Naïve realism

We tend to believe that, with the exception of a few tricks or illusions and so on that might fool us into seeing things a particular way, that the world is essentially as it is. I mean, this is kind of an extension of this idea of the videotape, that we're just going through the world and taking things in; it's being recorded and we can reproduce it faithfully.

Obviously, that's not the way the world works, but this idea that the world is like that, the world is as it is and we just interpret in particular ways—it's called naïve realism. This is a notion that Lee Ross has been working a fair bit on. He told us a little bit about naïve realism and how he sees it working. Here's what he had to say. Human beings necessarily think that the world is the way they perceive it to be. If I look around this campus, I see walls and windows and grass. To me, that is the way the world is. Einstein memorably said, "Reality is an illusion," and what he meant by that is that what we experience in reality is kind of the interaction that occurs between the kind of stardust that we're made of and the kind of stardust that's out there. To a physicist, the world is made up of these infinitesimally tiny strings of matter and energy fields—nothing like the way we perceive it to be. What we perceive as reality is our way of responding to that input and that construction.

Of course, we have to assume that the world is the way we perceive it, and in many ways we perceive the world similarly. It serves us really well to believe that: this naïve belief that there's a one-to-one relationship between the way we perceive and the way they really are, but it can get us into trouble, particularly when other people come to that world with different histories, different needs, different goals, different biases, different experiences. That's really cool. The exact same thing came up in my conversation with John Vokey. The world doesn't really look the way you think it looks. As you know, even what you call solid objects are just made up of molecules. There are big spaces between them, so it doesn't really look like that. There are no colors in the world. Color is something you bring to the processing of the information you receive.

So, in some sense, what you just said is always true. You're never really seeing what's out there. That's one level of explanation. In fact, hearing things that most other people would argue are not there or seeing things that other people would argue are not there is not saying much because that's always true.

What, I think, is meant is to try to dissociate, I think, what you're asking about from a straight hallucination, when there actually is no input source that should lead to that conclusion about something being out there, which is usually the result of brain disease or probably induced with some chemicals as well, where the brain's processing gets quite distorted and it's actually doing more than just trying to put together a reasonable construction—it actually creates it, whole cloth. There are people who do suffer from various diseases that in fact lead them to really see things that aren't out there in the sense that another person standing right there with them is just, "There's nothing there, nothing." Those are hallucinations, though. We're talking about in these particular cases where we could lead people to think that they heard, "I saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth," something a bit different.

We've given enough information. Much like we do in the real world, these aren't threshold phenomena that either is or isn't. It's that your perceptional systems are accumulating evidence. Then you can also make use of all sorts of biases that you've developed over your lifetime to, at some point, say, "Yes, I'm confident enough to go with claiming I hear this or see this," and later it turns out, "Oh, it was just the way the blanket was folded." "I thought it was my dog in the bed, but it turns out it was the blanket that was folded, but because I expected my dog there, that's what I saw." That would be not a hallucination. An illusion of the sense or type, I guess, is the way to think about it.

That's all we're really doing, and that's just standard normal processing. There's nothing unusual happening here. It's just what we're doing all the time. We're not really seeing the world as it is; we're just trying to create something that's reasonably predictive of allowing us to act in the world.

Hopefully, people are going to recognize how naïve this idea of naïve realism actually is. As Lee Ross, and now John, have indicated, it doesn't really make sense to talk about things objectively as seeing objects and events as they are in the world instead of being filtered by our own experiences. It should be clear now to people watching this that, again, seeing, hearing, and remembering all involve considerable knowledge of the world.