story-based: think in terms of whole narratives; have trouble evaluating statements without knowing where they fit in some story, whose case they help or hurt. Tend to be good at articulating vision and goals; tend to think that it's wrong to pierce a valuable story with contrary facts. Not great at anticipating problems where reality disobeys the intended story, but good at rolling over bumps and keeping eyes on the prize.
fact-based: strive to assess truth and falsehood irrespective of who it helps or hurts. Tend to put foot in mouth by saying things at the wrong time; perceived by others as indelicate. Tend to struggle to articulate vision and goals, given all the things that can go wrong; see nothing wrong with piercing a narrative with contrary facts. Good at anticipating problems, but can be too fixated on obstacles.
Does this ring true for others? How would you revise or amend this?
So people themselves have to do both, what and how they emphasize depends on the specific domain and circumstance.
Pro tip: if you think of yourself as fact based, work to understand what narratives form your grounding fabric for fact interpretation, so much so that you don't even think about it.
Related to "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" (Fiat justitia ruat caelum) versus "We're not going to acknowledge this because we don't like the outcome; we don't want to live in a world where X is true, so therefore it's not true."
It's rarely cut and dry as to what is true though, and you have to speculate at much in order to make sense of any real world complex situation.
There may be some value to that on a personal level - self-knowledge is a good thing. But I don't think that can be extrapolated out to the general population. There is far more variety between humans that that.
I used to think it was just an experience/wisdom thing - e.g.: when you're younger, you tend to be biased to action, builder/doer mindset, "what and how", "fact-based". Then as you become more experienced, you tend to plan more, focus on the bigger picture eg: "why and when", "story-based"
But the longer I've been around, I now see that people are just all wired differently.
The Myers Briggs test[1] is an interesting exercise to identify these traits (and a lot more).
I've done it multiple times over the years and while I'm certain I didn't use the exact same answers each time, the results always converge on the same personality type.
Yes, I know that Myers-Briggs rests on a shaky empirical basis, but it makes for a good narrative.
The leader is trying to sell his ideas by presenting a neat concise story. Think Elizabeth Holmes' story of her uncle hating getting his blood drawn and how he died or something? The details are irrelevant because the story is emotional and intended to pull your heart strings. If you raise objections, you are seen as non-believer. A heretic who must be purged.
The engineer is tasked with implementing the leader's vision. This is where reality throws a thousand wrenches into well laid plans and deadlines & story points multiply exponentially because there are a hundred edge cases. Or maybe it just doesn't work in the case of Theranos' Edison machine. A battle-scarred engineer sees all the things that can go wrong because he's been there and done that. Should you raise concerns as an engineer? Yes, but realize the executive's response maybe to stonewall and refuse to listen.
I think you're very near to understanding one of the core uses of story telling. Story telling can be a method of data compression, both cognitively and for transfering ideas to other people. The bitrate of our language is much lower than that of our imaginations. We use tricks to span the gap.
"The heroes journey" can be wielded the same way as a binary tree. They're both data structures for representing abstractions. You need a fuzzier data structure to encode our fuzzy reality.
I suspect if you and I worked together, you'd bring the storyteller out of me. Course details and dotted outlines are the matte and canvas for fine detail.
When I work with grand storytellers, it brings out my inner architect. Some people have strong psychic gravity, others aggressively fill vacuums. We all do a little of both and at different amounts depending on where we are in space and time.
No, you just like a different kind of story.
Ultimately people weigh each method differently. I think you are pidgeonholing them into two categories.
I think that's unwise, since it hurts the potential for you to grow your "EQ", so to speak.
top-down
- makes decisions based on intuition, rationalizes them afterwards if necessary
- quick reactions to new information
- more flexible (sometimes inconsistent) beliefs
- faster to adopt new ideas that align with their feelings, but also more resistant to ideas that they don't like
bottom-up
- systems based reasoning
- builds internal frameworks around ideas
- consistency is paramount
- slower reactions to new information
- can be seen to have more "unique" thoughts or insights through drawing parallels in their internally developed frameworks
- can be more rigid when it comes to new ideas, but not stubborn. it either fits into their frameworks or it doesn't
I'd say it's a spectrum, but people tend to significantly favor one way or another in my experience. I feel like top-down thinkers would be much more likely to be story-based, and bottom-up fact-based.
If the dimension you point out works for you - great, use it.
But keep in mind that people are fluid and also are heavily context dependent beings.
There is no real that vs that people. All of these are nothing but oversimplified models, with extremely narrow areas of applicability (at best).
For example, in some contexts I can be very arrogant and inconsiderate because "i know the truth" or just on another level with audience and don't bother spending time laying out all the steps (the narrative) that lead to the "right" answer. At the same time I can be very story/feelings oriented in others (like acting, where i'am just an amateur or psychology, which is by the nature is not very fact oriented matter).
The only way I've found to describe the difference in perspective I experience with some people is that I'll establish a thread with the intention of abstract curious exploration, not necessarily having anything to do with a discrete concrete problem, fact, or event, and they'll interpret it as though I'm looking for an answer to my specific personal problem, then getting frustrated when I steer it back to a more theoretical anecdote.
Most recently we were walking by a marina, and I was talking with them about their interest in getting into sailing. Tangentially, I posed the rhetorical question of "Hmm, I wonder how the municipality permits/taxes/allocates property when it comes to it being on the water? As in, is there a finite amount of shoreline that someone could have the right to build a dock on a charge for parking space?".
