Your Emotions Care About the Facts

Key points

Emotions help shape narrative and give facts meaning in the pursuit of truth.

Emotion and reason collaborate to guide choices in a data-heavy world.

Resist the temptation to treat facts as self-explanatory or emotions as irrelevant noise.

.....But Your Emotions Care about Facts

The popular maxim that “facts don’t care about your feelings” has become a touchstone of modern debate. It suggests that truth is harsh and objective, immune to the influence—or distortion—of emotion . But does this slogan capture the whole story?

Naturally, our emotions care profoundly about facts. They respond to them, interpret them, and help us decide what truly matters. They determine which facts will become part of the narrative. The relationship between fact and feeling is not one of confli