In social psychology, 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, or biased. 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, and fundamental attribution error, among others. The term, as it is used in psychology today, was coined by social psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s. It is related to the philosophical concept of naïve realism, 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 is inherently subjective. Several prominent social psychologists have studied naïve realism experimentally, including Lee Ross, Andrew Ward, Dale Griffin, Emily Pronin, Thomas Gilovich, Robert Robinson, and Dacher Keltner. In 2010, the Handbook of Social Psychology recognized naïve realism as one of "four hard-won insights about human perception, thinking, motivation and behavior that ... represent important, indeed foundational, contributions of social psychology."
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.
History of the concept Naïve realism follows from a subjectivist tradition in modern social psychology, which traces its roots back to one of the field's founders, German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin's ideas were strongly informed by Gestalt psychology, 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 to 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 psychology. For example, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget argued that children view the world through an egocentric lens, and they have trouble separating their own beliefs from the beliefs of others. In the 1940s and 1950s, early pioneers in social psychology applied the subjectivist view to the field of social perception. 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". Social psychologist Gustav Ichheiser expanded on this idea, noting how biases in person perception lead to misunderstandings in social relations. 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, a prominent social psychologist who was also brought up in the Gestalt tradition, argued that people disagree because they base their judgments on different construals, 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 social psychology, which was published in a paper in 1954, students from Dartmouth and Princeton 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 perception of the event was blinded by bias.
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