1

Introduction
Truth and Trust

F
acts rely on trust. To a greater extent than many of us would like
to admit, our perceptions of facts are not grounded on unchallenged
observations but instead on trust in others’ reports about things that
can be disputed. Even if we witnessed an event ourselves, we trust that our
own observations were not faulty or biased, mistaken or misremembered.
In the more common case that we hear or read about a political reality, we
trust that the source—​mainstream journalist, government official, polit-
ical leader, college professor, personal friend, ordained clergy, midnight
blogger—​is reliable. And if we hear of two dueling accounts of the truth,
we must decide which report we trust and which we ignore. Given the
necessity of trust, do we trust your facts or mine? For most citizens it is
not a hard choice—​we trust our facts. Our facts are the ones that match
our values. Our facts are the ones that are endorsed by our political party
and our social groups. Your facts do not have these characteristics, which
allows them to be discounted easily, even if they have empirical evidence
or expert opinion on their side.

The Meekness of Facts, the Aggressiveness of Facts

One of the core characteristics of facts is meekness. They do not assert

themselves but must be found and often dragged from concealment. They
can be pushed around by stronger beliefs like values and ideologies, and
they often retreat from loud voices. As value conflict, ideological po-
larization, and the uncivil discourse of recent American politics have
grown stronger, facts have cowered. In Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann

One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. Morgan Marietta and
David C. Barker, Oxford University Press (2019). © Morgan Marietta and David C. Barker.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190677176.003.0001
applauded the occasional “murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of
Brutal Facts.”1 But since Lippmann’s 1920s, facts have become lazier and
less inclined to fight theories. We now have relatively passive facts. By the
1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that “the facts are very
soft-​spoken.”2 By now, they can barely be heard at all above the noise.
On the other hand, we offer the metaphor of dueling facts—​violent phys-
ical conflict between contenders. American politics now includes continual
conflict over fact perceptions, including sometimes perplexed and sometimes
uncivil exchanges on television news, online, and in personal conversations
over contradictory understandings of reality. We call them dueling facts
because they come in recognized pairs engaged in combative contests for
respect, often over perceived insults to each other’s standing. Perhaps the
image of dueling pistols is too decisive because the contest seems to drag
out without a clear victor. Even a duel with swords seems to offer a more
clear-​cut winner. Perhaps the better metaphor for the state of factual con-
flict in American democracy is a boxing match without a referee:  a long,
bruising fight with many rounds and knockdowns but no knockouts, resulting
in bloodied competitors each convinced of victory and an audience equally
certain and divided. Any decision from the judges will be split and only lead
to accusations of bias and immediate demands for a rematch.
How do we square this contradiction between meek and aggressive
facts? Like many facets of facts in the current day, their alternating paci-
fism and militancy is difficult to comprehend clearly. Part of the problem
is the frequent assumption that facts really do speak for themselves. John
Milton put it this way in 1644: “Let her and Falsehood grapple, who ever
knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”3 The more con-
temporary sentiment that “the truth will out” is phrased res ipsa loquitur
(“the thing speaks for itself”) in legal jargon and “we hold these truths to
be self-​evident” in the Declaration of Independence.
Indeed, many a politician wishes he had the power to assert that facts
are self-​evident and need no justification. But quite the contrary is true
in a less trusting political culture. Contradicting the many assertions that
facts are stubborn things (as John Adams phrased it in his famous defense
of the shooters in the Boston Massacre),4 we argue that facts are elusive

1
 Lippmann 1922, page 10.
2
 Maslow 1963, page 130.
3
 Milton 1644.
4
 “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of
our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the
fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their

2  |  One Nation, Two Realities

and malleable, more like warm Jello in the hand than a cold statue on a
pedestal.
However, while the facts themselves are meekly contented to be
wallflowers, assertions of facts are often aggressive. Facts are quiet; Fox is
loud (and MSNBC is no Zen garden). We suggest that the apparently con-
tradictory nature of facts results from conflating truth (actual reality) with
facts (human approximations of the truth), mixed with the unwarranted
assumption that one or both are easily within our grasp. To explain this,
we can begin with a controversy between two major sources of facts: CNN
and The New York Times.

