People are "naive realists" about politics, treating their beliefs as objective, unbiased, and unmediated interpretations of self-evident facts. I explore the roots of this harmful delusion.
I might add one more—not mutually exclusive—reason for naive realism in politics: the conflicting selection pressures between within-group competition for social partners and between-group competition for power and resources. Within groups, we have an incentive to avoid interacting with dishonest, manipulative, unreasonable, simplistic, self-serving, and untrustworthy people. So any signs of these traits triggers social disgust and avoidance. But between groups, we have an incentive to create propaganda that mobilizes the group against rivals, coordinates the group (which requires simpler vs. complex info and categorical vs. continuous info), creates trust and common knowledge that others will commit to the collective action and not chicken out, and reduces the likelihood of defection to rival groups, regardless of truth. There’s a conflict here. We must spread propaganda that we’re not spreading propaganda. We must lie that we’re not lying, bullshit that we’re not bullshitting, manipulate each other into thinking that we’re not manipulating each other, etc. Because if we don’t, we’ll see ourselves as dishonest, irrational, manipulative people, and destroy our desire to associate with one another, unraveling the group from within. So we need naive realism (and other sacred narratives) to stably exist as a competitive group at all. This is similar to your point on action, but fleshes it out a bit more. I write about this in my preprint on social paradoxes. I’m curious if you buy the argument.
Super interesting and insightful! And that’s a very interesting looking paper. I hope Dan doesn’t mind if I plug a couple of my papers that are (I hope) very relevant:
“they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing the fact that one is signaling the trait”
Yes! I’ve called this “hidden authorship” in the past, and I led what I think is still the only paper that studies whether and when children are capable of it. We found evidence at 3 years (the youngest we tested).
Grosse, G., Scott-Phillips, T., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Three-year-olds hide their communicative intentions in appropriate contexts. Developmental Psychology, 49(11), 2095-2101.
And on recursive mindreading, this experimental study shows performance even beyond those you review:
O’Grady, C., Kliesch, C., Smith, K., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks. Evolution & Human Behavior, 36(4), 313-322.
I think that if you say that a social problem is complex, people will accuse you of not caring enough about the problem. People who espouse naive realism come across as being more caring, so naive realism gets socially rewarded rather than punished. I will say more about this in a post scheduled for 3/22.
Good point although it's not immediately obvious why we should think those who take naively realistic views are more caring - I'm looking forward to the post.
I wonder if this is just an implication of the underlying assumption: that the answers to moral questions are easy. If someone doesn't arrive at the correct answer to an easy question, this raises the question as to why. If we're ignoring the possibility that our answer is wrong, or at least not obvious, then we likely have to posit that we're talking about someone who could easily profess the right answer, but doesn't. Such a person would then be shirking his clear duty.
Fascinating post. A couple of additional possible explanations to add:
1. The Desire to Participate in a Good vs. Evil Narrative - Most people have a deep desire to participate in a monumental good vs. evil struggle, and a naive realist worldview allows them to more easily identify with the "good" and oppose the "evil". A more nuanced view of the other side would jeopardize the crusade, so the nuance is dispensed with. This is similar to the social benefits point, but in this case the benefits are for the individual's psyche, rather than the individual's integration with the group.
2. The Glorification of Critical Thinking over Fallibilism - It seems like critical thinking and fallibilism are more opposed than most people think, and in general we all learn that critical thinking is to be preferred. Critical thinking involves critically stripping down a question to its base assumptions, a la Descartes, and then arriving at 100% defensible and "correct" positions. Fallibilism is much more defensive and fluid, but that fluidity is many times misconstrued as "hypocrisy" or "waffling" by the critical thinking crowd. There's a perception that critically thinking allows one to arrive at correct conclusions, instead of the better fallibilist approach of disinterestedly following the data and changing opinions when the data changes. I'm still thinking through the extent of this distinction but would be interested in your thoughts on this one
Interesting thoughts - thanks for sharing. I agree re. (1). I'm not sure about (2). I think there are forms of critical thinking that would mitigate against naive realism, but you might be right about critical thinking in practice
Similar experience here. Read the recent interview with Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, an economist now leaving the University of Chicago. He notes that his papers were discussed in DC and more generally if they served a cause. In general, few people are interested in constraining their prior beliefs through experience. They are interested in experience (data, studies, etc.) expressing or confirming their prior beliefs.
