum of world views that are situationally and culturally influenced. We need to understand how appreciation of other worldviews and choice of process is related to inclusion and exclusion. We need to be aware of who benefits when the goals are expediency and authority and who benefits when the goals are long term effectiveness and full participation supporting individual choice. As with the second grade assignment, this assignment is heavy lifting for all of us but, unlike the second grade assignment that created winners and losers, we need to make winners of us all so we can effectively address complex societal problems.