CNN versus The New York Times: Differing

Perspectives on Truth and Facts

In October 2017, CNN began its “Facts First” campaign. The first ad on
television, Twitter, and Facebook shows a perfect apple in the middle of
the screen while the voiceover explains, “This is an apple. Some people
might try to tell you that it’s a banana. They might scream banana, banana,
banana, over and over and over again. They might put BANANA in all
caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it’s not. This
is an apple.”5
CNN doesn’t question that the perception of the apple is anything
but obvious and easy. Other facts are presumably equally clear to them.
If fact perceptions are obvious and easy, someone who sees things
differently is motivated to deceive and is not to be trusted. The print
ads in this campaign state, “Facts are facts. They aren’t colored by
emotion or bias. They are indisputable. There is no alternative to fact.
Facts explain things. What they are, how they happened. Facts are not
interpretations. Once facts are established, opinions can be formed.
And while opinions matter, they don’t change the facts. That’s why, at
CNN, we start with the facts first.” Therefore, the ads imply, listen to

own defence.” Adams is, of course, arguing that the stubborn fact is that the British soldiers were
attacked and therefore it was not a massacre at all, exactly the opposite fact most Americans were
taught in school.
5
  https://​www.cnncreativemarketing.com/​project/​cnn_​factsfirst. Version 2:  “This is an apple. You
can look at it from the left; you can look at it from the right. But it doesn’t change the fact that this
is an apple.” Version 3: “This is an apple. And this is a distraction. (chattering teeth move across the
screen) But while the distraction might grab your attention, it will never change the fact that this is
an apple.” Several variations on the theme have followed.

Introduction  |  3
us, “the most trusted name in news” (as their long-​standing ad cam-
paign phrases it).
Eight months earlier, The New York Times presented a very different
set of ads:  the “Truth is Hard” campaign, which debuted during the
broadcast of the Academy Awards in February.6 The signature televi-
sion ad is also stark and simple, featuring black sentences on a white
background. It begins with “The truth is our nation is more divided than
ever” and slowly changes the text following “The truth is . . .” to “al-
ternative facts are lies,” to “the media is dishonest,” with a faster and
faster rendition of competing claims to truth across the political spec-
trum. When it slows down again, the now bold type says, “The truth is
hard,” then “The truth is hard to find,” “The truth is hard to know,”
and finally, “The truth is more important now than ever.”
At first glance, CNN and The Times seem to suggest a similar con-
clusion:  listen to us. However, the characterization of reality offered
by the two news outlets is quite different. To CNN, reality is easily
recognized and reported, like the nature of the apple. To The Times,
on the other hand, understanding reality is not easy but hard, specifi-
cally because people have different perceptions and because they often
haphazardly blend opinions with facts, as in the series of statements in
the ad. Those claims are intentionally fuzzy, like everyday arguments,
rather than crisp and clear like the apple. The Times’ nickname, the
“Gray Lady,” refers to the newspaper’s age as the paper of record (and
some claim because its close-​set typeface makes the entire page look
gray rather than black and white), but it also fits the argument of the
ad campaign—​things are gray and nuanced, requiring a trusted guide
such as itself. We agree more with the Gray Lady than with CNN on
this one; reality is often difficult to discern, especially in the current
political environment.
Before we conclude this comparison of CNN and the paper of rec­
ord, we would like to call attention to another subtle difference in the
two media authorities’ ad campaigns, which might go unnoticed but is
important: they employ different terms to describe empirical reality. The
Times focuses on truth, while CNN focuses on facts (“Truth is Hard”
versus “Facts First”). There is an important distinction to be made here,
which reflects the competing claims that one is easier to recognize than
the other.

6
 https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=gY0Fdz350GE.

4  |  One Nation, Two Realities

Truth versus Facts

We often use these two words interchangeably, but they are significantly
distinct. Truth refers to what really exists, the actual state of things. We
would desperately like to know the truth, but philosophers and scientists
from the beginning of philosophy and science have recognized that
we have only limited and flawed access to it. Errors are rampant, and
disagreements are profound. What we do have are facts, or socially deter-
mined approximations of the truth. Facts are as close as we can get to the
truth, but they might not be that close sometimes. Accepted facts may be
somewhat incomplete or even completely wrong. They may be shown to
be false and replaced by other facts. No reasonable person asserts that all
of the known facts of the current moment are the truth without error or that
none of them will ever be withdrawn.
Perhaps more importantly, for most ordinary citizens, the facts are not at
all clear. Facts are routinely disputed by political leaders. Facts are some-
times disputed by experts. Even when experts demonstrate a consensus,
that consensus is often difficult for ordinary citizens to perceive when
they hear opposing views from seemingly respectable sources. There is
a great deal of available information on politically relevant facts—​too
much to handle—​but very little clear guidance on which pieces of infor-
mation are legitimate and which are not. Trust in the traditional sources of
authority that are able to provide that guidance—​academia and media—​
has been falling. Many people, perhaps especially the highly educated,
may feel that regardless of the public dispute, they know the truth or that
when in doubt they can sort through the legitimate and illegitimate evi-
dence and come to the right conclusion. It seems clear to them that others
who disagree must be misled by elites or misdirected by their friends or
are simply misrepresenting for their own benefit (who, after all, could
really believe such obvious falsehoods?). We suggest that such epistemic
hubris is dangerous. When we assume that the facts are easy to know
and that those who dispute us are fools and knaves, negative democratic
consequences ensue.
One can pretend that these difficult problems are simple:  assume
that the known facts reflect the truth, and assume that we can trust a
favored source to report the known facts grounded in expert consensus
(just trust CNN or The New  York Times, as their ads suggest). If we
make these leaps, they are grounded in trust of various forms. Trust is
a large part of the dilemma of dueling facts, largely because trust is in
short supply.

