Lack of Access to Reliable Objective Information

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 12, 2026

Many conflicts are made much harder to resolve because the parties do not have access to reliable, objective information that they all trust. Sometimes the needed information simply does not exist, or is incomplete, uncertain, or too technical for ordinary citizens to easily evaluate. More often, however, there is a deeper problem: reliable information may exist, but one or more of the conflict parties does not believe it is reliable. In these cases, factual disputes are not just disagreements about evidence; they are disagreements about who can be trusted to say what the evidence is and what it means.

This problem has become especially serious as public trust in major information institutions has declined. Gallup reports that Americans' trust in the mass media has fallen to historically low levels, while the Reuters Institute finds that trust in U.S. news remains low in a highly polarized media environment. The result is that many people now approach news reports, government statistics, academic studies, court findings, and expert testimony with suspicion.

For better and worse, this suspicion is not always irrational. News organizations, experts, and public agencies do make mistakes, sometimes display bias, and sometimes fail to explain uncertainty honestly. But when distrust becomes automatic, even carefully gathered and responsibly presented information can be dismissed as propaganda.

Partisan polarization makes the problem worse by pushing Americans into increasingly separate information worlds. Pew Research Center has documented large differences between Democrats and Republicans in the news sources they use and trust. Similar divisions appear in attitudes toward science and expertise. Pew also reports that trust in scientists remains below its pre-pandemic level, with important partisan differences over how much scientists should be involved in public policy. As science-related issues such as climate change, public health, energy, crime, education, and election administration become politically charged, facts themselves can become identity markers. People may come to believe that accepting a particular piece of evidence means betraying their group.

This does not mean that all factual claims are equally valid, or that "both sides" are always equally right or equally wrong. Some claims are strongly supported by evidence; others are not. The challenge is that, in polarized conflicts, simply announcing "the facts" is often not enough. People need to know how the information was gathered, who paid for it, what uncertainties remain, whether dissenting evidence was considered, and whether the people interpreting the evidence have a stake in the outcome. The National Academies' work on science misinformation emphasizes the importance of making high-quality information more visible, accessible, and trustworthy. For conflict resolution purposes, the goal is not blind deference to experts, rather, it is the creation of information processes that are transparent enough, fair enough, and inclusive enough that opposing parties have reason to take the results seriously.

One way to do this is to use a joint fact-finding process, in which representatives of opposing sides help frame the questions, choose or review the experts, examine the evidence, and identify areas of agreement, uncertainty, and continuing disagreement. This approach does not magically eliminate values conflicts, ideological commitments, or bad-faith behavior. But it can reduce the tendency for each side to hire its own experts, produce its own facts, and accuse the other side of lying. In intractable conflicts, reliable information has to be more than technically accurate. It also has to be produced and communicated in ways that contending parties can see as legitimate.

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.