It seems that to be a politician you have to be a naïve realist. To be selected as a candidate you have to buy into the policy platform of your party. Pointing out that other parties may have better policies than yours on some issues is not likely to win you votes in a selection battle. If virtually all of our politicians then are naïve realists, albeit with different realities, that may lend legitimacy to naïve realism. We see politicians who weigh up both sides of an argument labelled as ditherers, those who change their views as flip-floppers whereas those who stick to their guns are lauded as conviction politicians.
A chicken and egg situation with some positive feedback thrown in? The selection process is often driven by party activists and perhaps party activists are more naive realist than the average member of the public.
Often politicians start out more heterodox, but quickly come to self-edit on the issues where they differ from their base. A good example would be David Lammy a leading Labour politician in the UK. He used to argue passionately for the importance of fathers in Afro-Caribbean British communities- but he quickly dropped this from his platform when he realised it offended White university educated kids from affluent two parent families who happened to be Labour Party voters.
I think your comment misses an important distinction. You have to ACT as if you are a naïve realist. You don't have to be one, though in some ways it helps. Actually, there are at least three ways a politician might not be. (1) truly believe your team has made all the best choices while realizing how they might be wrong (2) going along to get along while realizing the flaws and the strengths of other views (3) not always going along (Manchin, Cheney, Romney, McCarthy, Johnson, ...).
Back to the second way, politics involves A LOT of give and take. All politicians offer support to things they don't think best in order to get other things they think more important. Maybe this is a fourth way.
“Here is my question: Why are people naive realists? The truth in politics is rarely self-evident, so why do so many people act as if it is?”
Why is this the question? It seems to me plain and unsurprising that people are naive realists: and hence the thing to be explained is not why people are naive realists, but why and how some people are able not to be!
In other words, is your question is placing the burden of explanation in the wrong place?
I see your point and agree in a way. But I don't think systematic error in any domain should be treated as "plain and unsurprising." To the extent that naive realism is the default way people approach politics, I think it's interesting to explore why. And I don't think it's trivial to explain why. As I go through in the essay, I'm not sure I fully understand its causes. But you're of course right that insofar as naive realism is the default, the exceptions are deserving of special explanation.
"I don't think systematic error in any domain should be treated as "plain and unsurprising.""
Why not? Ask me about quantum physics—which, like modernity, has many features that are either opaque or counterintuitive to the human mind—and I will certainly make (systematic) errors. But I don't think these errors require any explanation, quite the contrary. I'm just suggesting: ditto for politics under mass culture. (In a sense, I'm agreeing with Lippmann!)
Nevertheless, I agree that it's interesting to ask the question you ask. My challenge is slightly mischievous in that respect. (Sorry!)
These are all good explanations, but there's an important one I didn't see here. One prominent feature of politics, even more visible in political debates, is that it feels inherently *moral* in the way it bears directly on questions, dilemmas and disagreements over policies that will viscerally impact lives. Of course, one of the themes of your blog is how so many different things become moralized for social functions. But I think politics really draws this out in unique ways, particularly when we have to discuss politics with one another. So, social benefits - but to me the interesting factor is the moralizing around political discussions that serves as the currency for those benefits.
In this regard, your last two reasons (which I see as part of the same thing, with the unilateral problem as one particular aspect of the latter) are the ones I find most compelling. You could say that "Politics demands action" is another way of saying "Politics is ultimately about doing whatever you can to prevent evil and fight for what you believe is good in the world." The stakes in politics are as high as they get in anything, because politics (thanks to power, which tends to magnify whatever it touches) is where "good" and "evil" cash out; where the rubber hits the road.
