Naive realism
The conviction that you see the world as it objectively is, so people who disagree must be uninformed, irrational or biased.
What drives it
Your perceptions feel like reality from the inside, and naive realism protects that feeling. It turns disagreement into evidence about the other person rather than about the question.
How it shows
Work
'Anyone who looks at the numbers will see it.' When colleagues disagree, the first theory is that they haven't understood, the second that they're lazy, the third that they're acting in bad faith. Both sides of a merger or team conflict overestimate how extreme the other side is (false polarisation). Each side sees a neutral mediator as leaning toward the other.
Relationships
Rows in which each person believes they are simply describing what happened. 'I'm not being emotional, I'm being accurate.' Assuming a partner who sees it differently has an agenda.
Self
After explaining your view you feel the other person should now agree; when they don't, you explain it again, slower. The tell is having a theory of why they're wrong but none of why they see it as they do.
What tells it apart
False consensus effect: False consensus overestimates how many people agree with you before any conflict; naive realism appears once disagreement is visible, as the belief that dissenters are biased.
Bias blind spot: Bias blind spot is believing you are less biased than others in general; naive realism goes further and treats your view as plain fact, visible in disputes about what actually happened.
Paranoid personality: Paranoid personality reads disagreement as concealed hostility across relationships and holds grudges; naive realism attributes it to ignorance or bias and is ordinary and situational.
A test
Ask the person to state the other side's view well enough that the other side would sign it; inability or unwillingness to do this signals naive realism.
Questions to carry
- How would the other side put their own view, in words they would sign without changes?
- When someone disagrees with me, what do I assume about their information, their motives or their intelligence?
How strong the research is
moderate. Supported by research on false polarisation, the hostile media effect and attributions of bias to opponents, but as a broad framework it is harder to test directly than its component effects.
Where it comes from
Lee Ross and Andrew Ward, 1996; Gustav Ichheiser, 1940s (earlier formulation)
Sources
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)