How Tribes Construct Rival Realities

Henry Nowak, George Floyd, and the hidden interpretive machinery that drives political conflict.

Do citizens live in “different worlds”?

In recent years, there has been considerable scholarly and political attention to the worry that citizens of many democracies increasingly inhabit different “worlds”. This fear is acute in the US, where sharp polarisation between Democrats and Republicans is intense and seemingly ever-increasing, but it is also salient in many other Western countries where party-based identifications are swamped by other divisions, such as left versus right, cosmopolitan versus nationalist, establishment versus populist, and so on.

Concretely, the worry is that on topics as diverse as election integrity, immigration, crime, vaccines, and the Epstein files, many citizens do not just hold different values and interests but operate with fundamentally different factual understandings of what is going on.

This creates an obvious problem. Democracies can function if citizens have different experiences, interests, values, and ideologies, but if they can’t even agree on what is happening in the world, we are in trouble.

As Obama said, “We want diversity of opinion; we don’t want diversity of facts.”

This worry is typically coupled with a familiar partisan interpretation. For liberals and progressives like Obama, the fundamental problem is not so much that citizens inhabit distinct realities as that some citizens confront reality whilst others—the right, or at least the populist right—inhabit a fantasyland populated with fake news, misinformation, disinformation, demagogic lies, and conspiracy theories.

For the right, this interpretation is reversed. As Rush Limbaugh declared in 2009, “Everything run, dominated and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it.”

The suboptimal nature of this situation has fuelled much scholarship, discourse, and policy aimed at diagnosing what has gone wrong and prescribing various cures.

However, a prior question is whether this assessment of substantial “factual polarisation” is accurate to begin with. How widespread is this phenomenon, really? How worried should we be?

Three sources of scepticism

One source of scepticism is a now-familiar body of research alleging that post-2016 worries about fake news and misinformation are overblown. According to this work, clear-cut falsehoods and fabrications are less prevalent in the information environment than many assumed.

More relevantly, there is also a persuasive body of research suggesting that estimates of factual misbelief and polarisation have been systematically overstated due to flawed survey designs. It turns out that when you pay respondents to give accurate answers (to guard against insincere partisan “cheerleading”), include “don’t know” options, and screen for inattention and trolling, the amount of outright factual errors and disagreements in public opinion tends to drop quite substantially.

Finally, whereas five or ten years ago, it was all the rage among social scientists and public intellectuals to argue that people are so irrationally tribal they are often immune to facts and sometimes even “backfire” when confronted with corrections, such ideas have shared the fate of countless other sexy social-psychological findings: they generally haven’t replicated. The more robust, boring finding from recent research is that when people are presented with factual evidence and rational arguments, they tend to update their beliefs, even when that means moving away from their tribe’s orthodoxies.

One reasonable lesson you might draw from all this is that the “different worlds” panic is unfounded. Perhaps most citizens are more closely tethered and responsive to a shared reality than was previously feared. They might still dislike members of other political tribes for dumb—well, tribal—reasons, as research on affective polarisation or political sectarianism suggests, but they don’t disagree about the fundamental nature of reality as much as many feared.

A different view

I partly agree with this interpretation. The “different worlds” thesis has been overstated, even in highly divided countries like the US, especially among most normie voters who don’t pay much attention to politics because they have better/more enjoyable things to do. I also think that, as with the misinformation panic, too much of the discussion here has suffered from recency bias, exaggerating how novel the core phenomenon really is.

Nevertheless, I think the core phenomenon is real and important for thinking about some of the central political challenges we confront today. However, much scholarship and discourse has misrepresented it. To understand in what sense citizens inhabit different worlds, we need to move away from differences over narrow, verifiable facts. Instead, the action resides in the competing systems of interpretation through which people select, categorise, frame, connect, explain, and narrate those facts.

Although I am tedious in my repeated emphasis of this point, I think the best account of this phenomenon comes from one of my intellectual heroes, Walter Lippmann, in his analysis of what he called the “pseudo-environment”: the highly selective, low-resolution compressions of reality that most citizens confuse for reality itself. This analysis of the pseudo-environment spotlights a form of political division—of polarisation—that has been overlooked in much (but not all) scholarship: interpretive polarisation. (Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and colleagues call a similar phenomenon “interpretative polarization”.)

