“It’s So Obvious, Why Can’t They See It?” – The Naïve Realism Bias

In the spring of 2022, the State of Texas began putting migrants on buses and depositing them in largely Democratic cities such as Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. According to a New York Times report, the goal of forcing such cities to grapple with the flood of migrants across the southwestern border has had an impact.  Mayors have struggled to find housing and pay for providing other services.  “I took the border to them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said.  Many of those who applaud Abbott consider migrants a danger to America.  They cite crime, taking American jobs, and the “browning of America” – and share stories to “prove” it.

Some, however, consider the Texas program “a political stunt.”  They acknowledge the need to address the migrant problem but empathize with people they see as seeking refuge from violence, a livable income for their families and a better future. They see migrants as filling jobs Americans don’t want, paying taxes ,being hard workers and thus good for America – and share stories to “prove” it.

Americans falling into either of these two versions of reality find it hard to acknowledge the other.  Each side is subject to what psychologists call naïve realism - the belief that what we perceive is an exact picture of reality.  Each side finds its anchor in a mental model, a way of describing reality based on what they see and the conclusions they draw. Mental models help people make sense of a complex world.  They reduce ambiguity, offer certainty and closure.  Yet they can easily be cognitively and emotionally limiting.  A mental model is like looking out only one pane of a large window when using the whole window would offer a richer and fuller view.

It’s hard to escape naïve realism because it is supported by other mental biases, such as:

·       False Consensus Effect – the tendency to believe that there is widespread agreement on what we think – our version of reality.  Confronted with information contrary to what “we know” exists we may reject it and those who don’t see what is obvious to us.

·       Illusion of Knowledge – the belief that we know much more than we do about any topic.  Thus, for example, we may be convinced that wind turbines are a danger to wildlife but asked how a turbine works, how air currents around it may affect birds and where we can find scientifically objective evidence for our belief, we struggle because we just don’t know.

·       Confirmation bias – the tendency to look for and like only information that fits our existing beliefs.  Confirmation bias leads people to ignore or discount contrary information.   Studies show, for example, that conservatives prefer stories on Fox News and liberals gravitate to CNN.  In both cases they’re less likely to encounter facts that don’t fit their mental model.

·       Political Homophily – the tendency to prefer people who are most like us and share our views.  Research by Bill Bishop, popularized in his book The Big Sort, shows that Americans increasingly choose to live in Congressional districts where the majority of people think like them.  More recently, it’s not just red and blue districts but red and blue neighborhoods.  Research also suggests that people on online platforms not only like to connect with people like them but prefer to follow peers who are even more extreme in the political views they already hold, a process called acrophily - the love of extremes.

·       Illusory Truth Effect – Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels said that “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”  If people are anchored in a mental model, in their naïve version of reality, and associate almost exclusively with sources of information that fit that model, it’s easy for them to fall victim to disinformation and fake news.  Then, the more often they hear such stories, the more comfortable they get with them and the more likely they are to treat falsehoods as the truth.

·       Motivated Blindness – the tendency of people to ignore unethical behavior in others when it is to their personal advantage to do so. Motivational blindness can allow people on both sides of the immigration debate to fail to see or, if they do, accept and rationalize behavior from government officials and migrants that they would not otherwise tolerate. 

As with immigration so also with issues such as abortion, guns and the environment - the “it’s so obvious” division of Americans that comes from the blinders of naïve realism hinders rational solutions to serious problems.

Most of us do our best to perceive and understand the world accurately as we make judgments and take action.  Yet, being human, we are imperfect observers and thinkers. We’d help ourselves and our country if we had a little more humility to accept that the “reality” we see may be, at least in part, deceiving us. As the writer Anais Nin observed: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

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