Introduction  |  5
 To provide a fuller and more common-​language understanding of what
most contemporary Americans mean when they speak of facts, they are
descriptions of reality that reflect the best available objective evidence as
endorsed by the prevailing authorities of society. The problem is that rea-
sonable people can disagree about whether we have enough evidence to
make a claim to owning a fact at all, as opposed to uncertainty or admitted
ignorance. What one person considers to be a fact may be seen as an esti-
mate, a guess, or a supposition by someone else who does not recognize
the strength of its foundations. When we hear a claim to a fact, reason-
able people can disagree about whether those asserting it have established
the key elements of “reality,” “objective,” “evidence,” and “prevailing
authorities.”
Reality simply refers to the world around us. The term assumes that
the truth exists outside of human perceptions, even if we have trouble
perceiving the truth accurately. Jennifer Hochschild and Katherine Einstein
take this common-​sense position in Do Facts Matter? and describe two
forms of these realities: “states of affairs” and “causal statements.”7 The
first describes what exists, while the second describes what brings these
things into existence. An example of a factual claim describing a state of
affairs would be “the global mean temperature is higher now than 50 years
ago,” while an example of a causal statement would be “human activity
causes climate change.” Both are assertions of facts in the sense that X
exists and X leads to Y are descriptions of empirical reality.
While we can break the two apart analytically, more often in the
political world these two forms of facts are conflated together. For
example, the op-​ed headline in The New  York Times of February 21,
2015—​“Obamacare Is Working”—​was partly a claim about a state of
affairs (the number of insured Americans is higher, and the growth
of healthcare costs is lower) and partly a claim about a causal mech-
anism (aspects of the Affordable Care Act have created these positive
outcomes). Rather than being pure statements of either the first kind
of fact or the second, more often it seems that political assertions are
entangled hybrids of the two. In our view, this makes the project of
disentangling states of affairs from causal claims not only difficult but
also unhelpful for understanding politics. Like Hochschild and Einstein,
we are content to treat both kinds of statements about reality (and their
mixture) as claims to facts.

7
 Hochschild and Einstein 2015, pages 35–​36.

6  |  One Nation, Two Realities

 Objective refers to existing without regard to personal perspective.
If the perception relies on the perceiver, then it is subjective rather
than objective. Only if many observers with various backgrounds and
beliefs perceive the same thing do we consider it to be objective. Of
course, it has become normal in some circles to reject this possibility
and insist that all things are subjective at heart. The common-​language
understanding of facts rejects this insistence on the dominance of sub-
jectivity, whether labeled postmodern or deconstructionist or perspec-
tival or any of the other terms that deny the existence of objective facts.
We take the position invoked since Plato’s allegory of the cave:  we
suspect one reality to exist and only doubt our ability to perceive it.
The fault is likely ours for being poor at perceiving rather than the
world’s for being poor at existing in a stable fashion. Another way
of phrasing this is that the problem is not about existence but about
epistemology (can we perceive accurately?). When people refer to a
“fact,” they are asserting the objective state of affairs, often because
they know that the inherent subjectivity of humans creates alternative
claims that are false.
Evidence refers to the full range of legitimate information that bears
on a claim. Perhaps most importantly, the existence of a fact requires that
there is evidence. No fact can exist if no evidence is available. In that case
we can have opinions, guesses, or hopes but not facts. Even if evidence
is available, it can be incomplete, contradictory, or of questionable legit-
imacy. If enough evidence exists (and cannot be discounted too heavily),
we can assert a position with some degree of confidence along the con-
tinuum from possible to likely (more than 50%) to very likely to certain
(which humans almost never reach). In social science, we have pretty
much agreed on 95% as a standard of likelihood, which suggests that
something is a fact when it is less than 5% likely to not be a fact. Insisting
on 100% would mean that almost nothing would ever be called a fact, so
we are forced to accept a bit of an error rate. But when we call something
a fact we are as confident as humans can be that it is grounded in the best
available evidence.
So if a fact is a description of reality supported by the objective evi-
dence, when someone claims that something is not a fact, he is in essence
asserting that it is not objective or not backed up by the available evidence.
It may not be objective because it is biased or dependent on other beliefs.
It may not be accurate because there are no legitimate data available or
because the data are fraudulent or because some other data have not been
considered. If any of these objections are believable, then the claim in