So I think if we want to understand the roots and persistence of naive realism when it comes to politics, we need to also consider naive moral realism. Or at least, the way moral baggage supercharges naive realism.
Great points - yes, completely agree. This suggests one solution to problems of naive realism is to reduce the moralisation of political issues, which honestly sounds quite plausible to me (even though of course it's not always possible).
For one thing, it's not clear to me that politics is a special case here. I suspect most people think things are simpler, etc., than they really are. For example, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off a bunch of staff a lot of people very confidently believed that this would be a technical disaster for the company. People on average are probably less informed about software or how to run a tech company than they are about politics but they weren't more humble about their beliefs on this topic.
It also seems to me that people don't end up with a lot of data points that suggest re-examining their political views. In a polarized context there's sort of a built-in "real X has never been tried" defense for any policy -- nobody gets a clean enough win that they can ram through 100% of what they want, so any problems can always be blamed on compromises, an intransigent opposition party, etc. So if they never notice any disconfirming evidence why wouldn't people keep believing the simple stories they already believe? (Possibly this is a combination of "Ignorance" and "No skin in the game").
And I'm not sure how cynical this is, but I wonder if "politics demands action" has it backwards and maybe it's more like "politics justifies inaction" -- in a stable society it can be easier to be a complainer with no responsibility than to actually do things and take blame if they turn out badly.
Good points - agree on all counts. One question, though: maybe politics isn't a special case, but perhaps the more general category of things where we tend to be naive realists has to do with levels of complexity that we are not adapted to deal with, cognitively?
The point about "politics justifies inaction" is interesting. Lots of political debate feels like a kind of politics cosplay (i.e., no skin in the game, just complaining) in ways that relate to this.
Yes, thinking about it more generally it does seem to be variation, in trying to think of examples that go in the opposite direction I thought of piloting (some people seem to think that believing you could land a jet if the tower was talking you through it is hubris on the level of thinking you could fistfight a bear) and IP law (people seem super skittish about non-lawyers even talking about it). I'm not sure I can think of enough examples to be sure whether it tracks complexity, but I think there's something interesting going on there about what fields we do or don't do it with.
In terms of the "politics justifies inaction" point, in addition to performative debate I was also thinking that which issues are "live" may be affected by this -- in the US progressives are theoretically in favor of the "higher taxes, more services" model, but seem a lot more enthusiastic about arguing for this as the way the federal government should do things (where Republicans have some power to push back) than they are in implementing these policy preferences in states where they have control.
I have been thinking often lately of the "one screen but two movies" problem in politics. This essay is very useful in that thinking. Unfortunately, even the author himself counsels that while useful it is not particularly helpful: "this will only work if we could somehow coordinate to become more reasonable" . . . with emphasis on the indeterminate "somehow."
Good comment. I address this further up the thread with the post which begins. 'Great essay. I think number 7 should be political polarisation...'
On any issue, the Left might possess 30% of the solution or rational trade-off. The Right will possess another 30%. The rest only gets 'solved' when they work together and argue in good faith. Pigs might fly on good faith, these days...
I think that most people are more rational than you give them credit for. My view is that generally speaking (or at least much of the time) people draw more or less correct logical conclusions given their fundamental values and untestable assumptions about how the world works and what is our purpose in it. Take abortion, for example. Both sides are adamant about the self-evident Truth of their beliefs, and both sides are right, correctly deriving their beliefs from a differing set of fundamental values and “metaphysics” or whatever the right term is. How to bridge that gap is the real challenge. I feel like the naive realism concept aims more at how we rationally arrive at our beliefs, when the problem is in a conflict of pre-rational assumptions.
Interesting. Maybe people are more rational than I suggest here - although I think the abortion debate perfectly illustrates people's tendency towards naive realism.
