Can We Disagree Honestly Again? The Pro‑Truth Answer

Walk into any family dinner, town hall, or social media feed in 2026, and the diagnosis is the same: we are not just disagreeing anymore. We are operating from different sets of facts.

Oxford Dictionary named "post-truth" its word of the year a decade ago, and the air has only gotten thinner since. AI-generated deepfakes circulate faster than corrections. Cable news rewards heat over light. And ordinary citizens — well-intentioned, busy, exhausted — share things their tribe wants to hear without checking whether those things are real.

The instinct is to blame the other side. That instinct is part of the problem.

Behavioral truthseeking is a skill. Most of us were never taught it. We were taught to argue, not to verify. To win, not to update. To distinguish "us" from "them," not opinion from fact. You cannot have a productive disagreement about immigration, school choice, or election reform if the participants cannot agree on what is actually happening.

The Pro-Truth Pledge was built to fix exactly that problem. And it was deliberately designed to be something both sides of the aisle can carry.

Created by a team of behavioral scientists and now signed by more than 33,000 people — including over 1,200 elected and appointed officials and 1,300 public figures — the pledge asks signers to commit to twelve specific truth-oriented behaviors, organized under three commitments: share truth, honor truth, and encourage truth.

It is, on its face, a list of things any thoughtful person should already do. That is exactly the point. The pledge takes the unglamorous work of civic honesty and makes it visible, shared, and accountable. This matters for civil discourse in two ways our current moment desperately needs.

First, the pledge gives us a way to disagree productively. Its twelve behaviors are nonpartisan by design and apply equally to everyone who signs. The shared standard does not eliminate disagreement; it gives disagreement somewhere stable to stand.

Second, the pledge enables what is mostly missing from American politics right now: solution discourse. Solutions require facts everyone can stipulate to, experts whose consensus is honored even when inconvenient, and the ability to update our beliefs when we are wrong. Each of those is a Pro-Truth behavior.

Two peer-reviewed studies — one in Behavior and Social Issues, another in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology — have measured the pledge's effect on signers. Both found statistically significant improvement: fewer misinformation-laden posts, more sourcing, more balanced framing. The pledge works because it leverages four behavioral levers at once — precommitment, reputation, peer accountability, and clear behavioral standards. In plain terms, it is a science-backed habit change for public conversation.

Signing the pledge is just the first step. Turning the Pro-Truth Pledge from a personal commitment into a national civic movement requires advocacy.

Changing how millions of Americans engage with information happens person by person, conversation by conversation. Pro-Truth advocates do that work: gathering signatures at community events, pitching the pledge to journalists and elected officials, writing letters to local editors, teaching the twelve behaviors in public settings, and gently holding fellow signers accountable when we slip.

That last part is everyone's job, including mine. The pledge is not a purity test. Signers who make honest mistakes are not punished; they are invited, compassionately, to correct the record. The point is not to catch people lying. The point is to make truth-telling the visible, expected, rewarded default.

If you are tired of feeling like the loudest, least honest voices are setting the terms of our public life, the Pro-Truth Pledge is a way to push back without picking a side — and there is a place for you in this movement at every level of time and capacity.

Start by signing the pledge at protruthpledge.org.

Then share it: post it on social media, send it to five people whose judgment you respect, and ask your elected representatives — both parties — to sign it themselves. If you have time to give, volunteer as a Pro-Truth advocate and help us bring the twelve behaviors into your community. If you have resources to give, become a checkbook volunteer; even a modest monthly donation funds the materials, training, and outreach that turn pledge signers into pledge teachers, and pledge teachers into a movement.

The lies are bipartisan. The antidote can be too — and it only works if we build it together.

Alana House is Director of the Pro-Truth Pledge, a project of the nonprofit Intentional Insights.