Introduction  |  7
question is not a fact but instead a misperception, mistake, illusion, or
some other form of error.
Another common way of defining a fact is an empirical statement that
can be falsified but we are confident has not been. This is the Popper
standard of falsification, which has been extremely influential in social
science. The problem is that who we are and how confident we need to
be are not at all agreed upon. Some would argue that the majority is the
standard; a consensus perception is a fact. Others argue that the appro-
priate we must be experts; facts are what the experts believe, regardless
of how the majority sees it. When someone asserts that “facts are not
democratic,” she generally has the second standard in mind. But relying
on experts to define facts requires that we can identify those experts and
trust them to provide authoritative facts about things the public cannot
verify for themselves. When citizens trust different sources (or none at
all), this conception of facts leads to dispute. The problem of trust is un-
avoidable: Do we trust specific sources to be authoritative? News media?
University faculty? Scientists? Clergy? Government agencies? Hochschild
and Einstein define objective facts as those “determined by nearly unan-
imous agreement among experts who have relatively little ideological or
partisan motivation.”8 The difficulty is that citizens may have very dif-
ferent views about which authorities are ideological or non-​ideological,
partisan or non-​partisan, making this understanding of factual authority
problematic for citizens to agree upon.
Some have great confidence, trust, or faith in our ability to recog-
nize objectively accurate reality; others have much less confidence and
are much less willing to recognize authoritative facts because they do
not accept that we have the means to know them or do not trust those
who claim to know them. These problems of perception and perspec-
tive create disputed claims to reality. When examining this phenomenon,
what is the best way to conceptualize it and the best set of terms to
employ?
Throughout this book, we employ the following definitions:

Truth is what really exists, though it may or may not be within human
observation.
Facts are descriptions of reality reflecting the best available objective
evidence endorsed by prevailing authorities.

8
 Ibid., page 36.

8  |  One Nation, Two Realities

 Epistemology is the process and study of establishing facts, which is
important specifically because truth and facts are not necessarily
the same.
Dueling fact perceptions (DFPs) exist to the extent that people per-
ceive facts differently, regardless of whether they are established
facts or not. DFPs of established facts include misperceptions on
one side. However, many DFPs make claims for which no clear
and indisputable facts have been established—​ what could be
called blurred realities. DFPs encompass both misperceptions
and blurred realities (which can be difficult to distinguish and the
distinctions between the two can change over time as new infor-
mation becomes available). Hence, DFPs are the broadest category
and the focus of our attention. As we will show, when perceptions
of reality are divided, serious democratic consequences follow—​
regardless of who happens to be right or wrong in any given
instance.

The focus on perceptions is a key aspect of DFPs as a concept. What

exists in citizens’ minds is the source of political consequences;
perceptions guide political actions, and therefore it is those perceptions
we seek to understand. Misinformation (false data) would be irrelevant
if it did not lead to misperceptions (false beliefs). When we or others
employ terms like dueling facts and partisan facts, the additional word
perception seems to be implied even when it is omitted. There are really
no partisan facts or dueling facts, per se, because an established fact
(in common language and as we define it) has no legitimate counter-
part with which to duel, but there certainly are dueling fact perceptions,
which is what is implied by the shorthand (and slightly imprecise) term
dueling facts.

