An article in The Daily Gazette entitled Lee Ross's Lecture on Barriers to Conflict Resolution, is authored by Elizabeth Hipple. It discusses a concept called naive realism. From the article:

Naïve realism is the conviction that one sees the world as it is and that when people don't see it in a similar way, it is they that do not see the world for what it is. Ross characterized naïve realism as "a dangerous but unavoidable conviction about perception and reality". The danger of naïve realism is that while humans are good in recognizing that other people and their opinions have been shaped and influenced by their life experiences and particular dogmas, we are far less adept at recognizing the influence our own experiences and dogmas have on ourselves and opinions. We fail to recognize the bias in ourselves that we are so good in picking out in others.

In a section of Chapter 6 (Do You See What I See?) of The Design Matrix, Mike Gene delves into the influence of our prior experiences on our perception. Experiences help shape our expectations and the passage correctly notes that the meaning we assign to data is influenced by our expectations. Expectations are a clue to biases. The author of the linked article points to a problem- an inability to recognize our own biases. More:

Overcoming naïve realism is difficult because group dialogue, usually thought to be a good way of helping people to see things from the other point of view, can actually only further polarize opinions on a topic.

That is consistent with results of internet dialogs.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under The Debate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.