social psychology Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the ...

, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed,

irrational Irrationality is cognition, thinking, talking, or acting without inclusion of rationality. It is more specifically described as an action or opinion given through inadequate use of reason, or through emotional distress or cognitive deficiency. T ...

, or

bias Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group ...

ed. Naïve realism provides a theoretical basis for several other cognitive biases, which are systematic errors when it comes to thinking and making decisions. These include the false consensus effect, actor-observer bias,

bias blind spot The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of recognizing the impact of biases on the judgment of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one's own judgment. The term was created by Emily Pronin, a social psychologist from Princeton Uni ...

, and fundamental attribution error, among others. The term, as it is used in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

today, was coined by

social psychologist Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the rela ...

Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s.Griffin, D., & Ross, L. (1991). Subjective construal, social inference, and human misunderstanding. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), ''Advances in Experimental Social Psychology'' (pp. 319–359). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. It is related to the

philosophical Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

concept of

naïve realism In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. When refer ...

, which is the idea that our senses allow us to perceive objects directly and without any intervening processes. Social psychologists in the mid-20th century argued against this stance and proposed instead that

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

is inherently subjective. Several prominent social psychologists have studied naïve realism experimentally, including Lee Ross, Andrew Ward, Dale Griffin, Emily Pronin,

Thomas Gilovich Thomas Dashiff Gilovich (born January 16, 1954) an American psychologist who is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He has conducted research in social psychology, decision making, behavioral economics, an ...

, Robert Robinson, and

Dacher Keltner Dacher Joseph Keltner is a Mexican-born American professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, who directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. He is also the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, host ...

. In 2010, the ''Handbook of Social Psychology'' recognized naïve realism as one of "four hard-won insights about

human perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

thinking In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, an ...

motivation Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-dire ...

and

behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...

that ... represent important, indeed foundational, contributions of

."Ross, L.; Lepper, M.; Ward, A.
History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
In Fiske, S. T., In Gilbert, D. T., In Lindzey, G., & Jongsma, A. E. (2010). ''Handbook of Social Psychology''. ''Vol.1.'' Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

Main assumptions

Lee Ross and fellow psychologist Andrew Ward have outlined three interrelated assumptions, or "tenets," that make up naïve realism. They argue that these assumptions are supported by a long line of thinking in social psychology, along with several empirical studies. According to their model, people: * Believe that they see the world objectively and without bias. * Expect that others will come to the same conclusions, so long as they are exposed to the same information and interpret it in a rational manner. * Assume that others who do not share the same views must be ignorant, irrational, or biased.Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In T. Brown, E. S. Reed & E. Turiel (Eds.), ''Values and Knowledge'' (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

History of the concept

Naïve realism follows from a

subjectivist Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth. The success of this position is historically attribute ...

tradition in modern

, which traces its roots back to one of the field's founders, a German-American psychologist named

Kurt Lewin Kurt Lewin ( ; 9 September 1890 – 12 February 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career Lewin applied hi ...

. Lewin's ideas were strongly informed by

Gestalt psychology Gestalt-psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward T ...

, a 20th-century school of thought which focused on examining psychological phenomena in context, as parts of a whole. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Lewin developed an approach for studying human behavior which he called field theory. Field theory proposes that a person's behavior is a function of the person and the environment. Lewin considered a person's psychological environment, or "life space", to be subjective and thus distinct from physical reality. During this time period, subjectivist ideas also propagated throughout other areas of

. For example,

Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called " genetic epistemolog ...

, a

developmental psychologist Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, ...

, argued that children view the world through an

egocentric Egocentrism is the inability to differentiate between self and other. More specifically, it is the inability to accurately assume or understand any perspective other than one's own. Egocentrism is found across the life span: in infancy, early chi ...

lens, and they have trouble separating their own beliefs from the beliefs of others. In the 1940s and 1950s, early pioneers in

applied the

view to the field of

social perception Social perception (or interpersonal perception) is the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people as sovereign personalities. Social perception refers to identifying and utilizing social cues to make judgments ab ...

