Facts Can Wait
In a time when objective data and consensus reality are inconsistently valued in society, it’s important to reaffirm that facts matter. At the same time, when it comes to persuasive communications, facts can wait. That’s because the neuroarchitecture of the brain invokes a specific sequence of regions in decision-making.
Anyone who has studied behavioral economics knows that we spend over 80% of our waking hours navigating the world with System 1(1), a lightning-fast set of circuits that enable us to quickly process information and make decisions while using relatively little energy. When we’re thinking deeply—as when calculating the square root of 123—we use “System 2,” which is powerful, but slow and resource-intensive.
The difference in speed is wide enough that we’ve all experienced it many times(2). If you’re in a room and someone walks in when you’re not expecting it, you may startle, then realize who it is and relax. That difference between “gasp!” and “oh, it’s you” is the speed differential between System 1 and System 2.
Our brains heavily favor System 1 for two important reasons:
It’s fast. When early humans sat around the Serengeti 1,000,000 years ago, those that got a “funny feeling” and took off running survived and became our ancestors. Those that pondered too long about that funny feeling ended up as lion food. And so we’ve all inherited this fast circuitry.
It’s thrifty. Because those circuits work so quickly, there’s not a lot of cellular activity, at least compared to the massive processing load of System 2. This conserves energy for later in case an emergency arises—for example, lions.
Snap decisions are entirely made using System 1. But for decisions we can think about in advance, human brains follow a predictable pattern:
The prefrontal cortex (behind our foreheads) weighs relevant factors and makes a recommendation
That recommendation is sent to the “decision switch” near the center of the brain. This switch simply decides A or B? Even complex decisions ultimately reduce to a collection of binary choices—which is why they take a long time to make.
Then the decision goes back to the prefrontal cortex for review.
Usually our decision matches the recommendation and we feel satisfaction at having been so smart. But sometimes we have the unsettling experience of making a choice contrary to what we’d planned. How can this happen?
The reality is that if someone questions a choice that differed from our original intent, our reply is eerily accurate: “It just felt right.”
That statement is accurate because the decision switch lives in a region of the brain that deals heavily with emotions(3). In fact, the two are so closely linked that it’s fair to say that every decision we make in our entire lives is ultimately emotional.
Even highly analytical decisions are contextualized in emotion. Saved the company money? Feelings of pride in one’s honor, duty, and resourcefulness. Bought the hybrid minivan instead of the supercharged coupe? Feelings of responsibility, care, maturity, and self-respect.
One important result of System 1 or System 2 activation is that the activated system draws resources to itself. In brain terms, those resources are glucose and oxygen, delivered through the bloodstream. Accordingly, blood flows towards the activated area and away from the un-activated area.
This is why getting really emotional tends to impair our ability to think logically, and why talking about emotions tends to make them feel less extreme(4).
It’s also why it’s hard to say the perfect comeback in the heat of the moment, but easy to think of one after the moment has passed. In the moment, the blood is in the emotional center, not in the processing-intensive language areas. Once the emotional moment has passed, blood flow begins to equalize. That takes a few minutes to happen, and the conflict is over by the time the rational part of the brain is ready with the perfect comeback.
These facts line up to define some immutable truths about persuasive communication:
System 1 is fast, System 2 is slow.
System 1 is emotional. System 2 is rational.
Decisions are emotional.
Whichever system we activate inhibits the other system.
It takes a long time for blood flow to equalize, and for the inhibited system to come back online.
As professional communicators, this means we are continually confronted with a choice: Do I want to make people feel right now, or do I want to make them think? It’s either-or, you cannot have both, because the brain simply doesn’t work that way.
Furthermore, if we activate the wrong system, it will be a long time (in brain terms) before we have an opportunity to speak to the right one. So what’s the best thing to do?
It depends on your goal.
If you want people to make a decision, you must communicate emotionally. Emotions are where decisions get made. Unfortunately, people get this wrong all the time, and end up ruining their efforts as soon as they’ve begun. This error is particularly common among scientists, engineers, attorneys, educators, and non-profits.
