Naive Realism

In social psychology, naive realism is the tendency for a person to believe they perceive the world objectively and without bias, while assuming that anyone who disagrees with them must be uninformed, irrational or biased. The social psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues coined the term for this specific psychological sense in the 1990s, building on earlier field theory and Gestalt psychology traditions that examined perception within its full social context rather than in isolation; other researchers associated with the concept include Andrew Ward, Dale Griffin, Emily Pronin, Thomas Gilovich, Robert Robinson and Dacher Keltner. The 2010 edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology identified naive realism as one of four foundational insights the field of social psychology has contributed to understanding human perception, thought and behavior. Naive realism is described as underlying several more specific patterns of biased thinking, including the false consensus effect, the actor-observer bias, the bias blind spot and the fundamental attribution error.