Today I was scrolling through a series of social media posts about politics. Yes, I know, I might as well down a spoonful of castor oil. But occasionally I find this an insightful activity for seeing what the digital age hath wrought on strangers’ abilities to talk to one another. Here’s a few posts I saw on a public reddit thread about vaccine safety, kicked off by a mother pregnant with her first child. The thread invites readers to “Respectfully debate me on vaccines”:

Contributor A: “I believe vaccines can save lives. I also believe that big pharma is trying to make us all sick for profit. I believe that vaccines have side effects. I don’t believe all vaccines are necessary. I believe certain ingredients in vaccines make your immune system weaker.”

Contributor B: “This is the wrong forum and I doubt anyone will take your bait. Science overwhelmingly supports vaccination. You probably need to go on a crunchy mom site full of woomeisters who don’t understand science to get what you’re looking for.”

Contributor A: “[I’m] not trying to ‘bait’ anyone. I want people who understand science, that’s why I posted here. Can’t really find any like minded people who are in the middle like me. Science also supports that vaccines can have side [e]ffects . . . plenty of pediatricians are ‘vaccine-friendly’ so they support vaccines but don’t believe that the CDC recommends them in the safest way.”

Contributor C: “You’re not in the middle. You’re wading around in the dumpster out back. Your ‘reasoning’ statements point to complete lack of understanding. Not trying to be a total ass — but let me poke at one of your statements: << If they get the slightest cough, straight to the doctor to get tested and get antibiotics. HA. Ha. Ha. ha. Oh yeah, doc’s gonna be right on that for you.”

If you want to lose faith in humanity quickly, you should read the rest of the thread. You can imagine how this “discussion” went. We know that the online disinhibition effect can make us feel less restrained in our communication with one another on the internet. If it’s difficult for people to hate others up close, distance has an opposite effect.

Where we might have thought twice about attacking someone verbally, offering a sarcastic remark, or being less civil toward a stranger, with less immediacy online we can easily lose empathy and “netiquette.”

There’s a lot to address in the content of the comments above. But I want to bracket the details of each for a moment to focus on a single, bigger-picture issue that exchanges like these represent. Lurking in such comments is a key assumption about the very purpose of talking to others. As least in the thread above, most of the time that purpose is to make truth claims. Less frequently, it’s seeking to explore and find out truths. That balance can shift. And that balance is worth paying attention to as a key communication and leadership skill.

I call it one’s “ratio of truth stating vs. seeking.”

Source: Canva AI, “On one side of a weighted scale, show someone using a loudspeaker. On the other side of the same weighted scale, show someone doing research.”

You Can Handle the Truth

Have you ever met someone who is absolutely, utterly certain about every single political issue out there? I’m always amazed to discover that for some people, who would readily admit to not knowing how to fix a carburetor or a laptop, the powers of omniscience are suddenly within reach the minute a political topic is raised. It’s as if a switch flips when presented with the lure of a social issue.

I’ve studied politics for about three decades and can tell you this: it’s still one of the most complex and chaotic terrains we humans tackle. Yet instead of the good dose of humility that proper mapping deserves, sometimes we take a not-at-all-honest stance in communicating that there’s nothing more to ever find out.

Or we use the selective exposure of certain media platforms, family and friends, or other limited sources to overstate our actual political knowledge. To be clear: this is an “us” issue. All of us have played some version of this game before.

At the same time, stating truths matters. Based on good evidence, we should take moral stands on public challenges. Given the urgency of issues such as housing and food insecurity, actions need taken without having complete knowledge about all aspects of every issue.

Firefighters don’t have knowledge about every single factor at play in entering a burning building. But the moment demands that they should quickly take in as much information as possible to make judgments and save lives while staying open to further learning. If a firefighter doesn’t expect to hear the voice of someone coming from a room filled with smoke, they won’t ignore that new development. They’ll adjust and act accordingly.

We need to hear others’ truth claims to understand our big, complicated world. We need to know what and who to trust. I don’t think any of us wants to go back to an age when doctors recommended smoking as a claim worth taking at face value. It’s easy to feel a “chronological snobbery” about such examples, but if you take it that far less is known about our world and universe than is known, there’s many truths we need to know.

If one wants to truly be truthful, the question of where truths come from leads us back to the opposite side of the ratio. No truth-stating is possible without someone deciding to seek truth to begin with. Every belief comes from somewhere, highlighting that the issue of “how” we know what we know comes before every single belief in a “what.”