Interpretive polarisation is not primarily disagreement over narrow, verifiable facts, nor disagreement over the values or high-level ideologies citizens bring to politics. It involves competing systems of interpretation that determine which facts citizens attend to, how they understand them, and how they connect their values and ideologies to political action.

Part of my aim here is to make the case for this thesis. But I also want to argue that this analysis helps to illuminate some of the most pressing challenges liberal democracies confront today.

For that, it will be helpful to start with one of the biggest stories in recent British politics: the murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, and the processes through which the facts of his death were refracted through the rival systems of interpretation that organise political attention and conflict in the UK and broader Western world.

“I can’t breathe”

Many of the facts concerning what happened to Henry Nowak are not in dispute, in part because the final moments of his life were captured on horrific body-cam footage.

Last December, Nowak, a white eighteen-year-old university student, was stabbed multiple times by a Sikh individual named Vickrum Digwa. As Nowak lay dying, Digwa’s brother phoned the police and claimed that Nowak had racially assaulted his brother. When the police arrived, Digwa and members of his family reinforced this story as Nowak lay on the floor, barely able to speak or move.

He told the police officers he had been stabbed. One responded, “I Don’t think you have, mate.”

He was then placed in handcuffs and was initially ignored and dismissed as he said, multiple times, “I can’t breathe.” The officers told him he was being arrested for assault and read him his rights as he lay dying. “Please, brother, I can’t breathe” were some of his final words.

Shortly afterwards, the police officers discovered that Nowak had in fact been stabbed, and Digwa was charged with murder. A couple of weeks ago, Digwa was found guilty of this charge, after which the horrendous body-cam footage from the police officers who arrived on the scene was released to the public, fuelling a vast amount of media attention and political discussion of the incident.

Observing this discussion, it would be reasonable to conclude that many citizens inhabit different worlds. And yet, this manifested much less through disagreement on the verifiable facts of the case than in how they were interpreted.

Similar facts, different interpretations

Among the populist and far-right, the events were imbued with maximal political salience—not as an isolated or unrepresentative occurrence, but as a national emergency, a cause for a political reckoning.

It was categorised as both an instance and proof of how the UK operates with a “two-tier” culture and justice system, in which establishment institutions apply different standards to white (increasingly capitalised “White”) citizens than to racial minorities.

The police’s response was explained not just in terms of incompetence but in terms of the insidious influence of anti-racist/DEI/woke ideology throughout our institutions, which led the police officers arriving on the scene to treat an accusation of racism “more seriously than an act of murder.”

In this way, the events were also filtered through counterfactual assumptions about how such an event could never have occurred had a white man stabbed a Sikh teenager and then falsely claimed to have been racially assaulted.

Most fundamentally, the events were located in a clear narrative of villains, victims, and heroes. The direct victim, Nowak, was a synecdoche for the broader population of ordinary white Britons victimised by liberal elites and racial minorities. To fight back, these victims must rely on brave, truth-telling individuals—politicians, pundits, activists, ordinary men and women—unafraid of being called racist.

This interpretation clashed with the mainstream liberal and progressive reading. Here, the events of Nowak’s murder and the police response were largely treated as an isolated tragedy, unrepresentative of, and so uninformative about, anything broader. Hence, they should not be “politicised” (i.e., treated as carrying information about matters of broad political interest). In contrast, the right’s reaction to such events was assimilated to a broader, more familiar template: far-right demagogues and deplorables exploiting unrepresentative tragedies to whip up hatred and division.

In this narrative, the victims were the racial minorities targeted by such racist hatred, as well as the establishment institutions that function to protect them.

An interpretive inversion

Importantly, one reason the events ignited such a political and media storm is a specific phrase Nowak uttered: “I can’t breathe.”

Back in 2020, these words were uttered by George Floyd as he was killed by Derek Chauvin, events captured in equally horrendous video footage.