. In 1948, psychologists David Kretch and Richard Krutchfield argued that people perceive and interpret the world according to their "own needs, own connotations, own personality, own previously formed cognitive patterns".Molouki, S., & Pronin, E. (2015). Self and other. In E. Borgida & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), ''APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology'', Volume 1: ''Attitudes and Social Cognition.'' Washington, DC: APA. Social psychologist Gustav Ichheiser expanded on this idea, noting how biases in

person perception A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...

lead to misunderstandings in

social relation A social relation or also described as a social interaction or social experience is the fundamental unit of analysis within the social sciences, and describes any voluntary or involuntary interpersonal relationship between two or more individuals ...

s. According to Ichheiser, "We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things 'as they really are' and to react to them 'in a normal way'. We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways."

Solomon Asch Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many othe ...

, a prominent

who was also brought up in the

Gestalt Gestalt may refer to: Psychology * Gestalt psychology, a school of psychology * Gestalt therapy, a form of psychotherapy * Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, an assessment of development disorders * Gestalt Practice, a practice of self-exploration ...

tradition, argued that people disagree because they base their judgments on different

construals In social psychology, a construal is a way that people perceive, comprehend, and interpret their world, particularly the acts of others toward them. Researchers and theorists within virtually every sub-discipline of psychology have acknowledged the ...

, or ways of looking at various issues. However, they are under the illusion that their judgments about the social world are objective. "This attitude, which has been aptly described as naive realism, sees no problem in the fact of perception or knowledge of the surroundings. Things are what they appear to be; they have just the qualities that they reveal to sight and touch," he wrote in his textbook ''Social Psychology'' in 1952. "This attitude, does not, however, describe the actual conditions of our knowledge of the surroundings."

Experimental evidence

"They saw a game"

In a seminal study in

, which was published in a paper in 1954, students from Dartmouth and

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

watched a video of a heated football game between the two schools. Though they looked at the same footage, fans from both schools perceived the game very differently. The Princeton students "saw" the Dartmouth team make twice as many infractions as their own team, and they also saw the team make twice as many infractions compared to what the Dartmouth students saw. Dartmouth students viewed the game as being evenly-matched in violence, in which both sides were to blame. This study revealed that two groups perceived an event subjectively. Each team believed they saw the event objectively and that the other side's

of the event was blinded by

False consensus effect

A 1977 study conducted by

Ross Ross or ROSS may refer to: People * Clan Ross, a Highland Scottish clan * Ross (name), including a list of people with the surname or given name Ross, as well as the meaning * Earl of Ross, a peerage of Scotland Places * RoSS, the Republic of Sou ...

and colleagues provided early evidence for a cognitive bias called the false consensus effect, which is the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share the same views. This bias has been cited as supporting the first two tenets of naïve realism. In the study, students were asked whether they would wear a sandwich-board sign, which said "Eat At Joe's" on it, around campus. Then they were asked to indicate whether they thought other students were likely to wear the sign, and what they thought about students who were either willing to wear it or not. The researchers found that students who agreed to wear the sign thought that the majority of students would wear the sign, and they thought that refusing to wear the sign was more revealing of their peers' personal attributes. Conversely, students who declined to wear the sign thought that most other students would also refuse, and that accepting the invitation was more revealing of certain personality traits.

Hostile media effect

A phenomenon referred to as the

hostile media effect The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on ...

demonstrates that partisans can view neutral events subjectively according to their own needs and values, and make the assumption that those who interpret the event differently are biased. For a study in 1985, pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students were asked to watch real news coverage on the 1982

Sabra and Shatila massacre The Sabra and Shatila massacre (also known as the Sabra and Chatila massacre) was the killing of between 460 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by the militia of the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite Christian Lebanes ...

, a massive killing of Palestinian refugees (Vallone, Lee Ross and Lepper, 1985). Researchers found that partisans from both sides perceived the coverage as being biased in favor of the opposite viewpoint, and believed that the people in charge of the news program held the ideological views of the opposite side.

"Musical tapping" study

More empirical evidence for naïve realism came from psychologist Elizabeth Newton's "musical tapping study" in 1990. For the study, participants were designated either as "tappers" or as "listeners". The tappers were told to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song, while the "listeners" were asked to try to identify the song. While tappers expected that listeners would guess the tune around 50 percent of the time, the listeners were able to identify it only around 2.5 percent of the time. This provided support for a failure in

perspective-taking Perspective-taking is the act of perceiving a situation or understanding a concept from an alternative point of view, such as that of another individual. A vast amount of scientific literature suggests that perspective-taking is crucial to human de ...

on the side of the tappers, and an overestimation of the extent to which others would share in "hearing" the song as it was tapped.