But the idea that life begins at conception and is a sacred gift from God, on one hand, or the idea that forcing a woman to carry a baby to term is oppression on the other, aren’t examples of a distorted representation of a complex reality. Being militant in these political stances isn’t an example of naive realism on either side. Each side holds true and equally valid perspectives on reality, but a different set of core values. For example, I am pro-life. A better understanding of the validity of pro-choice arguments wouldn’t cause me to moderate my conviction of or advocacy for the pro-life position, because it wouldn’t change my fundamental values and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of life. Though it does keep my activism from becoming personal or involving hatred of the other side.
That's a good point, but, for example, when I point out to my conservative friends that in origin, within the Abrahamic Faiths, the soul doesn't begin spontaneously at the point of conception or later, but was pre-existing and merges with the physical, many react with scepticism or disbelief, even when I point out that belief in the Guf is well documented and predates the collection of the Old testament into a single text. It's also a belief common to all other Ancient faiths.
I think the epistemic roots lie somewhere in the Enlightenment, with Descartes et al. We used to see the physical and ideal (or spiritual) worlds as separate but converging with life. Now, even those believe in spiritual truths subconsciously argue from the proposition that the ideal is somehow a byproduct of the physical.
Personally, although a Brit, I tend to favour the 12 to 14 week limit on abortion imposed by most European countries. The first biological signals which tend to argue brain activity beyond an (albeit temporary) state of brain death which the accepted standard for how medical realities translate into law, occur around 110 days. It also strikes the right balance between Rights and Responsibilities inherent to liberty.
I have argued that if the individual state wishes to impose mandates more severe than this limit then they should then accept any responsibilities both financial and social for supporting the child- but conservatives seem to object to this conscience-based solution to limiting liberty.
I am generally sympathetic to conservative positions. I would never for example use to 'just a clump of cells' argument which is so obscene to preciously held moral beliefs. But on this issue my libertarian side tends to win out- one of the consequences of holding a heterodox mindset, ignoring partisan loyalties on most issues.
From a utilitarian perspective, 42% of women who have an abortion fall below the Federal poverty line. 60% already have one or more children- a recipe for making scarce financial and parenting resources scarcer. 86% are unmarried. Given what we know about fatherless boys, crime and underachievement, and given the high likelihood of many bouncing into the foster/care system (which has even worse results than a state of fatherlessness)- a total ban on abortion would seem the perfect recipe for a high crime dystopia, burdened by the expense of North Korean levels of incarceration.
We desperately need to start teaching teenagers the consequences for a child of being born into a community without fathers. It's a far greater driver of disparities than race, as Raj Chetty's research on social mobility effectively proves. The Left blanches at the subject, but ask any single mother what she wants for her daughter- the answer is the same- get a good job, meet a nice man, settle down and have kids. They know how difficult it is to raise kids as a single parent. Yet the Left refuses to offer simple and effective preventative education which could massively improve lives for the better- all because of the insistence that families come in all shapes and sizes and because some vague belief in stigmatisation is somehow worse than having a measurably worse probable future life by every metric.
On the “success sequence” I couldn’t agree with you more. My only explanation for why it isn’t taught is that elements of the Left are more interested in other social objectives than in actually reducing poverty. Maybe there’s a connection to naive realism there, I don’t know.
The Left is also more female. This has always been the case to an extent, but in the last decade it's been accelerating. In the UK, rather than simply stopping keeping data on differential rates of physical and sexual abuse against single mothers and their children versus married women and their children (a 15:1 ratio in the US, according to a City Journal source), the British Government actually destroyed all historical data as well from public sources such as libraries on the basis that it was 'discriminatory'.
There is real element of 'should we expect women to remain trapped in loveless marriage for the sake of their kids' argument bound up in the issue. The answer is it depends. Is the relationship abusive or acrimonious to the extent that husband and wife cannot treat their relationship like a business partnership with a shared goal (possibly resorting to an open arrangement outside the home and shared social environment)? A recent study showed that divorce has a higher negative impact on a child's future academic performance than the death of a parent- so the answer would appear to be an emphatic 'yes'- with the obvious exception of abuse and relationships so toxic they result in a permanently disrupted home.
