Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Use of science/facts in decision making

[Mary Baker, Solid Communications (mary]

I have encountered that kind of attitude as well. To me, it smacks of emotional 
elitism. It certainly shuts down any embrace of diversity in communication and 
cognitive styles. 

But what I have also discovered is that if you make the facts available, people 
will generally consider them quietly, in their own time, and slowly assimilate 
them into their “feelings” on an issue. This is another reason it is useful to 
have some brakes on the decision-making process, particularly for emotionally 
charged topics. Emotional thinkers also do not like to be suddenly “confronted” 
with facts and you do yourself no social favors by being the messenger IRL. 
It’s useful to have a neutral place to post facts and studies, like a document 
archive on your cohousing internal website, or on a discussion board, where you 
can simply say, “I’ll just leave this here if you’re interested.”

Mary B.

From: Mary English 
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2016 10:09 PM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org 
Subject: [C-L]_ Use of science/facts in decision making

At Wasatch Cohousing we had a proposal being discussed and the facilitator  
said " no we are not going to pay any attention to the scientific data. This 
will be decided only by peoples feelings"

And I have found that people do not necessarily want to made decisions based on 
research or data here,, which has been frustrating to me.  Mary