Objectivity Starts With the Story Behind a Belief

Joshua Johnson offers a three-part practice for dealing with people whose views or behavior provoke an immediate reaction. First, temporarily set that reaction aside. Second, ask how the person came to hold the view, rather than only asking them to defend it. Third, listen closely enough to notice the detail—a hesitation, change in tone, or unexpected admission—that falls outside the prepared argument.

The first step is not neutrality, in Johnson’s account. Neutrality asks a person to negate opinions and deaden emotions, as though they have no judgments at all. Objectivity means “park[ing] your emotions and learn[ing] without judgment”: keeping one’s views while shifting attention outward, toward what can be learned.

Johnson is explicit that this does not mean becoming indifferent to the harms under discussion. He says he is not neutral about “bigotry, hoaxes, political violence” and wants them gone. Parking an opinion is temporary, like parking a car rather than abandoning it. But the temporary suspension matters because difficult conversations cannot be genuinely open if the listener is only waiting to rebut the next claim.

The practical question is not whether a person deserves agreement. It is whether their argument is the whole story. Johnson’s advice is to move closer “not to embrace them, but to explore them”: to approach a difficult position with the attention of someone studying a sample, rather than observing it at a safe distance.

Joshua Johnson learned the limits of neutral argument during an early interview on NPR’s 1A. His guest, a descendant of Confederate soldiers, argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved. As a Black man, Johnson felt substantial pressure to remain neutral. He focused on the guest’s reasoning, found it flimsy, and challenged it.

Eventually, the guest said, “It really doesn’t matter what I say.” Johnson took that response as evidence that he had failed, even if he had made valid points. Neutrality had allowed him to interrogate the belief. The distance created by that posture, he says, had kept him from seeing why the guest held it.

His alternative would have been to ask for the story beneath the position: who had most influenced the guest’s views, or what it would mean to him if all the monuments and statues remained as they were. Those questions do not accept the argument. They seek the formative decisions, influences, and turning points that made the argument matter to the person advancing it.

Johnson’s point is not that a personal history dissolves a substantive disagreement. It is that grilling a person’s stated case may change nothing if it never reaches the commitments behind the case. A person can defend a familiar position from habit or identity, then retreat further into it when challenged. Asking for the story creates a chance to see the person behind what Johnson calls their “canned arguments.”

Joshua Johnson’s second practical rule is to keep questions short—“ten seconds tops.” A long question can feel like a setup, he says, or can sound as though the interviewer is rambling. The restraint is useful because the follow-up should arise from what the other person actually reveals, not from a lengthy argument embedded in the question itself.

Johnson describes an interview with a former Baltimore police officer who had become a forceful advocate for law-enforcement reform. The officer was delivering an extended, angry rant and returning to his familiar points. Johnson was trying to stay objective when he heard the man’s voice waver slightly. Beneath the rage, he thought he heard trauma.

Near the end of the interview, Johnson cautiously said that the officer seemed traumatized by his experiences as a cop and asked whether he could reflect on that. The answer was brief: “I put people in prison cells who are better people than me.”

The officer soon returned to his talking points. But Johnson treats the moment as consequential because the man’s defenses had dropped long enough for something other than advocacy to emerge. In Johnson’s terms, he had shifted “from being right to being real.”

The final instruction is therefore not simply to ask better questions; it is to use what Johnson calls a mental microscope. His image comes from a teenage summer program in which he worked with clinicians studying cancer, thrombosis, and HIV. He had expected crusading scientists and instead encountered level-headed people doing careful work on serious conditions. As a journalist, he adopted that stance toward the problems he encountered on air: get close enough to study them without pretending to approve of them.