Women are more prone to negative emotions, so perhaps it's a moral justification to prevent feelings of guilt. The problem with the 'grass is greener' thinking which would substitute another man in the father role for the biological father, is that all the data shows that substitute fathers are almost always inferior for the kids. Why? Because one of the positive roles biological fathers play in parenting is contradicting the mother when they are wrong about parenting issues, especially in terms of overprotectiveness or negotiating with children (always a bad idea). Stepfathers don't tend to correct mothers when they are wrong about parenting.
Have you read Warren Farrell's The Boy Crisis? The prose style wasn't to my taste, but it's full of good points and data. He's also done some more in depth interviews on YouTube.
On the beginning of life question, as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I do believe that the soul exists before conception. I had no idea this was a common belief outside of modern mainstream Christianity. Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll have to read about this. (Of the two sides in the abortion debate I referenced, neither one fits my beliefs perfectly. I used them as examples.)
The Guf or Guff is a Talmudic reference. I first came across the subject when watching the movie The Seventh Sign, a reasonably ok film about the threat of Biblically themed end of the world scenario.
So many good points, Geary. I’ll break up my response into multiple comments. First, I think the British experience indicates that people are by and large pretty reasonable, even on abortion. This was my original point. If the democratic process is not subverted (as it was by Roe v Wade) even on this divisive issue, people will come to a reasonable compromise. Not because they have overcome their naive realism, but because people with very different fundamental values and beliefs are reasonable and able to work out a compromise. I think with time that will also happen in the states.
A great piece. There's lots to ponder here. Perhaps, truth is not self-evident, period. Not just in politics. This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Bertrand Russel:
We all start from ”naive realism,” i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
I might add coalitional interests. Winning in politics means building coalitions, and coalitions require compromise (and sometimes hypocrisy). If I want abortion an you want affirmative action, I might support affirmative action (even if I don't like it) in order to get you to endorse abortion (even if you don't like it).
To reduce painful cognitive dissonance or to signal loyalty to the coalition I may even come to convince myself that I actually like the thing I don't, or at least make excuses for it.
Often building meta-narratives to justify the positions of the coalition is taken on by the chattering classes.
I believe that this is a case where Gresham's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law comes into play. Bad political chat drives out good. Being a nuanced and thoughtful person makes it harder for you to put up with those who are only there for power politics and for the satisfaction of sadistic urges -- especially if they decide to demonstrate their power by joyfully crushing you.
I mostly disagree with the 'naive realism' theory. I think that if the fundamental problem is not that people believe that their beliefs -- political and otherwise -- are 'objective, unbiased, and unmediated interpretations of self-evident facts'. They are perfectly aware that their beliefs are subjective, biased, and supported by whatever data they can find and conscript in that role. After all, they will be the first to tell you this about _your_ views when you disagree with them. When they make statements that cause you to think that their problem is naive realism they are lying to you and often to themselves as well. Self-deception is rewarded in politics, for the reasons you outline in this note.
Now there was a time, when there was a shared Christian morality, that we had a way to address this sort of problem, which we didn't characterise as an epistemological failure. We knew perfectly well that what was going on was a moral failure, and that sinful people were deceiving us on purpose. They were the problem, while the people who were just making mistakes, including the naive realism sort mostly weren't. You'd point out their errors, and they would say something like 'Ooops, I never knew that. Thank you for bringing that up.' This could take a while, as people are often egotistically attached to their erroneous beliefs, and often because the facts are ambiguous and support more than one interpretation. As long as everybody is acting in good faith, trying to be truthful, it doesn't matter how many disagreeing naive realists you have in the mix.
It's when you don't have an effective way to remove liars and those who are acting in bad faith from the mix that things go to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. The reasonable people leave and the remainder get down to fighting over who gets to reign in hell.
Interesting thoughts - thanks for sharing. Although I'll add that I don't think what you say undermines the claim that naive realism is widespread, even if it does involve self-deception (self-deception might be widespread, after all).
