Facts, Fear, Awe, & Emotion

Jan 29, 2026

The Problem with Facts

Katharine Hayhoe: Of all confrontational people I’ve responded to with carefully marshaled and fully cited science, only a tiny handful have ever taken the time to engage in a thoughtful and honest way. So why aren’t all these facts working to change people ’ s minds? And if the facts are more accessible today than ever, why are so many people getting them so wrong?

Katharine Hayhoe: But when politics, ideology, identity, and morality get tangled up in science—when our frames, as George Lakoff calls them, get in the way—then all bets are off. And what if that science implies that urgent and widespread action is needed? That’ s when the gloves come off, too.

The Problem with Facts

Katharine Hayhoe: It turns out that being better able to handle quantitative information and understand science in general doesn’t make you more accepting of thorny, politically polarized scientic topics with moral implications that require a response; it just makes you better able to cherry-pick the information you need to validate what you already believe.

motivated reasoning: an emotionally driven process of selecting and processing information with the goal of confirming what you already believe rather than informing your opinions or perspective.

The Problem with Facts

Katharine Hayhoe: Basing our opinions and judgments on reason rather than emotion is the lofty goal laid out by Greek philosophers. It continues to be pursued by scientists today. But Plato might be disappointed to learn that modern psychology strongly suggests that when it comes to making up our minds about something, emotions usually come first and reason second.

Katharine Hayhoe: all of us engage in motivated reasoning with higher stakes. In bigger decisions regarding parenting or religion, for example, our strong emotional attachment to a given position causes us to hold to our pre-existing opinion in the face of significant opposition and even solid fact. We will use all the intelligence we have to show why we’re right, rather than admit we’re wrong.

The Problem with Facts

Katharine Hayhoe: As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay explain in How to Have Impossible Conversations, “think of every conversation as being three conversations at once: about facts, feelings, and identity.” I thought I was having a conversation about farming and water; but we were also talking about how we felt about climate change, and about how we saw ourselves in relation to it.

Katharine Hayhoe: If we give people new information that contradicts their frame, what they believe, and what their tribe adheres to, their brains just turn off. Even worse, she says, “because we are often exposed to contradicting information and opinions, this tendency will generate polarization, which will expand with time as people receive more and more information.”

Rethinking what reasoning is

From
Reasoning = Facts

To
Reasoning = Facts + Emotions

The Fear Factor

Katharine Hayhoe: If we are making decisions rationally, with emotion following after we’ve processed the information, then scary facts will cause us to seek a solution rather than to shut down. Often, we like to think that’s how we think (despite large bodies of psychological research to the contrary). I suspect that’s why so much environmental messaging uses a fact- and fear-based approach. As legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, though, there is a substantial emotional cost to receiving information, which often leads us to metaphorically cover our ears. We’d rather not know about it if we don’t think there’s anything we can do.

The Fear Factor

Katharine Hayhoe: When we share scary information about climate change, we’re trying to get people to act. Fear does make us sit up and pay attention, at least until our bandwidth is depleted. If people aren’t worried about climate change, they should be.

Katharine Hayhoe: if we don’t immediately connect those fears to people’s everyday lived experiences and provide viable and appealing options for dealing with the threat, all too often what happens is exactly the opposite: people disengage or get angry. And if that weren’t bad enough, these fear-based information dumps can stimulate another equally two-edged emotion—guilt.

The emotion of wonder and awe

Madeline: I like how the doc immediately draws us into a world of vibrant life beneath the surface, using slow pans and rich sound to create an emotional investment before any facts are introduced. It works as a rhetorical hook that makes us care before we even know what we are supposed to care about/what is happening. It serves as pathos through imagery because it makes us grieve for something we’ve barely seen yet. Throughout the documentary, they do a really good job of using pathos to immerse the viewers in the cause and make it feel like we are fighting and working and problem-solving alongside them.

The emotion of wonder and awe

Stella: Do you think that positive imagery (such as these beautiful reefs) can be just as impactful in eliciting change as fear-ridden messages/rhetoric? I think people seeing the possible beauty and life they could be protecting can be motivating, while rhetoric that produces fear can sometimes cause inaction.

Ellis: I like this take. One thing we're learning about in Behavioral Economics is the phenomenon of "loss-aversion", where the psychological pain of losing is about twice as intense as the pleasure of gaining an equivalent amount. I think this is relevant in this scenario because instead of showing nice things that we could have if we fix climate change, by showing nice things that we are losing, using the logic above, would be twice as impactful and perhaps more likely to elicit action.

The emotion of wonder and awe

Madeline: I love the parts of this documentary that linger in slower, calmer moments of exploration. You can see the biologists’ passion as they describe the intimate inner workings of the reef and its relationships with the surrounding fish. While the core focus of the documentary (coral bleaching) is not directly about fish moving in and out of these structures or the ocean being alive with sound, these moments do so much to personalize the issue and make the audience care. Without them, it would be much harder to fully grasp the ways of life that are lost alongside the reefs themselves.