In the aftermath of those events, the systems of interpretation that I have described were inverted. Among liberals and progressives, not just in the US but across the broader Western world, Floyd’s death was imbued with maximal political salience. It was not an isolated or unrepresentative murder and tragedy but the cause for a national reckoning—in fact, an international reckoning.

The core narrative frame here was racism—not just Chauvin’s racism, but also the deeper, even more insidious forms of racism (structural, systemic, implicit) that had long poisoned Western cultures and institutions, which Floyd’s death was an awful symptom of. Of course, this causal interpretation implied a counterfactual assumption: that had Floyd been white, this would never have happened.

Most generally, the events were narrated through a story of victims and villains in which Floyd’s direct victimhood both demonstrated and reflected the broader oppression of all black (increasingly capitalised as “Black”) people and other non-white groups around the Western world, who now depended on the heroic actions of progressive, anti-racist activists awake to the reality of such oppression.

Conservatives and right-wing populists viewed the events through a very different interpretive framework.

Most obviously, they resisted any treatment of what they deemed a rare and unrepresentative act of police misconduct as the basis for a broader condemnation of American policing, let alone Western societies as a whole.

They emphasised the specific facts of the case, including Floyd’s criminal record and behaviour. They expressed agnosticism or outright scepticism about the relevance of racism to the events, and often made efforts to publicise similar cases in which white victims were killed by police without receiving comparable media or political attention.

Finally, this media and political attention was itself explained in terms of a broader, familiar pattern: the left’s cynical exploitation of isolated, unrepresentative incidents to advance its hysterical ideological agenda.

For the populist right today, the profound differences in how Floyd’s and Nowak’s deaths were treated provide yet further evidence for their own interpretation. When “career criminal George Floyd” was murdered, the establishment responded by politicising it to an extreme degree, fuelling the “Great Awokening” that swept Western institutions in the years afterwards. In contrast, that same political establishment’s response to the Nowak event is to not politicise it—“proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.”

For liberals and progressives, this very narrative is itself further confirmation that the right inhabits a deranged fantasyland. Floyd’s death reflected the extreme, well-documented historical oppression of Black people, which contrasts with the delusional victim complex of deplorable, racist white citizens today.

This is what interpretive polarisation looks like.

A Lippmannian analysis

To understand what is going on in these cases, focusing on narrow disagreements over verifiable facts won’t get us very far. That’s not to say that there are no such disagreements, or that nobody is deluded or lying about basic facts. The point is rather that we need a richer account of how such facts become selected, ignored, and narrated in the minds of those who identify with different political tribes.

For the basics of such an account, we can turn to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 masterpiece, Public Opinion.

Public Opinion’s central thesis is simple and, on reflection, obvious.

In contrast to the relatively small-scale social worlds our species engaged with for most of its history, the modern world is far too big, complex, changing, and inaccessible for any individual to engage with directly or completely. Most events, trends, regularities, and public affairs are remote. They happen in places we have never been, involve people we have never met, are affected by complex systems and institutions we cannot fully understand, and turn on countless facts we cannot personally verify.

This has two interacting implications.

First, we rely on others (journalists, pundits, politicians, activists, intellectuals, Substackers, etc.) to mediate reality for us, all of whom are in exactly the same situation.

Second, this mediation cannot involve transmission of a complete set of facts. There are too many facts and too many ways to interpret, connect, and explain them. So, we must reduce reality to extremely selective, low-resolution mental models.

This thesis underlies Lippmann’s distinction between what he calls the “real environment”—the vast, complex, independent reality in which our actions have consequences—and the “pseudo-environment”: our simplified, selective pictures of reality we instinctively confuse for reality itself.

For Lippmann, we cannot understand democratic politics and its defining pathologies without attending to the distinctive characteristics and failure modes of these pseudo-environments. We also cannot understand political divisions and the ways in which different citizens “live… in different worlds.”

A central insight of Public Opinion is that pseudo-environments are not best understood as either a database of factual beliefs or as a judgement on a pre-existing set of facts. Instead, they are constituted by what Lippmann called “stereotypes”, by which he meant not just prejudiced generalisations about social groups but something much broader: all simplifying systems of categories, frames, prototypes, narratives, and explanatory models through which citizens compress reality in ways that make it intelligible.

