I was too young to catch the original airing of Dragnet on TV in the 1950s, or even the revival in the late 1960s. But by the time I was a kid, the catchphrase “Just the facts, ma’am was a thing,” despite the line only having been said once in the show.
Instead, the phrase seems to have caught on after a parody, St. George and the Dragonet, was released, using the trappings of the show in a medieval audio drama.
The line was so tied to the show by the time the Dan Ackroyd movie rolled around in 1987, it was used multiple times through the movie.
When not being used as a parody or in a mocking way, the line means basically, don’t give me commentary, just give me what happened. Give me what’s known. Give me, well, give me the facts.
The implication here is give me all the facts and nothing but the facts. No matter how small or seemingly irrelevant, the facts are important. You can’t build your case without all the facts.
Because if you don’t have all the facts, you can’t understand the whole picture.
Take for example, today. I’m writing this on Monday. I woke up this morning at 7, and realized I forgot to plug the car in. I ran out into the -26 degree weather and plugged it in, but it was still hard to start when Colette went to work at 7:45. Taking the dog for a walk, my fingers nearly froze. Are you getting the picture of what sort of day Monday was? Cold. Heart of winter sort of day.
But at 3 pm when I went out again to pay for my daughter’s buzz cut at Tangles Salon (Seriously), it was -6. And sunny. And calm. And you get a completely different sort of picture of what type of day it was.
If I were to give you only one of those facts—it was -26 on Monday, or it was -6 on Monday—you’d get a completely different view of what type of day it was. -26 is hate the cold, make fun of climate change weather. -6 is, well, average. It’s cold, sure, but not too cold. It’s what you’d expect in February.
And, by knowing both those facts, you learn another fact: that the temperature changed 20 degrees over the course of eight hours.
This has nothing to do with weather, but everything to do with how we deal with facts.
We as humans are really good at ignoring facts that disagree with our worldview, and we’ve gotten so good at spinning the facts, at only accepting the facts that jibe with our worldview that nearly everything is in dispute.
There’s 65 years of hard science data to tell us that water fluoridation is healthy and that smoking is bad for you. Yet I’m sure that there’s a group of you already reaching for your smartphones to send a note explaining how fluoride is detrimental to your health while puffing on a cigarette.
(Indeed, fluoridation isn’t just adding fluoride to water. It’s naturally occurring, and in some places, it’s too high. Sometimes it’s about removing levels that are too high, because yes, too much fluoride is harmful. In other news: eating too much broccoli can kill you. Drinking too much water can kill you. Everything in moderation.)
We like to believe that we arrive at decisions based on finding facts, then reaching a reasoned conclusion. And while we are using our talent for reasoning, quite often we are using what is known as “motivated reasoning.”
Motivated reasoning is simply the process by which we, by looking at the facts, reach the conclusion we already hold, or decide to act in a way that conforms to what we already know to be true.
We don’t reach the conclusion on who to vote for based on the facts of their party’s political platform or views on fluoridation, but rather, our views on fluoridation frequently conform to the views that are held by our favoured political party or some other group to which we belong.
Our sense of self is tied to the group we identify with. It’s part of who we are.
So it’s no surprise that we get defensive when the ideology of our group is threatened by—gasp—contrary facts. We listen to the experts we like and find logical reasons (using motivated reasoning) to reject the rest.
A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest.
Which makes it really hard to have an actual rational conversation.
When your ideologies are challenged, your personal prejudices, beliefs and political views skew the facts. A challenge to your group’s belief system threatens your very sense of identity. If, for example, you believe that GMOs are dangerous, anyone who says anything different is an idiot, even if they are a scientist who has spent the last 15 years systematically researching the very issues you raise as to why GMOs aren’t safe. Do tax cuts pay for themselves by driving economic growth? Do immigrants perpetrate more violent crimes? These days, you can go to your favourite media source (not us, obviously) to find the facts that support your worldview.
In the end, what matters is not what is factually accurate, but what is politically true. And if the group dogma is threatened by facts, these biases can lead to denial. And because we tend to stick up for the group, it allows us to be manipulated by leaders. In the end it turns out that my facts are not my facts at all, but those that are being foisted on me by others.
The only good thing to come out of this is that, once we identify a problem, we may be able to start working to fix it. But being a good group member is so hard wired into our system, it may be impossible. But we’ll never know until we try.