How do you know that the sun is at the center of our solar system? An elementary school teacher may have talked about it (the how = teachers are a good way to receive knowledge), you saw a NASA YouTube video describing it (the how = videos from government sources on the internet are reliable), and you’ve looked up at the sky (the how = your eyes are a means to what’s real or not).

All those “hows” can, of course, be called into question as the basis for your “whats,” but the point is that some seeking from someone, somewhere, is always prior to the result of stating. By looking to the truth-seeking side of the ratio, lots of questions get raised about the quantity, quality, and type of evidence and reasons one has as support for their “truths.”

The Truth Shall Make You Seek

For our purposes, simply taking on the identity of “truth seeker” transforms the nature of our “truth-stating.” We’ll attempt to be a bit more qualified in what we know, how we know it, and what more there’s to ever find out about, well, anything. Nevertheless, we can’t stay in truth-seeking land forever. Whether it’s a spreading disease or unemployment trends, we need answers and actions to take on the challenges all around us.

One issue that shifting to the truth-seeking side helps us find our way through is the false equivalence between truth-seeking and having different opinions. The movement to have “viewpoint diversity” in universities can be deeply misguided if there’s no commitment to truth-seeking, for instance. The following example from Lisa Siraganian brings home this critical difference: 

“The logic of viewpoint diversity contains its own extinction, if truth really is the goal. Consider that a researcher in 1952, trying to figure out how DNA is structured, would need to survey all the theories and viewpoints on DNA structure up to that point before making an evidence-based opinion. DNA’s structure was still (just barely) a live question. But by 1954, our researcher wouldn’t need to study the theories of the triple-helix model, or the side-by-side model, at all, because by 1953 the double-helix model had been convincingly established. Our researcher could safely reject the triple-helix or side-by-side models—or simply ignore them, not even stopping to sniff at those particular diverse garden flowers—because the local question about DNA’s basic structure had been answered. Academics do this all the time because we are pursuing local truths. If we are even half-decent teachers, we are instructing our students how to do it too. On any particular topic, viewpoint diversity might be useful to initially survey competing theories, and once a consensus of the truth of that matter has been established, viewpoint diversity on that topic is rightly, habitually, dismissed.”

Siraganian finds that a similar approach is still operating for the humanities and other interpretive fields. Why argue for anything at all if you don’t think there’s some truth to what you’re saying, after all? And while coming to validated conclusions is important, there’s still room for supported change and amendments. Read: “supported” change. Not arguments with only selective, cherry-picked data that support what we want to be true, nor claims without a breadth and depth of evidence outside of oneself.

One’s approach to “change” itself makes the biggest difference in all of this. As Anderson writes, viewpoint diversity “imagines that individuals occupy identifiable political positions aligned with stable and explicit beliefs that do not change over time.” Where “authoritarians want fixity, and they project it onto their opponents,” remaining “open to change, self-critique, and revision” has never been more important.

Alternately, after a period of important “truth-stating,” this ratio reminds us to always get back to “truth-seeking” in a way that may even end up changing what we thought before. We wouldn’t have the light bulb, modern dentistry, or evidence-based therapy without an individual or group seeking to find out more about our physical and social worlds. Scientific revolutions require it.   

Like the reddit thread above, in our everyday lives opportunities for curiosity and “truth-seeking” often get dashed against the rocks all the “truth-stating” that ensues. Even the good intent of asking others questions can easily veer off in loaded, pointed, and closed directions, presuming truths in a way that cuts off the possibility of seeking.

All this highlights our need to keep the “ratios” in mind. Asking oneself, “how much time do I spend in one mode or the other?”—knowing that we all need both, to a certain extent—is a good way to keep ourselves committed to the virtues of honesty, humility, and accuracy.

The ratios also promote humor, as the possibilities of making mistakes, learning alternative interpretations, seeing the gaps between real and ideal, and the distance between what think we know and can be known come into view. If there’s no sense that any of us can be knocked off our pedestal every now and then, we’ll live in a joyless world.

From a leadership perspective, using the ratio as a skill to practice opens space for communication with others. Moreso, the ratio of truth seeking vs. stating can also help separate thoughtful persuasion from mindless propaganda. Couldn’t we all use a bit more of that?