Although these stereotypes tend to distort citizens’ understanding of the political universe (more on this below), they are unavoidable. Without extreme selection, simplification, and categorisation, political reality would be an unintelligible blur.

Most interestingly for our purposes here, this basic model of political psychology leads him to criticise what he calls the “orthodox theory of public opinion”, which in many ways still shapes how many people think of politics and political disagreement today:

“The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that … a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts … The pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them.”

Attention and Interpretation

There are two aspects to this model.

The first concerns selection and salience. Neither the mind nor the media can simply hold up a mirror to reality. There are too many facts, too many things going on, so we must be selective in what we attend to and deem newsworthy. We must decide which events matter, which events are representative, which reports are trustworthy, and which things can be ignored as noise.

This means that distinct pseudo-environments could, in principle, emerge not initially through disagreements over narrow, verifiable facts but through different decisions about which facts to attend to and which to ignore.

The second function of stereotypes concerns how facts are categorised, framed, narrated, and explained. The same events can be interpreted as a protest, a mostly peaceful protest, a riot, a coup, an insurrection, a false flag, and so on. The same murder can be interpreted as a local tragedy, a hate crime, a symptom of racism, an instance of two-tier justice, or an anecdote exploited by cynical political entrepreneurs.

We do not first see, then define…

These ideas lie behind perhaps the most famous line from Public Opinion: “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.”

The point is not that pseudo-environments involve simple hallucinations or that citizens can never perceive anything accurately. It is that how people experience and understand the political universe is shaped by socially supplied systems of categorisation and interpretation.

Public opinion is, hence, not a matter of evaluating a pre-existing, self-interpreting set of facts. It involves applying a pre-existing system of interpretation to the task of selecting, omitting, categorising, and framing facts.

For Lippmann, this notion of “seeing” includes not just what we encounter second-hand through media reports but also our first-hand experiences.

This is why Lippmann is so sceptical of what is now called “lived experience” as a basis for political insight, an aspect of his model of politics that my students tend to find most confusing and maddening when I teach Public Opinion. One’s lived experiences do not come pre-interpreted. Which experiences we attend to, how we categorise them, and how we connect them to broader frames, narratives, and explanatory models is determined by our system of stereotypes, not the experiences themselves.

“I don’t think you have, mate”

One couldn’t find a clearer or more disturbing illustration of these ideas than the case of Henry Nowak’s death.

First, there were the police officers who arrived at the scene and initially dismissed Nowak’s claims that he had been stabbed and, when arrested, could not breathe.

They did not first take in the facts and then form a judgement. They seem to have arrived with a pre-existing interpretation, which guided what they saw: a drunk, racist white guy lying on the floor, and a victimised Sikh family. It has even been said that Nowak’s uttering of “I can’t breathe” might have been interpreted as further confirmation of this interpretation, precisely because in the aftermath of Floyd’s death this has become a slogan often mockingly used by the far-right when arrested by police.

Then, of course, there is the politics of the event, the competing systems of interpretation highlighted above, in which the body-cam footage was encountered and understood through competing systems of salience, categorisation, and explanation.

To understand this, we need to identify a distinctive form of polarisation, one which is not well-understood in terms of traditional categories, including factual polarisation (disagreement over narrow, verifiable facts), ideological polarisation (disagreement over high-level values, principles, or ideologies), or affective polarisation (mutual dislike among members of opposing groups). Interpretive polarisation is connected to all of these—competing systems of interpretation will typically co-exist with these other forms of polarisation—but it is not reducible to them.

It has many dimensions, including categorisation, causal and counterfactual models, representativeness judgements, moral framing, and narratives and narrative roles, all of which mediate between the facts people attend to, ignore, and explain, as well as the way they apply high-level values (e.g., concerns with fairness, equality, or freedom) to politics.

Importantly, this is not a new proposal, not just because it is in Lippmann’s work, but also because many other researchers have expressed similar insights. Nevertheless, I think the core idea is underrated in how many people think about politics, polarisation, and public opinion.