They immediately got frustrated that I was asking them exactly what the dollar value was that this specific Marina would be paying, but I was just establishing a vague idea to talk about, whereby if they had any insight, it would be something to discuss hypothetically.
In other cases it's been the economy, as in what effects might be had if X hypothetical policy change was passed, and they've answered with advice on specific personal investment mechanics as though I'm trying to solve a personal financial problem and looking for an account to open.
Reflecting on this, although different than your quandry, seems to come down to whether someone is intuitively an abstract thinker or likes that sort of discussion, or whether they're more about the concrete details of some specific case, and uninterested in intangibles.
Note that I also don't shy away from personal discussion, it's just that there can be more to explore in curious, abstract, larger scale topics, and it's an element of chemistry whether someone will run with your type of communication
If that resonates, maybe look up some secondary traits and see if you have those, and if you feel you want a second opinion to identify the condition, pursue a diagnosis.
Remember to be pragmatic and not die on a hill for the sake of an argument that isn't worth the trouble: Pick your battles.
And make sure your facts are really facts. Facts are hard. Bring solid information to back yourself up.
And keep in mind that truth tends to be very good at winning its own fights in the long term. If patience is an option, make use of it and play for the long game.
Which is exactly the story that some people like to tell themselves but is completely wrong. People who think of themselves as "fact based contrary to most others" often are extremely rigid in stories and on top of it extremely blind to them because they view themselves as "fact based and unbiased".
None of you are Data or Spock. The sooner you come to accept that you are human and that comes along with all the human biases the better off you'll be - because then you can start to manage them.
In the end, being a fact-based person might just be a narrative you hold about yourself.
I find it fun that you posed this then said you identify as fact-based. This dichotomy is a story (regardless of whether or not it has any basis in fact).
Reframe as "quibbler vs reasoners", maybe, and see where it takes you.
Or "proposers vs disposers"
Or look at the Big 5 personality profile attributes of Agreeableness and Neuroticism
On places where I agree with you: there are some people who naturally think about the big narrative, what could be done, the vision, and the way the hero will progress through their journey. There are also people who think through the day-to-day, less about the hero's journey and more about how the hero will get from Town A to Town B in two days. Great pairings come from having both; this is one of the reasons that co-founder teams are often so much more successful than individuals. They complement each other.
On the places where I disagree with you: some of your statements refer to reactions when the scenario requires thinking that is different than natural strengths. A successful "narrative" person understands and respects that someone needs to be thinking through the day-to-day, and a successful "facts" person understands that someone needs to be setting the big goals. They recognize weaknesses in themselves as strengths in another.
For example, a fully-aware "narrative" person won't think it's wrong to pierce a valuable story with contrary facts. They will respect that their story should be updated. And a fully-aware "facts" person won't put their foot in their mouth by saying things at the wrong time. They'll respectfully listen to others and chime in when it's appropriate to build up the group. None of us are perfect, so we will all make mistakes here, especially under stress.
Yes: There is the idea of constructivism, where everyone constructs their own reality all the time. There is no shared, objective reality. And there are multiple ways to construct a reality, and some are, for example, based on emotion: "I feel it, therefore it must be true"[^1]. And there are reinforcing patterns which protect your reality constructions from falling apart, proofing it against what from other people's perspective would be considered evidence. The most famous protection mechanism is the Confirmation Bias. Another one that is widely spread among conspiracy mystics is Disagreement implies Ignorance: You disagree with me because you're ignorant to the facts. Another one would be Disagreement implies Dislike: You disagree with me because you don't like me, not because I'm wrong. So yeah, what you call "story-based" is from my perspective a class of reality constructions.
But no, it's not about some people being like this, and some people being like that. Everyone constructs their reality all the time, and constructing them in a specific way is a muscle you can train, something that changes over time _and_ something where you can fall into both of your categories at the same time. A famous example would be HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. People who are any or more of these things tend to create their reality differently without even noticing. If I'm hungry, I'm angry, and I tend to accept things more easily into my world view that justify my being angry, without even being aware of it. Only after a good meal I would be able to change my perspective again.
[^1]: For a fascinating glimpse into many reality construction patterns which are centred around emotions, I recommend this series of texts around a sub-group of parents of estranged children: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730763
When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics
This article presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.
Relevant quote, p. 227: Table 6 presents responses that attest to a range of distinct but overlapping themes in these qualitative data. In particular, some articulate to moral flexibility as a strategy in partisan politics, such that they weigh the “deeper truth” more than commitment to fact-grounding. One such example, expressed by a respondent who supported the DeSantis statement, was presented in the introduction of this article. “I believe that there are times when it is more important for a leader to send the right message, even if it is not entirely accurate” (respondent 216). Another respondent, who assessed the “the right message” as more important that objective evidence when evaluating Biden’s statement said: “In a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it was more important for President Biden to appeal to American values of patriotism and the willingness to step up for others. Most people are aware that while vaccinations greatly reduce the spread of disease, there is no vaccine that can completely, utterly stop it. However, Biden was using strong, emotional, positive language to encourage Americans to do what was morally correct and patriotic at that moment, and I feel that was entirely appropriate” (respondent 37).