That’s why appeals that lead with data perform poorly. A surefire way to shut down the emotional centers is by opening with facts and data, as in “According to the January 2022 PIT Count, 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness across America. This amounts to roughly 18 out of every 10,000 people. The vast majority (72 percent) were individual adults, but a notable share (28 percent) were people living in families with children.”(5)
In other words, making people think first literally shuts down their ability to feel.
Conversely, this is why the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ (ASPCA) advertisement set to Sarah McLachlan’s Angel is so effective. In just the first two years following its release, that advertisement alone raised over $30 million dollars for the ASPCA. To this day, it remains their most effective fundraising asset in almost 160 years of operation.(6)
If you only remember one thing from this article, hold on to this: feelings win.
After reading this far, you may be wondering, “Is there a role for data? Facts do matter, right?” Absolutely. Facts and data are vitally important, but it’s essential that they be used at the right times.
What are the “right” times to use facts and data? Simple—the opposite of when you need to use emotion. In other words, keep facts and data at a distance from the moment of decision.
A series of communications that identify a problem can lean into facts and data to articulate the scale of the problem or how entrenched it is. Awareness campaigns, long-game marketing, and donor and board cultivation sequences are all excellent opportunities to deploy facts, statistics, and other hard numbers that make your case.
Then when you get to the moment of the ask or sales pitch, leave all that behind and go for their heartstrings.
Depending on the size of the ask and the stakes of the decision, you may be able to make your ask right then. For larger questions, you may still need to keep pushing to secure the decision you’re after.
Does this mean you should double down with another appeal to emotion? Definitely not.
The reason is because we have a built-in circuit breaker to protect us from impulsivity. We intuitively know that acting from pure emotion can be disadvantageous—or disastrous. “Don’t send an angry email without waiting a day…” When emotion creates an inclination to act, even more emotion will make us suspicious of our own impulsive nature. So we wait for System 2 to catch up, and then see if it agrees with System 1.
We’ve all experienced this phenomenon so often that we barely notice when it happens. For example, when we’re sitting in a dimly-lit room and a killer jumps out of a closet with a knife, we react instantly: eyes wide, stomach tight, breath shallow, palms sweaty…and then System 2 reminds us that we’re in a movie theater and we relax instead of running for the exits.
After making an emotional appeal, you’ll want to reinforce your proposed decision with data—but don’t rush it. You need to pace the conversation so the blood flow can start returning to the prefrontal cortex.
In other words, the ideal sequence for persuasive communication is:
Make ‘em feel
Create a pause
Make ‘em think
Recall the feelings
Make your ask
But…how? How do we make audiences feel appropriate emotions that will lead them to action? Fortunately, there is an effective, reliable strategy for this, and it has stood the test of time for a few hundred thousand years.
Story.
Stories are the most primal form of human communication, and are central to our survival—more on that in another article—and so we have evolved to have physiological reactions to stories. Specifically, our bodies release cortisol and oxytocin when we experience a story.(7)
Cortisol drives focus and attention. Oxytocin drives empathy and bonding, and under its influence we tend to mirror the emotional experience of the storyteller and other audience members. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) scans show that listeners’ brain activity aligns when listening to the same story.(8)
Storytelling aligns listeners’ emotions as they bond to each other and the storyteller during the shared experience of the story. And because we’ve evolved to depend on stories for our individual and collective survival, this method of communication is almost infinitely effective.
So how do you tell a great story?
Book a story training for your team, and I’ll show you!
Yes! I want story training for my team!
Scientific American, Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice [Excerpt]
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Systems 1 and 2 thinking processes and cognitive reflection testing in medical students
Harvard Business Review, Decisions and Desire
Science Daily, Putting Feelings Into Words Produces Therapeutic Effects In The Brain
National Alliance to End Homelessness, State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition
redbook, Sarah McLachlan Reveals the Truth About Those Sad ASPCA Ads
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative
Adam Olenn is the founder of Rustle & Spark, a branding and marketing agency.