Blog #0196: Storytelling in a Post-Truth World

Source: Photo by Joris Voeten on Unsplash

[ED: The backfire effect is overstated, but facts alone still aren't enough. From Nyhan's research to Oxford Ionics to Pixar — why narrative is how you carry truth through. 0/5 hats.]

The Old Model

The old model for persuasion was straightforward. Present the facts. Show the data. Draw the conclusion. If your argument was sound and your evidence was solid, reasonable people would update their views. This was the Enlightenment promise: truth, properly presented, would prevail.

It was a good model. It may also have been wrong — or at least, far more conditional than we assumed.

The Backfire Effect, Honestly Assessed

The idea that facts can backfire entered popular consciousness through Nyhan and Reifler's 2010 study, "When Corrections Fail." They found that presenting people with corrective facts on politically charged topics — the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whether tax cuts increase revenue — could actually reinforce existing misperceptions. The finding was alarming and spread rapidly through journalism, science communication, and popular psychology.

But the research story is more complicated than the popular version.

In 2019, Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter published "The Elusive Backfire Effect" in Political Behavior. Across five experiments with over 10,000 participants, testing 52 issues specifically chosen to be the most polarised and theoretically conducive to backfire, they found no evidence of the effect. Not on a single issue. The original researchers — Nyhan and Reifler — then collaborated with Wood and Porter and reached a similar conclusion.

The current consensus, summarised by Nyhan himself in a 2021 PNAS paper, holds that factual backfire is rare. People do, by and large, update their factual beliefs when presented with corrections. This is good news for anyone who cares about truth.

But here's the crucial distinction: updating beliefs does not mean updating attitudes, identities, or policy preferences. Facts can correct what people think happened without changing what they think should be done about it. You can accept that vaccines don't cause autism and still feel uneasy about vaccinating your child. You can accept that crime rates have fallen and still feel unsafe. The gap between factual correction and genuine persuasion is wide, and facts alone do not bridge it.

Nyhan's 2021 review adds another layer: the accuracy-increasing effects of corrections often don't last. They decay. They get overwhelmed by cues from political leaders and media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims. Misperceptions persist in public opinion for years after they've been debunked — not because the correction backfired, but because the correction didn't stick.

So: the backfire effect as popularly understood is overstated. But the difficulty of persuasion through facts alone is real, persistent, and well-documented.

The Flood of Slop

The other half of the problem: generative AI means anyone, anywhere, can produce and publish plausible-sounding content at near-zero cost. A 2,000-word article. A convincing infographic. A deepfake video. A hundred of each, per day, per person.

The volume of material that looks like information but carries no signal has exploded. The signal-to-noise ratio collapses. Individual human attention cannot scale to match. Every scroll through a feed is an exercise in filtering, and the filters are not getting better as fast as the noise is getting louder.

In this environment, facts are not worthless. But they are insufficient. They need a vehicle to reach people, to stick, to survive the noise. That vehicle is narrative.

Story as Vehicle

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It requires emotional transformation for the main character — some change between the state they start in and the state they finish in. This structure is not decorative. It's the mechanism by which humans have transmitted knowledge, values, and identity for as long as we've had language. We are storytelling apes. That's how we got anywhere.

Using story as a vehicle for truth is not a retreat from rationality. It's a pragmatic recognition that truth needs a carrier. Data without narrative is inert. It sits in a spreadsheet. It appears in a report no one reads. It gets shared on social media and scrolled past. Wrap the same data in a story — give it a character, a problem, a transformation — and it moves from one mind to another.

The Technology Is Half the Battle

This applies everywhere, but the consequences are particularly visible in deep tech and innovation.

Consider the case of Oxford Ionics, a quantum computing spinout from the University of Oxford. In June 2025, IonQ — a US-based quantum computing company — acquired Oxford Ionics for $1.075 billion. On the surface, a huge success for a UK deep tech company. And it was.

But anyone who watched the quantum computing space closely knew what was happening. Oxford Ionics held the world record for fidelity in trapped-ion quantum operations. They were technologically years ahead. IonQ had managed to go public, turn its stock into currency, and use that currency to acquire the technology it needed. The UK company had the technology. The American company had the narrative — and the capital that narrative attracted.

This is not an isolated case. It's a pattern. The company that owns the story gets funded. The company that gets funded survives. The company that survives gets to build the future. Technology is necessary but not sufficient. The narrative determines who gets the resources to develop the technology.

A friend of mine invests in deep tech. He's adding a storytelling fellow to his venture team — not a marketing hire, a dedicated role focused on helping portfolio companies tell their story. His reasoning: no matter how good the technology is, you need money to take a scientific breakthrough from lab to market. If you can't tell the story, you don't get the fuel.

What to Tell Your Kids

I have two children navigating the current tool upheaval — one in animation, one in mechanical engineering. The advice I give them both is the same: don't learn the tools of now. Learn the fundamentals those tools serve.

The tools are changing. They will keep changing. Whatever software my daughter uses to animate today will be different in five years and unrecognisable in ten. But storytelling is eternal. Humans are storytelling apes. The ability to tell a story that moves people — that has a beginning, middle, and end, that transforms its protagonist, that makes someone feel something — is the durable asset.

Pixar understands this. Pixar doesn't win because of rendering quality. Plenty of studios can make hair move the same way. Pixar wins because they are extraordinary storytellers — and specifically, because they tell two stories simultaneously with the same words. When you watch a Pixar film as an adult and when your six-year-old watches it beside you, the narrative arc and dialogue speak to both of you at the same time. It's not that adults laugh in some parts and children laugh in others. The blend itself is the composition. That's filmmaking craft, and no amount of cheaper rendering will replicate it.

The distinction matters: film is a medium; filmmaking is a craft. Pixar has mastered the craft. The medium is almost incidental.

The Primary Mechanism

The world has become doctrinal in places. We're back to arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and there are people who'd happily burn you for picking the wrong number. Facts won't fix that. Not because facts are wrong, but because facts arrive at the door and find it bolted from the inside. Story is how you get invited in.

Storytelling is not a nice-to-have. It's the primary mechanism for moving ideas from one mind to another. If you care about truth and want to communicate it effectively, learn to tell stories. The post-truth problem isn't that facts stopped working. It's that facts alone were never enough.

Narrative is how you carry truth through.

References

• Nyhan, B. & Reifler, J. (2010). "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330.
• Wood, T. & Porter, E. (2019). "The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes' Steadfast Factual Adherence." Political Behavior, 41, 135–163.
• Nyhan, B. (2021). "Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions." PNAS, 118(15).

Regards,
M@

Originally posted on matthewsinclair.com and cross-posted on Medium.

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