The mirror crack’d

People watching the same videos, reading the same headlines, and reacting to the same street-level events often seem to be describing entirely different realities. Conversations quickly break down, not because people disagree about what should be done, but because they cannot even agree on what is happening.

It’s as if people are watching two completely different movies on one screen. People with access to the same set of facts come away with completely different understandings of what is happening. In some cases, each side seems genuinely unaware that the other interpretation even exists.

Psychologists tell us this resembles dissociation more than cognitive dissonance. Dissociation refers to a class of mental processes in which certain thoughts, perceptions, or experiences are kept out of conscious awareness.

As clinical psychologists have long noted, dissociation functions as a defensive mechanism, shielding the individual from information that is experienced as overwhelming or intolerable. The mind does not reject the data after evaluating it. It fails to perceive it in the first place.

These conflicting media narratives matter because most people do not build their understanding of the world through direct experience. Our personal encounters are limited. The rest of our mental model is assembled from stories. Indeed, research in cognitive psychology and media studies consistently shows that humans rely heavily on narrative to organise information and assign meaning.

In other words, we are not natural statisticians. As psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Daniel Kahneman have shown, people reason intuitively through stories, examples, and emotionally salient cases, often treating mediated experience as a stand-in for reality itself. This is why propaganda is most effective when it does not look like propaganda.

A functioning society does not require agreement on every issue. It does require a shared reality. When large groups of people cannot even see what others are responding to, debate becomes impossible. You cannot resolve disagreements if one side experiences the other as hallucinating.

The answer is not counter-propaganda, and it is not simply more facts. Research on motivated reasoning shows that facts alone rarely change minds when perceptions themselves are structured by narrative. What is required instead is closer attention to how stories shape perception. What they highlight. What they omit. And how repetition turns fiction into intuition.

These conflicting media narratives matter because most people do not build their understanding of the world through direct experience. Our personal encounters are limited. The rest of our mental model is assembled from stories. Indeed, research in cognitive psychology and media studies consistently shows that humans rely heavily on narrative to organise information and assign meaning.

In other words, we are not natural statisticians. As psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Daniel Kahneman have shown, people reason intuitively through stories, examples, and emotionally salient cases, often treating mediated experience as a stand-in for reality itself. This is why propaganda is most effective when it does not look like propaganda.

Many people assume propaganda is something obvious that you notice and argue with. In reality, the most powerful propaganda works through repetition rather than persuasion. Social psychologists have documented what is known as the “illusory truth effect,” in which repeated statements are more likely to be judged as true, regardless of their accuracy. When a moral narrative is replayed often enough, it stops feeling like a claim and starts feeling like memory.

There is also a structural problem with storytelling itself. Everyday reality, especially everyday crime, is usually chaotic, senseless, and narratively unsatisfying. Criminologists have long observed that much violent crime lacks coherent motives or moral meaning. Writers, understandably, select stories that feel legible, purposeful, and emotionally engaging. But those selections shape our expectations of reality and thus our perception, and make us see otherwise messy events as morally clearer than they actually are.

The result is a moral universe in which certain kinds of harm are treated as profound moral ruptures, while other kinds are treated as routine or unfortunate facts of life. Violence committed by some characters is framed as a social crisis demanding urgent moral response. Similar violence committed by others is portrayed as tragic but unremarkable, something to be managed rather than interrogated. Calling ourselves Homo Sapiens appears to be a misnomer.