Facts, Truth, and Trust

Where all the facts are out of sight a true report and a plausible error read alike,
sound alike, feel alike. Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is
great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between
trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.
—​Walter Lippmann9

9
 Lippmann 1922, pages 142–​143.

Introduction  |  9
Public Opinion was published in 1922, but it is a brilliant anticipation of
the contemporary politics of truth. In some ways it lays out a starting point
for our book:

1) Facts cannot be known easily

2) Conclusions drawn from personal knowledge often fill the gap, and
3) Perceptions of the impersonal world reduce to whom we trust

The trust on which we are forced to rely takes several forms: trust in tra-
ditional sources of authority such as universities, trust in government
agencies to report information accurately, trust in journalistic fact checkers
to establish the truth. And trust in our own personal knowledge and core
values as guides to reality. Trust in our social groups and party leaders to
fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Distrust of the seemingly self-​serving
and distorted assertions of our political opponents. Distrust of fellow citi-
zens who see the facts differently.
Some kinds of trust have fallen, while others are rising. Which are
which can be summarized in the question, Your facts or mine? Forms
of trust grounded in others—​the your category—​include specific media
outlets, universities, government agencies, and fact checkers, all of which
are perceived by many to be compromised. Forms of personal trust—​the
mine category—​include an individual’s own experience, identity groups,
information found in personal searches online, and especially a citizen’s
core values. Your facts are trustworthy only to the degree that their sources
appear to have connections to my groups and beliefs.
In a fascinating book on the origins of contemporary claims to exper-
tise (A Social History of Truth), Steven Shapin argues that trust is at the
heart of modern epistemology. The goal of the book is “to draw atten-
tion to how much of our empirical knowledge is held solely on the basis
of what trustworthy sources tell us.” Our search for “a world-​known-​in-​
common” reduces in many ways to a search for “a reliable spokesman for
reality.”10 Who can be trusted to tell the truth? The clergy? The govern-
ment? Children (as in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”)? Shapin’s argument
is that in the early modern period it was gentlemen, who were believed to
be so independent (both financially and morally) that they had no incen-
tive to lie. Hence their statements—​without any proof the public could
understand—​would be believed. Eventually this trust was transferred to

10
 Shapin 1994, pages 21, 36, and xxvii.

10  |  One Nation, Two Realities

scientists in general, who are the modern-​day gentlemen of leisure who do
not lie. That trust, however, seems to be time-​bound—​and its time seems
to be ending.
The question of the tree falling in a lonely forest applies here but in
reverse. The usual framing of the question assumes that we know a tree
has fallen. If we do not have knowledge one way or the other and one
person says he heard it fall, while another insists that the noise was not
a tree at all but instead something else entirely, do we believe a tree fell?
Do we believe it if the earwitnesses in favor outnumber those opposed
by a small margin? What if they are 4 to 1? What if the one dissenter is a
friend of ours? Perhaps the harder and more appropriate framing for our
current politics is, Do we believe it if we heard something tree-​like and we
expected a tree to fall, but the experts say it didn’t? Or the reverse—​the
experts say it fell, but we did not hear it? Whom do we trust?
One example of this dilemma is the infamous reporting scandal on
George W. Bush’s National Guard service, which more or less ended Dan
Rather’s long career in journalism. The truth of the situation—​whether
Bush did or did not use family influence to gain a National Guard spot
that would keep him out of Vietnam and whether he did or did not ful-
fill his training duties—​remains stable but unknown. What changed were
the known facts. Until 60 Minutes aired the accusations, the known facts
were that Bush served honorably, if not in combat. Then the facts endorsed
by a major national institution (CBS News) were otherwise. Then CBS
retracted the accusations and fired several influential reporters and editors,
changing the known facts again.
The 2015 film about the saga, oddly entitled Truth, insists that the 60
Minutes story really was true, even if its sources were false. For his part,
Rather continues to defend the story.11 His position is that even though the
sources cannot be documented and may have been falsified, the story they
substantiated was in essence true (just not demonstrated by those sources).
So to summarize, CBS initially said the sources were facts and the story
was truth; CBS later said the sources are not facts, so the story cannot be
said to be truth; Rather says the sources may not be facts, but the story still
is truth. No agreement on this will be forthcoming. Rather’s 2015 state-
ment for Variety magazine was “Don’t take my word for what it is; don’t
take CBS’s word for what it is; go see it and make up your own mind.”12
But citizens making up their own minds—​grounded in what matches their

