What I’m Listening To: You Are Not So Smart – Naive Realism
Episode #62 of the You Are Not So Smart podcast is an interview with Lee Ross about Naive Realism – the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong simply because they are misinformed. And oooooh boy am I guilty of this one!
According to Lee Ross, co-author of the new book, “The Wisest One in the Room”, naive realism has three tenets:
- You tend to believe that you arrived at your political opinions after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions.
- Since you are extremely careful and devoted to sticking to the facts and thus free from bias and impervious to persuasion, anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they’ve pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have.
- If anyone does disagree with your political opinions it must be because they simply don’t have all the facts yet.
Since this is the default position most humans take when processing a political opinion, when confronted with people who disagree, we tend to assume there must be a rational explanation. Usually, that explanation is that the other side is either lazy or stupid or corrupted by some nefarious information-scrambling entity like cable news, a blowhard pundit, a charming pastor or a lack thereof.
This leads people to approach political arguments with the confidence that “rational, open-minded discourse” will naturally lead to a rapid narrowing of disagreement, but that confidence usually short lived. Instead, we realize that the other side rarely yield to our attempts at ‘enlightenment’.
In other words, it’s naive to think evidence presented from the sources you trust will sway your opponents because when they do the same, it never sways you.
Psychologist Lee Ross explains how to identify, avoid, and combat this most pernicious of cognitive mistakes.