If you ask most people, they will tell you that human cooperation, from politics to simple daily interactions in the street, has gotten worse in the past 60 years.  We blame the rise on various trends, like more social media, more extreme partisanship, the loss of trust, the increase in crime, the decline in civic values – depending on our point of view.

It will probably come as a surprise to learn, then, that social cooperation and trust has actually increased in the last half-century, according to a meta-analysis of thousands of studies and over 60,000 subjects.  And we humans were already pretty cooperative to begin with. Ever since cave people had to cooperate in order to bring down the wooly mammoths and fill the dark, cold nights with laughter and song, we humans have been working together to solve our problems and to create new ones, like global warming.

In fact, the digital devices that are attracting so much blame of late for various kinds of human decline, especially mental, may actually be improving our memories rather than degrading them. One recent study showed that cognitive offloading, as the storage of things to remember on your cell phone is called, increases our memory recall by nearly 30 percent, even if we don’t use the device all the time. Perhaps, if we’re doing all that offloading, we have more space for other, non-virtual memories?

We might call this the Pinker Effect, after Steven Pinker, and his book The Better Angels of Our Nature:  Why Violence Has Declined, in which he demonstrates conclusively that in terms of the risk of war, disease, malnutrition, and so on, this is by far the best time in human history to be alive.

For most people, that’s a hard set of facts to swallow, and we still feel like life is more parlous now. The facts be dammed!  And that points to a problem for public speakers and leaders everywhere trying to persuade others of their point of view. If we are in possession of a set of facts, or expertise in general, that runs counter to some prevailing sentiment, how do we persuade others that we’ve got it right?

Facts alone are not going to sway public opinion, or even a small slice of it. The leader, or expert, needs a more expansive strategy.  In effect, you need to be ready throw a lot more ordinance at the problem in order to sway a prevailing POV.  What are the key ways to go about it?

First, tell emotionally powerful stories.  This point will not surprise any reader of this blog; I’ve been talking about storytelling for years.  Emotionally charged stories go right to our hierarchal memory storage system, based on the ways in which we catalogue our experiences of the world. We stack memories up in our brains like little videos, with the most painful and searing memories easiest to retrieve, ready to act as warning alarms:  don’t do that – the last time you did something like that you got burned!

Second, do use numbers and facts but keep them small and to a minimum.  We live in a world full of complex numbers, but we think in terms of the fingers of a hand or two. We’re best at comparing small numbers, not large ones, and thinking in terms of numerical abstractions is what we do least well.  That old advertising line about “3 out of 4 doctors recommend,” had it right.  Those are numbers we can relate to.

Third, use vivid imagery based on the 5 senses.  We take in most of the data we get from the world through our sight, hearing, sense of smell, taste, and touch.  The more you can appeal to those senses, the more you’ll land your evidence squarely in our minds rather than having it float away into the stratosphere of information overload.

Fourth, ask for something small, simple, and specific rather than the big change that you are looking for all at once.  If you are trying to get your employees to remember to save energy to help with climate change, focus them on one aspect of change one step at a time.  It might be never leaving the lights on in a conference room when you finish the meeting or thinking twice before you print something on paper that could remain digital, something like that.

Finally, enlist your audience in a positive cause rather than shaming them into avoiding something.  If you can set a goal, track progress, and keep it positive, you’ll get more traction with people than if you try to go negative. Then, it’s your job to keep constantly repeating the message more than you’d think anyone could stand in order to keep it in mind.

Pinker was wrong about one thing – the world is getting more and more information-overloaded, and that’s not a particularly good development.  Sure, it’s wonderful to have data able to answer any question we have or might ever have but finding the wisdom in the data is the hard part – and that is getting harder every day.

Pushing out your message to get heard is tougher than ever.  As an expert or a leader, don’t disappear into your own data. Keep thinking about how your audience needs to hear you in order for your ideas to stick with them.