11
 See Stahl 2012.
12
 Lenker 2015.

Introduction  |  11
prior beliefs more than the legitimate evidence—​may be the heart of the
problem.
As difficult as it is to forge a consensus, socially created facts endorsed
by authoritative institutions are all we have as approximations of the
truth. Our current dilemma facing democratic society is that the declining
weight of traditional sources of authority allows citizens to follow their
own inclinations. Either forced to fend for themselves or freed to follow
their own desires, we know what citizens will do: employ their priors to
dictate their perceptions. And priors in the current day—​core values, par-
tisan attachments, social identities—​are deeply divided. As we will dem-
onstrate throughout this book, polarized values lead to DFPs. This in turn
leads to disdain toward those who perceive facts otherwise and to dis-
engagement by citizens with more moderate views. The polarization of
perception leads to a downward spiral of distrust, cynicism, and further
political polarization.
Under these conditions, facts are not as obvious as many citizens be-
lieve they are. Politically engaged citizens often feel that their obvious
perceptions of facts must be asserted; they must speak truth to power, by
which they mean that obvious truths must override the equally obvious
distortions being attempted by the powerful. But majority perceptions are
themselves quite powerful, especially when driven by deep feelings of cer-
tainty. When they are wrong they may be speaking power to truth rather
than the reverse. Discerning between the two possibilities has become a
problem.
Almost everyone who cares about the trajectory of American democ-
racy bemoans the phenomenon of DFPs. Many recognize—​either implic-
itly or, as in our case, explicitly—​that trust is the bridge that allows us
to conclude that offered facts are close to actual truth, but that bridge is
damaged, collapsing, or perhaps entirely washed away. Nonetheless, many
observers have expressed hope that with different media or improved
incentives for partisan leaders or better fact-​checking or more civic edu-
cation trust can be restored, facts can become less politicized, and we can
all get closer to the truth.
To put it bluntly, we are here to dash those hopes. In the coming
chapters, we offer much more psychological background and analyze a
great deal of data from surveys and experiments. We end up as pessimistic
as Lippmann. He saw it coming, but we are living in it. And we suspect it
is going to get worse, not better. Our conclusion is that the core divisions
between facts and values have not just been smudged; they have been ef-
fectively erased. Before conducting these studies, we might have thought

12  |  One Nation, Two Realities

that education was the marker that could redraw the lines. As it turns out,
it is the eraser. The only hope for a less factually polarized republic, in our
view, is if the public becomes less sophisticated and less engaged—​which
is not an inspiring democratic slogan.

Why Now?

A final question to ask at the outset of this inquiry is whether DFPs are
really more prevalent and powerful now than they were in times past. The
psychological mechanisms described in the following chapters are cer-
tainly not new. The mechanisms of selective cognition, group conformity,
and motivated reasoning (see Chapter 5) have always been with us. But the
conditions that allow them to flourish have clearly expanded and deepened
in recent times. While many things are the same, there are at least three
ways in which conditions are very different: polarization, the information
environment, and the demise of trust in authority.
The most influential change may be the extreme moralization of pol-
itics and the polarization that has flowed from that. Our core argument
that value projection plays a major role in the origins of DFPs is related
to the rising polarization of public values. According to a broad range of
scholarship, our values are far more divided now than they were through
most of the twentieth century. Some scholars disagree about how recently
the shift began to occur, but the evidence of rising divisions grounded in
core personal and political beliefs is overwhelming.13 The religious divide
is an especially influential part of this story; the rise of public secularism
complicated a more uniformly religious public culture. While atheists
were once excluded from much of public discourse, secular culture
now has a clear voice in American politics. Similarly, other competing
voices of racial minorities, feminists, recent immigrants, LGBTQ citi-
zens, and other groups were also once not a part of mainstream polit-
ical conversation but now very much are, bringing with them a broader
set of competing values. These movements of ideas and ideologies have
shifted American politics to a more polarized place. Partisan loyalties
have also polarized. No doubt partisan attachments have deepened, be-
come more affective, and coalesced across a range of issues that were
once less unified within partisan groups. Multifaceted polarization as a

 See, for example, Hunter 1991, Layman 2001, White 2002, Abramowitz 2011, 2013, Jacoby 2014,
13

Campbell 2016, Garrett and Bankert 2018.

