Objectivity Illusion

The objectivity illusion is the tendency of people to believe that their own perceptions and judgments follow directly and objectively from the way the world really is, so that anyone who perceives a situation differently must be missing information, reasoning poorly, or acting under the influence of some personal bias, while one's own view is simply an accurate reading of reality. The social psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross documented the effect in a 2004 study titled Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder, examining divergent perceptions of bias in oneself compared with others, building on the theoretical foundation of naive realism, the broader idea that people implicitly assume a one-to-one correspondence between what they perceive and the true, objective properties of an object or event. This illusion is closely related to, but distinct from, this same research group's earlier and separately named bias blind spot, described by Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross in 2002, which specifically concerns the finding that people rate themselves as less susceptible to bias in general than other people; the objectivity illusion instead concerns the more basic belief, especially strong in the case of disagreement, that one's own particular judgment in a given instance is the objective one and that a disagreeing party must be the biased party. Naive realism, and the objectivity illusion it produces, is treated in the psychological literature as a foundation underlying several other biases, including the false consensus effect, the actor-observer bias, and the fundamental attribution error.