Naive Realism

Naive realism is the commonsense view that perception gives us direct, unmediated access to the world as it actually is. What you see is what’s there. The table is brown, the sky is blue, your colleague is being defensive. These feel like facts about the world, not interpretations of it, but philosophers have challenged this for centuries. Locke distinguished between properties objects actually have and properties that exist in the perceiver, not the object. Kant aruged we never perceive things as they are in themselves, only as they appear to us through the structures of perception and cognition. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty examined the structure of perception to show how much interpretive work is happening below awareness in what feels like direct experience.
Social psychologists Lee Ross and Andrew Ward coined the term in their 1996 paper, "Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding,” in which they argued this cognitive illusion operates on three main assumptions – the belief that one’s own perceptions, beliefs, and preferences are an accurate and unbiased reflection of the physical and social world; the expectation that other rational, open-minded people will share the same views and react to situations the exact same way; ant the belief that anyone who disagrees or holds a different viewpoint must be ignorant, irrational, lazy, or corrupted by bias.
Decades of subsequent research in social psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience have overwhelmingly supported and expanded Ross and Ward’s view, mapping out exactly how deep this bias runs in the human brain, how it fuels extreme polarization, and how it can be mitigated.

Glossary