Introduction  |  13
dominant feature of American life and politics is at the heart of the histor-
ical changes driving DFPs.
A second influential change is clearly in the information environment.
The rise of alternative and partisan media sources aided the rise of op-
posing perceptions of reality. But these changes are linked to the first
change; partisan media did not spring out of the ether. In an important
sense, ideologically specific media rose to meet the demand from the di-
vided citizens those media serve (and from whom they profit). Polarization
is profitable, for media moguls seeking advertisers, reporters seeking an
audience, and politicians seeking votes. Media companies may have risen
to supply a divided demand as much as they created it.
Another important development in the information environment is the
proliferation of online and social media. The availability of an explosive
amount of online information in unguarded form no doubt contributes to
DFPs. But the influence of unsupervised information flows is dependent
on the third major change that has encouraged DFPs: the decline of trust.
New technologies do not make citizens do anything; instead, they allow
us to do what we are already inclined to do. For example, cars didn’t force
people to move to the suburbs, but cars did make it easier to do so—​which
changed American communities in many profound ways. Likewise, the
Internet doesn’t force people to believe in its wisdom and to disregard
traditional sources of knowledge. If citizens continued to trust traditional
sources of information authority, the reach of the Internet would be more
limited. What it offers fills the void left by the abandonment of the pre-
vious gatekeepers. Falling trust in traditional media (the disseminators of
knowledge) is one facet of the story. Another is distrust of universities
(the producers of knowledge). One of the major changes leading to DFPs
was in the character of the university. Chapter 12 (on the role of education
and trust in its institutions) is an important part of our argument not only
because of the demonstration of the inability of education to unify fact
perceptions but also because of the demonstration of the lack of trust in
universities. Once regarded as bipartisan and non-​ideological institutions,
universities have come to be seen as dominated by one side of the ide-
ological spectrum. The polarization of the public leads half of it to dis-
trust an institution it sees as representing an opposing ideology rather than
presenting non-​ideological facts. The result is an openness to alternative
offerings of knowledge, online or in person, legitimate or not.
While we offer three answers to the question of why now—​the rise of
divided values, the expansion of media and Internet sources, and the de-
cline of trust in authorities to sort it out—​all three could be understood as

14  |  One Nation, Two Realities

facets of polarization. The polarization of beliefs, the polarization of in-
formation sources, and the polarization of trust are deeply interconnected.
The psychology of dueling fact perceptions was always available, but the
polarized conditions driving that psychology have flourished in our time.

Summary and Plan of the Book

In the chapters that follow, we consider four main questions about dueling
fact perceptions:  How should we think about this phenomenon? Why
are perceptions of facts so polarized? How consequential is factual po-
larization? And what are the odds of correction? The following brief
sections provide an overview of the four parts of the book, focusing on the
concepts, causes, consequences, and possible correctives of DFPs in the
not-​so United States.

Concepts (Part I, Chapters 2–​4)

Most political science research has focused on “misinformation” and
“misperceptions,” or the problem that many citizens hear and hold incor-
rect facts, regardless of the clear verifiability of the correct ones. But the
problem of dueling facts is far broader than merely those that are verifi-
able without controversy. Our aim here is not to understand who is right or
wrong but rather to understand how ordinary citizens perceive reality. Part
I of the book outlines our conception of DFPs and the empirical evidence
we will use to examine them.

Causes (Part II, Chapters 5–​9)

The more vital question is, Why is it so hard to tell which of the competing
perceptions are accurate? While part of the story is surely misdirection
by party leaders and media pundits, we argue that this isn’t the whole
story or even the most important part. Drawing causal arrows is always
difficult, so we attempt to distinguish between the clear and the controver-
sial causes. One clear cause is our current national polarization. Scholars
argue about whether Americans are polarized more around values, ide-
ology, partisanship, religion, identity, geography, or media consumption;
but each facet of polarization seems to reinforce the others, cycling toward
ever greater division. Polarization enhances several interwoven psycho-
logical mechanisms of selective cognition that create divided perceptions.
The polarized environment also increases the psychological motivation to

Introduction  |  15
be accepted by our social groups rather than to be correct about our fact
perceptions; holding accurate perceptions of a public controversy has little
personal payoff, while belonging to a social group has much greater direct
benefits. And while it may be hard to know if the experts agree with us, it
is relatively easy to know if our friends do.
More controversial is the extent to which dueling facts are driven by
polarized leadership or polarized values. The first is an external mech-
anism grounded in the political environment, while the second is an in-
ternal mechanism created by citizens’ own deeply held beliefs. This is a
critical distinction because one mechanism relies on elite manipulations
that could be curtailed or counteracted, while the second flows from citi-
zens’ own values that are likely entrenched.
The term partisan facts reflects the argument by some scholars that
the origin is largely the influence of opinion leaders taking advantage
of partisan tribalism. In this view, party politicians and the ideological
personalities of Fox News and MSNBC (and the like) distort facts for
their political ends and drag susceptible citizens along with them. Our
view is that the origin of divided perceptions is also divided value systems.
Extensive analyses of national survey data suggest that while the external
mechanisms are important, so is the internal mechanism of polarized value
systems. As public values have polarized over the last decades, facts have
followed. Top-​down leadership is not necessary if bottom-​up beliefs are
powerful enough for citizens to project their preferred values onto their
perceived facts.
The role of value projection in the creation of dueling facts brings us
to one of the other psychological contributions of the volume: a theory of
intuitive epistemology. The starting point is Philip Tetlock’s observation
that individuals bring distinct frameworks for discerning knowledge, not
merely about expected probabilities and trusted sources but also about
the core questions they ask. In other words, we do not end up with the
same answers because we do not begin with the same questions. Tetlock
theorized that these intuitive epistemologies come in distinct categories,
to which we add that those categories reflect distinct value systems. We
argue that value systems carry intuitive epistemology. A  specific value
is not merely a predisposition for what we would like to exist but also
a predisposition for how we discern its existence. And the stronger the
value commitment, the stronger the epistemological framework:  abso-
lutist values lead to absolutist facts, which makes it even harder to cor-
rect misperceptions.