Some Implications

There are several reasons why this matters.

First, we shouldn’t move too quickly from findings that simple factual mistakes and polarisation are rare to the lesson that citizens confront a shared reality. Radically different systems of interpretation can co-exist with a shared recognition of narrow matters of fact. In fact, just as the most effective propaganda rarely involves outright falsehoods, the most resilient systems of “stereotypes” are precisely those that are difficult to falsify.

Second, we also shouldn’t move too quickly from findings that clear-cut “misinformation” and misperceptions are relatively rare to the conclusion that most citizens have an accurate understanding of reality. Lippmann was concerned about pseudo-environments precisely because they typically simplify and distort reality in biased, cartoonish ways that fuel bad politics.

For example, the increasingly popular conviction that white (“White”) Britons are victims of an oppressive two-tier justice system is not easily subject to traditional “fact-checking”. Of course, one can point to many facts that seem to contradict it (e.g., the dominance of white people among the higher strata of British society), but one can also point to facts that seem to confirm it (e.g., laws and policies that often involve de facto positive discrimination in favour of non-white groups). At bottom, however, it is not a simple, verifiable claim about reality. It is a highly charged interpretation of reality capable of gobbling up confirming information and screening out disconfirming information.

For most of those who live in this pseudo-environment, it doesn’t even exist as a fully articulated set of propositions. It involves inchoate feelings of identity, status, and grievance coupled with a high-level narrative, the precise details of which are then fleshed out, connected to ongoing events, and defended by a professional class of politicians, pundits, and activists who work to construct and update the details of the pseudo-environment in real time.

Nevertheless, the core narrative is a gross simplification and distortion of a far more complex reality. It transforms a scattered set of real failures and asymmetries into a clean narrative of anti-white institutional oppression, omitting any facts and history that don’t fit this story, which is framed, exaggerated, and embellished in terms of stick-figure categories of villains, victims, and heroes.

Of course, such distortions are not unique to this pseudo-environment. The Great Awokening that swept Western institutions in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder also stitched together a complex set of truths, omissions, simplifications, exaggerations, homogenisations, and Manichean distinctions. (This was especially noticeable in the UK, where a narrative adapted to the US context was often applied here with almost no modifications, despite the radically different history of race, immigration, and multiculturalism in the country.)

More generally, Lippmann’s point was that although not all pseudo-environments are equally wrong, they are all, in a sense, wrong.

Partly, this is because such pseudo-environments are never neutral nor disinterested. A pattern of stereotypes, writes Lippmann, is “the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own value, our own positions and our own rights.”

As strategic political primates, we instinctively gravitate towards interpretations that frame and narrate reality in ways that advance our interests, flatter our allies, demonise our rivals, and mobilise support for our favourite causes. The construction of a pseudo-environment is, therefore, a complex move in a society-wide status game, a distributed attempt to interpret and misinterpret reality in ways that assign the right groups, organisations, and institutions to the categories of villains, victims, heroes, dupes, cowards, hypocrites, and demons.

This constructive process is also—and this is perhaps what most troubled Lippmann—a profoundly unscientific endeavour. By the early twentieth century, it had begun to dawn on most intellectuals that studying society effectively would require applying rigorous scientific and statistical methods for data collection, inference, and hypothesis testing.

In an amusing passage, he writes,

“To pick fairly a good sample of a large class is not easy. The problem belongs to the science of statistics, and it is a most difficult affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive, and mine remain azoic in spite of the half dozen manuals which I once devoutly imagined that I understood. All they have done for me is to make me a little more conscious of how hard it is to classify and to sample, how readily we spread a little butter over the whole universe.”

And yet, how are pseudo-environments constructed? Even setting aside the distorting role of people’s interests and self-deception, systematic inquiry into a complex, distant reality is replaced with pre-scientific intuitions, the limbic system, personal experiences, and headlines. (Today, we might also add viral clips and hot takes.) In place of representative samples, base rates, and reliable causal inference, we get the modern equivalent of primitive myths, except instead of guiding rain dances, they power our democracies.

