Social psychologist at NYU. Author of The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind. His key quote for storytellers: “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
This is why logical arguments rarely change minds but stories do. You could present an engineer with seventeen slides of data and watch her disagree with every conclusion. Then tell her a story about why the data matters, and suddenly she understands.
The human mind evolved to detect patterns and make predictions. Those predictions aren’t always correct. But they’ve been beneficial enough to become central to how we think. We’re pattern-matching machines wrapped in skin. We’re constantly asking: what story fits these facts? What’s the narrative that makes sense?
When you argue with logic alone, you’re fighting upstream. You’re asking the listener’s brain to abandon its prediction engine and follow yours instead. The brain resists. It’s too slow. It requires too much energy.
But when you tell a story, you’re working with the listener’s prediction engine. You’re laying down facts—small units of pattern. Their brain automatically fills the gaps. You’re not forcing conclusions. You’re creating conditions where their brain constructs the same conclusion it would have arrived at alone. That feels like discovery, not persuasion.
This connects to the Autocomplete concept. You lay foundations and let the audience’s brain build the rest. You provide the opening. Their prediction engine completes the sentence. Now it’s not your conclusion—it’s their insight.
Haidt’s research also explores why we’re drawn to logos in the first place. We want rational justification. But that rationality comes after the emotional decision. The inference engine runs first, unconsciously assembling a story that fits the facts. Then the rational mind shows up to provide justification.
Most founders have this backwards. They think they need to persuade with logic. But they’re really just providing the facts their audience’s pattern-matching engine needs to construct the story they already want to believe.
That’s not cynical. That’s how human minds work.