16  |  One Nation, Two Realities

Consequences (Part III, Chapters 10 and 11)
Another argument of the book is that dueling facts have a range of negative
consequences that are more difficult to alter than the obvious prescriptions
suggest. Some of the clear consequences seem to be miscommunication
and mistrust, fostering further division and deadlock. With no agreement
on basic realities, we have little chance of a consensus on the national
problems to be solved, let alone how to address them. DFPs foreclose the
potential for broad policy agreement as well as fruitful deliberation.
Another set of negative consequences are social, extending beyond pol-
itics to the coffeeshop and workplace. In our experiments, when people are
faced with others who see reality differently, they tend to react with con-
tempt, refusing to share space with them—​even workspace, one of the last
remaining environments in which many Americans interact with others
across the political divide. Factual disagreement even appears to skew the
electorate, mobilizing ideologues but silencing moderates. The result is
further retreat into like-​minded bubbles, creating more distance and dis-
trust, fostering greater polarization.

Correctives (Part IV, Chapters 12–​15)

For these reasons, the most commonly offered correctives—​education and
fact-​checking—​are not effective and may actually be counterproductive.
Perhaps the most consistent (and sobering) finding across many recent
empirical studies is that specific fact perceptions are not predicted by ed-
ucation or political knowledge. The evidence demonstrates that as citi-
zens rise in political sophistication, motivated reasoning becomes stronger
rather than weaker. Our findings regarding value projection reach the same
conclusion. As cognitive resources grow, citizens simply become more
adept at attaching their priors to their perceptions.
Contributing to education’s lack of efficacy in reducing DFPs is the ero-
sion of trust in traditional sources of knowledge. Recent national surveys
demonstrate that a surprisingly large proportion of Americans hold a low
degree of trust in the knowledge created by universities. When the pri-
mary institution that discerns and disseminates knowledge for the nation
is no longer trusted, this fosters a susceptibility to alternative sources of
information. Our data bear this out more precisely. The changes in the
perception of the university as an external source of authority are another
foundation for pessimism about the effective role of education in creating
a consensus.

Introduction  |  17
 For some of the same reasons, fact-​ checking does not amelio-
rate divisions in fact perceptions in the intuitive way we might expect.
In Chapter  13, we provide a critical assessment of the epistemological
foundations of the fact-​check industry, and in Chapter  14 we reinforce
other scholarly findings that citizens tend to reject the fact-​checks that
dispute their prior beliefs. Greater education merely facilitates this pro-
cess. This is the case even among people who are predisposed to trust
fact checkers, even when the perception relates to a candidate from the
same political party. These findings further reinforce our conclusion that
politically motivated fact perceptions are at least as much about value
differences as they are about partisan tribalism and external leadership.
Finally, we find that the durability of DFPs is a reflection of the ideolog-
ical symmetry of their origins. While some scholars have suggested that
dueling facts are essentially a phenomenon of the Right, driven by con-
servative values and Republican leadership, it became clear in analyzing
several years of survey data that this is simply not the case. As we show
in Chapter 15, the influence of value projection and partisan leadership is
remarkably symmetric across various DFPs, and in some ways we find ev-
idence of liberal asymmetry.

Conclusion (Chapter 16)
The book concludes with the role of dueling facts in the contemporary par-
adox of knowledge and democracy. Perceiving the world accurately has
always been difficult, but the polarization problem has increased the epis-
temological problem. Unfortunately, there is more to the origins of dueling
facts than laziness by the public and lying by elites; the core problem is
not merely miseducation or misdirection but divided values projected onto
perceived facts. Greater education and political sophistication are em-
ployed to sharpen rather than dull the connections between the strength of
internal beliefs and the perception of external realities. The consequences
of the dueling facts phenomenon include a degeneration of the close tie
between education and democracy.

18  |  One Nation, Two Realities