Looking around at today, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Lippmann’s worries about democracy and public opinion were well-founded. In fact, it is noteworthy that as liberal democracies have become more democratic, especially as social media has weakened the influence of establishment gatekeepers, the political influence of pre-scientific, primitive myth-making on both the far left and populist (increasingly outright fascist) right has gotten far worse.

What can be done?

At least when writing in 1922, Lippmann favoured a broadly technocratic solution. If the problem is that public opinion is pre-scientific, the solution must rest with “organised intelligence”: institutions that apply rigorous scientific and statistical methodologies to classify, analyse, and explain the social world.

In the second half of the twentieth century, this broadly technocratic impulse became highly influential across Western societies. As Benkler and colleagues observe,

“Government statistics agencies; science and academic investigations; law and the legal profession; and journalism developed increasingly rationalized and formalized solutions to the problem of how societies made up of diverse populations with diverse and conflicting political views can nonetheless form a shared sense of what is going on in the world.”

However, the two cases reviewed in this post show why this solution is so fragile.

First, the ostensibly neutral knowledge-producing institutions—the “organised intelligence”—championed by Lippmann can themselves become captured by popular pseudo-environments. This was evident in the Great Awokening, during which major knowledge-producing organisations and institutions across Western societies increasingly subordinated traditional epistemic goals—truth, objectivity, knowledge, understanding—to the project of social justice as conceived within the progressive pseudo-environment.

Of course, within this pseudo-environment, the very idea of “neutral” truth-seeking institutions was itself framed as a cover for the biases and interests of the dominant (white male cis heteronormative etc.) class.

Whatever one thinks of that debate, it illustrates the challenges of maintaining technocratic institutions in democratic societies with sharp divisions.

It also highlights a second issue: even if such institutions were perfectly objective, they could only shape public opinion if people trust them. If citizens inhabit a pseudo-environment in which such institutions are viewed as captured, corrupt, or biased, they cannot perform the role that Lippmann hoped for.

This basic problem was evident in the reaction to the Nowak case: when the narrative is that mainstream institutions are biased against white people due to the insidious influence of woke/DEI ideology among professional-managerial elites, it becomes difficult to rely on those very same elites to evaluate their own bias.

Again, what can be done?

We can gesture at some things that might help.

Most importantly, we should improve the reliability and impartiality of our epistemic institutions, which are too often politicised and advocacy-focused. Ideals of perfect objectivity and neutrality will never be fully achieved, but they are not simply a cover story for hidden interests either. The left’s growing institutional dominance in recent decades, combined with a prominent strand of left-wing thought that seeks to replace norms of objectivity with social justice activism, has had bad effects on these institutions’ quality and trustworthiness.

Representatives of these institutions also need to be better at adapting to the constraints and incentives of the new media age. The days of relying on establishment gatekeeping and elite control of the public narrative are long gone. We now live in a more fragmented, more competitive attention economy, one which favours more direct, authentic modes of communication. As Renée DiResta and Rachel Kleinfeld argue, “Organizations and scholars grounded in fact-based argumentation—and the philanthropists and advocates who support research-backed policy influence—must grapple with this shift.”

Finally, I am cautiously optimistic that advances in AI might help with some of the challenges described in this essay, but that is a story for another day.

Ultimately, however, it’s easier to diagnose the disease than to prescribe the cure. Freed from the constraining influence of reliable, expert knowledge that only systematic inquiry can provide, democratic citizens will construct rival realities, each a grossly simplified and distorted map of a complex environment that they will confuse for the environment itself.

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Further Reading

• My essays, The world outside and the pictures in our heads, Let’s not bring back the gatekeepers, Did social media destroy democracy—or give it to us good and hard?

• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

• DiResta, Invisible Rulers

• Neta Kligler-Vilenchik et al., Interpretative Polarization across Platforms: How Political Disagreement Develops Over Time on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp

• Will Storr, The Status Game, on the role of status in constructing narratives and much more

• David Pinsof et al., Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems

• Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

• Jeffrey Friedman, Power Without Knowledge