The Prison of One Story
By Bagudu Mohammed
There is a real danger in being fed only one side of undiluted information, the kind we naturally crave because it massages what we already believe. Social psychology calls it confirmation bias, and it is comforting until it becomes a prison. This selective diet is partly what breeds resistance, what hardens into fanaticism and then radicalizes, because when we are exposed to only one side of a story we never discover that there is an alternative truth, another mirror that could moderate absolute trust, soften absolute faith, and return us to balance.
I recently read the confession of a young lady who did everything to resist being posted to the North for NYSC. As the only daughter of her Christian parents, she feared for her life in Jigawa.
She eventually served there, reluctantly, and later admitted with disarming honesty that Jigawa was relatively peaceful and serene, nothing like the inferno she had imagined. She is Nigerian, not a foreigner, yet she was shaped by prejudice and by second-hand tales, never having had the chance to hear a counter-narrative or to experience the place herself.
Leon Festinger would call that cognitive dissonance resolved by reality, while Gordon Allport, in his classic work on the nature of prejudice, would say that stereotypes thrive in the absence of direct contact.
I also watched a video posted by a netizen showing Muslims streaming out of a mosque in large numbers in the South East, with the caption: see, our Muslims are free here, while Christians cannot do the same in the North. It was a statement of profound ignorance, a man living in one Nigeria without any idea of what exists in another, yet confident enough to pass verdict based on suspicion and one-sided tales. There is no state in the North, including Kano and Borno, without indigenous Christians to this day, and businesses in many northern cities are dominated by Southerners, not to mention government establishments, hospitals and banks staffed by people from every region.
Yet there are also Northerners who would not believe, without seeing such a video, that they could be free in the East. This is what happens when we live on one news, crave one story, inhabit one segment, and are exposed to only one side of existence. The award- winning author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us about the danger of a single story, and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan warned that the medium that feeds us exclusively can become the message that traps us.
Most people do not appreciate, nor intentionally encourage, free speech or the simple opportunity for others to share their side of a story that does not conform to the dominant narrative without bullying and mob action. This is now the reality in our WhatsApp platforms, in religious places and in public squares where people are attacked or harassed for refusing to be an echo chamber for what the majority thinks or wants.
Billboards are being torn down and voices silenced to portray certain agendas as godly and sacred while demonizing another as evil. It is a textbook illustration of Irving Janis’s concept of groupthink, where the desire for unanimity overrides the capacity for independent judgment, and of Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence, where people self-censor for fear of isolation.
History shows that if people always agree with us without dissent, without contrary opinion and without competing alternatives, we learn nothing. We do not seek informed judgment or objectivity; we settle for subjectivity, fear and coercion.
Even if people campaign for candidates we despise, they cannot force us to vote for them on election day. Billboards on their own do not win elections. We have been through this before, when we believed all candidates of a certain party were saints because of the change mantra, only to regret later and then seek to change the change. The political scientist Murray Edelman reminds us that politics is often symbolic, and symbols alone do not govern.
We know the truth but we prefer that our interest prevails at all cost regardless of consequences. If one person speaks, everything he says is believed as real, while the other is met with cynicism, fault-finding and deliberate blackmail. That is motivated reasoning at work, the tendency described by psychologist Ziva Kunda to arrive at conclusions we want to arrive at, rather than conclusions warranted by evidence.
Being exposed only to limited information and prejudice caused post-election violence in 2011 when many Northerners could not imagine that Buhari could lose, because of the massive support they saw and heard in the places they frequented. They failed to think beyond their immediate environment, to imagine that in certain regions hardly anyone knew him. This is the ecological fallacy writ large, mistaking one’s locality for the whole country.
My cousin who travelled to the East once told me he asked for a mosque and a local was confused, at a loss, not knowing what he meant until she asked another person who said, oh, he is talking about Muslim church. It was not malice, it was mere unfamiliarity, the kind that contact hypothesis, proposed by Allport, says can be cured only by sustained, meaningful interaction.
Nigeria is a large, complex federation and we must make deliberate, conscious effort to acquire emotional maturity and strength, to tolerate what we do not like or want to hear, and to appreciate the other side, the other mirror, whether it comes through criticism, alternative perspectives, contrary opinion or a choice that does not align with popular judgment. Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence teaches that maturity is not the absence of offence, but the ability to regulate our response to it.
Another danger is framing a candidate as regional property, as a matter of collective interest or struggle, expecting everyone from that religion or ethnic group to share a similar identity and then expressing disappointment when there is defiance or non-conformity. The evidence punctures that myth.
Buhari’s presidency did not make every Northerner rich, employed or less poor. Tinubu’s presidency has not made every Yoruba person comfortable or every Yoruba region rich.
The South East has been striving economically, entrepreneurial and resilient, despite not having produced an executive president since independence. So what is all the desperation about? The idea that having a kinsman at the helm automatically translates into personal favour is what political scientists call clientelistic illusion, and it explains why hysteria hardly lasts and disappointment comes so quickly.
Lastly, it is in the interest of our sanity, our emotional strength and our maturity to value opinions that do not merely massage our ego or echo our sentiments, but sometimes come to question us, to make us reflect, to moderate us and to make us better. To live otherwise, to believe we are the perfect people without another side, is to surrender to stereotype, superiority complex and contempt for others.
As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, even a false opinion may contain a portion of truth, and to silence it is to rob ourselves of the clearer perception of truth that comes from its collision with error.
Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