Wall Street Game

In 2004,

, Liberman, and Samuels asked dorm resident advisors to nominate students to participate in a study, and to indicate whether those students were likely to cooperate or defect in the first round of the classic decision-making game called the

Prisoner's Dilemma The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defe ...

. The game was introduced to subjects in one of two ways: it was either referred to as the "Wall Street Game" or as the "Community Game". The researchers found that students in the "Community Game" condition were twice as likely to cooperate, and that it did not seem to make a difference whether students were previously categorized as "cooperators" versus "defectors". This experiment demonstrated that the game's label exerted more power on how the students played the game than the subjects' personality traits. Furthermore, the study showed that the dorm advisors did not make sufficient allowances for subjective interpretations of the game.

Consequences

Naïve realism causes people to exaggerate differences between themselves and others. Psychologists believe that it can spark and exacerbate conflict, as well as create barriers to

negotiation Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties to reach the desired outcome regarding one or more issues of conflict. It is an interaction between entities who aspire to agree on matters of mutual interest. The agreement c ...

through several different mechanisms.

Bias blind spot

One consequence of naïve realism is referred to as the

, which is the ability to recognize

cognitive Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

and

al biases in others while failing to recognize the impact of bias on the self. In a study conducted by Pronin, Lin, and Ross (2002),

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

students completed a questionnaire about various biases in social judgment. They indicated how susceptible they thought they were to these biases compared to the average student. The researchers found that the participants consistently believed that they were less likely to be biased than their peers. In a follow-up study, students answered questions about their personal attributes (e.g. how considerate they were) compared to those of other students. The majority of students saw themselves as falling above average on most traits, which provided support for a cognitive bias known as the better-than-average effect. Next, the students learned that 70 to 80 percent of people fall prey to this bias. When asked about the accuracy of their self-assessments, 63 percent of the students argued that their ratings had been objective, while 13 percent of students indicated they thought their ratings had been too modest. Naive realism illustration

False polarization

When an individual does not share our views, the third tenet of naïve realism attributes this discrepancy to three possibilities. The individual either has been exposed to a different set of information, is lazy or unable to come to a rational conclusion, or is under a distorting influence such as bias or self-interest. This gives rise to a phenomenon called false polarization, which involves interpreting others' views as more extreme than they really are, and leads to a perception of greater

intergroup Intergroups are formed of Members of the European Parliament from any political group and any committee, with a view to holding informal exchanges of views on particular subjects and promoting contact between Members and civil society. Intergroups ...

differences (see Fig. 1). People assume that they perceive the issue objectively, carefully considering it from multiple views, while the other side processes information in top-down fashion.Pronin, E., Puccio, C. T., & Ross, L. (2002). Understanding misunderstanding: Social psychological perspectives. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.), ''Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment.'' Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. For instance, in a study conducted by Robinson et al. in 1996, pro-life and pro-choice partisans greatly overestimated the extremity of the views of the opposite side, and also overestimated the influence of ideology on others in their own group.

Reactive devaluation

The assumption that others' views are more extreme than they are, can create a barrier for conflict resolution. In a sidewalk survey conducted in the 1980s, pedestrians evaluated a nuclear arms' disarmament proposal (Stillinger et al., 1991).Ross, Lee (1995).
Reactive Devaluation in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution.
In Kenneth Arrow, Robert Mnookin, Lee Ross, Amos Tversky, Robert B. Wilson (Eds.). ''Barriers to Conflict Resolution''. New York: WW Norton & Co. One group of participants was told that the proposal was made by American President

Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan ( ; February 6, 1911June 5, 2004) was an American politician, actor, and union leader who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He also served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 ...

, while others thought the proposal came from Soviet leader

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet politician who served as the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

. The researchers found that 90 percent of the participants who thought the proposal was from Reagan supported it, while only 44 percent in the Gorbachev group indicated their support. This provided support for a phenomenon called reactive devaluation, which involves dismissing a concession from an adversary on the assumption that the concession is either motivated by self-interest or less valuable.