My Sister Kicked Me Out of the Car on Election Day

I enjoy shopping with my sister. We could hang out in the shopping mall and discuss the colors and trends of clothes and shoes relentlessly, and ever joyfully.

We also shop online at home — helping to audit the items in each other’s shopping cart before online checkout, on the living-room couch with a nice cup of coffee against the 37-degree, burning air of Taipei City.

We never fought, except once.

It was many, many years ago. It was the voting day of a presidential election in Taiwan, and for the first time, we supported different candidates. We both tried to convince each other to switch sides, and we both failed. In spite of that, my sister still offered to drive me to the voting station.

But it was not a regular presidential election. One of the presidential candidates had allegedly been assassinated — shot by two bullets and sent to the hospital right before Election Day. The news release stated that the gunshots had created an 11 cm by 2 cm wound on the surface of the candidate’s abdomen, yet the candidate had been properly treated and discharged from the hospital. The election was still on.

My sister and I had a heated debate in the car. She believed that it was a real assassination attempt, that the wounded candidate was the victim, and that we must support him. I thought otherwise. I believed it was a manipulated play, because I didn’t think anybody could just walk in and out of the hospital with that kind of wound and still be smiling, looking calm.

Again, we failed to persuade each other.

My sister got really upset. She pulled the car to the side of the road and said, “Leave my car. I don’t want to drive you to the voting station anymore.”

I walked to the voting station by myself.

The wounded candidate won the election by 0.228%. Journalists, government officers, and top-tier forensic detectives tried to solve this case. But up to this moment, there are still unresolved questions. Just to name a few: the suspected shooter was found drowned, the assassination weapon could not be located, and many details remain unknown.

The truth of this assassination remains an unsolved puzzle in Taiwan to this day. My sister and I stopped talking about it. The last time we chatted about it, we both agreed it was a mystery.

What fascinated me was not that we disagreed at that time. It was that both explanations seemed perfectly coherent, and it became difficult for us to understand the other party’s perspective.

My sister was an architect. She dealt with numbers, floor plans, and technical details all day long. An extremely rational person. I worked for a financial institution then. I worked with numbers and regulations myself. We were both rational people. We were used to checking facts before making decisions. And we still are.

But for that particular assassination event, with the same received information, we reached entirely opposite conclusions.

I wondered why.

Perhaps we already had frameworks in our minds, and we were simply using information selectively to fit into those frameworks. Perhaps for us, what mattered was not truth or fact, but coherence. Perhaps agenda-setting is not the privilege of media; it’s in our minds, too.

I searched online and found several theories that could possibly explain this.

We Don’t Just Collect Facts. We Build Stories.

The first is Narrative Identity Theory, developed by Dan McAdams, a personality psychologist at Northwestern University.

Narrative identity is one’s internalized story, integrating the reconstructed past and the imagined future to give life unity and purpose. McAdams believes that people construct their identity not through fixed traits, but through the evolving life story they tell about themselves. For example, people who narrate “suffering and sacrifice are a way of redemption” tend to reframe negative experiences as personal growth. They may then feel better off, and ultimately develop a more positive perspective toward the future.

Applied to the car: my sister and I possessed quite different narrative identities — about how power works, how institutions behave, who is trustworthy, and so on. Although we were exposed to the same bullet news, we absorbed the information differently. The facts were identical. The pre-existing narratives were not. By the time new information arrived, the stories in our heads were already running. New facts did not start a new narrative. They simply got recruited into the existing one.

It was the narrative identity, not the facts alone, that determined how we looked at the event.

How Two Opposite Conclusions Can Both Feel Rational

Are there other ways to explain how and why different conclusions were reached from the same information?

Ziva Kunda (1955–2004), an Israeli-Canadian social psychologist at the University of Waterloo, had an answer. Her 1990 paper “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” has been cited more than 9,000 times.

The concept of Motivated Reasoning is that people do not always reason first and conclude second. Sometimes they arrive at the conclusion they are motivated to reach, then construct apparently reasonable justifications for it — unconsciously. The reasoning is genuine, not faked. The person sincerely believes they are being objective. But the direction may have been set before the thinking began. Crucially, this only works when the person can build a plausible-sounding case. Motivated reasoning is constrained by the need to feel rational. We do not believe anything we want. We believe what we can justify to ourselves.

This explains the heated fight inside the car. My sister and I both believed that we were rational, that we were professionals, and that our own judgments must be sound and reasonable. We did not know exactly what happened with the assassination. In fact, nobody knows to this day. But we were both, unconsciously, convinced that the other person was not as rational as we were.

This amplified the disagreement.

The Little Jurors in Our Heads

Another theory further explains how we construct stories in our minds: The Story Model of Decision-Making, developed in 1992 by cognitive psychologists Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie.

Pennington and Hastie found that jurors do not evaluate evidence piece by piece, weighing each fact independently. Instead, jurors automatically organize evidence into a narrative — a story — and then choose the verdict that best fits that story. The story that feels most complete, most coherent, and most plausible tends to win, even if it does not account for all the evidence equally well. Jurors do not simply ask, “Which facts are strongest?” They ask, “Which story makes the most sense?”

This means the order in which evidence is presented matters enormously. Evidence arranged in story order can be significantly more persuasive than the same evidence presented in witness order. The verdict follows the narrative, not merely the data.

We all have little jurors sitting in our heads. Every day, millions of pieces of data run across these jurors’ desks, and they decide which pieces of information should be kept and which should be removed from the story. This is why, once we form an opinion about an institution or a system, it usually becomes difficult to change — at least not within days.

Taking myself as an example: I studied in the States, worked for American companies, and consumed mostly American left-wing media. I started as a diehard supporter of the Democrats on the East Coast when I was still a student, and it took me decades to finally understand the rationales of the Republicans. Because those “jurors in my head” automatically removed information related to Red States or Republican policies. At that time, whenever I detected something that smelled “conservative,” I would immediately divert my attention elsewhere.

Isn’t it interesting?

People rarely evaluate evidence piece by piece. They build stories. Then they evaluate which story feels most complete, most resonant.

Coherence and Truth Are Not the Same Thing

McAdams’ Narrative Identity Theory suggests that we insert facts into our predetermined narrative frames. Kunda’s Motivated Reasoning explains how divergent opinions get amplified. Pennington and Hastie show how we collect data to form stories.

All three are about coherence.

We insert facts into our preset narrative frames to create coherent stories. We try to be rational so we can arrive at conclusions that are coherent with our existing value systems. We collect data to form a coherent story before making the final verdict.

Obviously, we aim to achieve coherence in our narratives, consciously or unconsciously. Coherence can eliminate conflict, and that is comforting.

But coherence and truth are not the same thing.

A coherent story definitely sounds smoother and nicer. Yet conspiracy theories, scams, ideologies, and lies can also be coherent and, therefore, believable. In fact, the reason why scams and lies work is exactly because they sound coherent. Therefore, people tend to believe them.

Are they true and real? Maybe not.

My sister and I are no longer interested in finding out the truth of the assassination. We discuss things, and we usually resonate with each other in recent years. We stopped trying to solve the puzzle of the bullets before Election Day. But we continue talking about the politicians we like and dislike.

I guess human beings are storytellers long before we are truth-seekers. Faced with uncertainty, we instinctively select facts into narratives that make the world feel a bit more understandable.

Sometimes those narratives bring us closer to the truth and make us uncomfortable. Sometimes they merely bring us coherence and make us feel good.

The problem is that sometimes it becomes difficult to differentiate which is the right one to choose.