Why More of Us Now Believe That Truth Is Something You Feel

There is no such thing as your truth, the argument goes. There is the truth, and there is your opinion. That line, posted to social media by the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in 2018, was meant as a rebuke. Psychologists at the University of Amsterdam saw something else in it: a near-perfect specimen of the worldview they were trying to pin down.

They even tried to fold the line into their research, using it as one of the candidate statements people would agree or disagree with. It did not survive the cut. But the instinct behind reaching for it tells you what this work is really about.

The team has spent four studies and roughly 1,600 participants building something they call the Youniversalism scale, a tool for measuring how strongly a person believes that truth is personal, experiential, felt. The name is a pun, fusing “you” with “universalism”, and it carries the whole idea in nine words: that the individual sits at the centre of the world, constructing not just their corner of it but the underlying truths that explain everything else. Bastiaan Rutjens, one of the psychologists behind the scale, has watched this drift for years. The trouble was that nobody had a clean way to measure it. “This concept has been described before in the humanities, by Wouter Hanegraaff among others, but until now there was no good way to measure it,” he says.

So what does it actually look like, the felt-truth mindset? It splits, the researchers found, into two distinct halves.

Truth You Can Sense, Truth You Can Own

The first half is experiential. You can feel whether a claim is correct, even when you can’t say how you know. You trust your hunches, your gut, your first read on the facts. The second half is subjective: truth depends on context, shifts between people and eras, comes from within. These two things sound like the same thing and aren’t, which is partly the point of the whole exercise. A person can believe there is one objective truth out there yet still trust their intuition to find it. Another might happily accept that different people hold equally valid truths while flatly denying that any gut feeling can locate them.

Untangling those two strands took some doing. Early versions of the scale kept misfiring, with items meant to capture subjective truth measuring its opposite, until the team rebuilt that half from scratch. The version that finally held together pairs four experiential statements with five subjective ones, and the people who score high on it look, statistically, rather distinct from everyone else.

“These days, we’re seeing changes in what people believe and above all, in how they determine what is true. This scale allows us to measure that,” says Rutjens.

Here is where it gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable. The higher a person scores on Youniversalism, the lower their faith in science tends to run. The same goes for spirituality: the more someone leans toward the now-common “spiritual but not religious” identity, the more they tend to embrace felt truth, and the more sceptical of scientific findings they tend to be. The link between spirituality and science scepticism has nagged at researchers for years, stubborn and hard to explain away, surviving even when you control for politics and religiosity and how scientifically literate someone is. Youniversalism, the Amsterdam team suspects, may be the missing piece, the underlying habit of mind that ties the two together. “Spiritual people often say that truth can be found by looking inward or through personal experience.” That inward turn, the data hint, is the same one that nudges people away from the lab.

Not that any of this means spiritual people are simply irrational, or that intuition is the enemy. Trusting your gut is, after all, a normal and even necessary part of how children and adults learn to navigate the world.

The harder edge shows up elsewhere. Rutjens points to people who cling to claims that contradict the evidence but simply feel right, the covid conspiracy theories, the conviction that raw milk is somehow healthier despite the risk of making yourself ill. “Those who strongly believe that truth comes from their own feelings will be less inclined to be convinced by data, experts or official sources,” he says. And that, he warns, is not a harmless quirk. “That can have serious consequences. For example, people could negatively impact their health by following unfounded medical advice, such as we see increasingly on social media.”

The Slow Retreat from Fact

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. The shift the scale captures at the level of a single person seems to echo something far larger. One striking analysis of millions of books found that, since roughly the 1980s, words tied to fact and reasoning have steadily faded from the page while emotion-laden words have surged. Another, scanning decades of US congressional speeches, traced the same migration from evidence toward intuition. The Amsterdam scale, in a sense, is a way of taking that civilisational mood and reading it off one mind at a time. This was a UK-only sample, fifteen-hundred-odd people recruited online, so quite how the pattern travels across cultures remains an open question.

What the researchers hope is that knowing how someone arrives at truth might change how you talk to them. If you can tell which audiences run on intuition rather than data, you can pitch the evidence accordingly. “If we knew this, we could present scientific information differently,” says Rutjens, “for example, less in terms of ‘dry facts’ and more through stories and personal experiences.” There is an irony there, of course, and the team would surely admit it: that the best way to reach people who have stopped trusting facts might be to stop leading with them, and to tell them, instead, a story that feels true.

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