Our disagreement isn't over the _existence_ of naive realism, but the extent to which it is a problem in civilised discourse. If we removed all the people who are arguing in bad faith from our discussions, we could better judge how much of a problem it is. I could be underestimating it. But I strongly suspect you would be amazed at how many people would be removed.
Conversations I am having on substack are now quite nice. But I have been through this experience many times before. A new place for conversations opens up. People flock to it, delighted to have a place to exchange ideas and politely disagree about things, in the service of amusing themselves, learning things, and finding new truths.
More people show up. They are in it for status, and likes, and money and sex and the whole kit-and-caboodle of social goods you can get if you are only willing to lie, first a little, and then a lot to give people what they want to hear. Bad conversations ensue. Bad conversations drive out the good ones, the reasonable people leave, and everybody sighs and says 'why is it always like this?'
Perhaps someone else already pointed this out: if someone believes that p (where 'p' can be any proposition), then she is going to believe that p is true ( p iff it is true that p). This simple conceptual fact makes that content available for furhter inference ('if p, then q, and since p, q must follow). £Aren't we naive realists with respect to any propositional content? It is a further fact to publicly ascribe truth to a belief -- such a public ascription signals endorsement, and all the relevant features of public endorsements of a proposition apply.
I don't think so. It's true that to believe that p is to believe that p is true. However, it is possible to step back and reflect on the likely partiality and fallibility of one's beliefs as a whole, and people rarely seem to do this. More generally, in addition to our beliefs, we also have beliefs about our beliefs and the processes by which we acquire them, and it's with respect to these second-order beliefs that people tend to be naive realists.
Fascinating read. I wonder if a 7th driver / reinforcer of political naïve-realism could be added: the role cultural consumption (novels, films, music, etc) plays in fixing - and making invisible - one’s ideological priors. For instance, books and films that support an individualist ethos will in turn lead to particular political truths appearing more ‘natural’ and self-evident.
I might add one more—not mutually exclusive—reason for naive realism in politics: the conflicting selection pressures between within-group competition for social partners and between-group competition for power and resources. Within groups, we have an incentive to avoid interacting with dishonest, manipulative, unreasonable, simplistic, self-serving, and untrustworthy people. So any signs of these traits triggers social disgust and avoidance. But between groups, we have an incentive to create propaganda that mobilizes the group against rivals, coordinates the group (which requires simpler vs. complex info and categorical vs. continuous info), creates trust and common knowledge that others will commit to the collective action and not chicken out, and reduces the likelihood of defection to rival groups, regardless of truth. There’s a conflict here. We must spread propaganda that we’re not spreading propaganda. We must lie that we’re not lying, bullshit that we’re not bullshitting, manipulate each other into thinking that we’re not manipulating each other, etc. Because if we don’t, we’ll see ourselves as dishonest, irrational, manipulative people, and destroy our desire to associate with one another, unraveling the group from within. So we need naive realism (and other sacred narratives) to stably exist as a competitive group at all. This is similar to your point on action, but fleshes it out a bit more. I write about this in my preprint on social paradoxes. I’m curious if you buy the argument.
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/avh9t
Super interesting and insightful! And that’s a very interesting looking paper. I hope Dan doesn’t mind if I plug a couple of my papers that are (I hope) very relevant:
“they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing the fact that one is signaling the trait”
Yes! I’ve called this “hidden authorship” in the past, and I led what I think is still the only paper that studies whether and when children are capable of it. We found evidence at 3 years (the youngest we tested).
Grosse, G., Scott-Phillips, T., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Three-year-olds hide their communicative intentions in appropriate contexts. Developmental Psychology, 49(11), 2095-2101.
And on recursive mindreading, this experimental study shows performance even beyond those you review:
O’Grady, C., Kliesch, C., Smith, K., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). The ease and extent of recursive mindreading, across implicit and explicit tasks. Evolution & Human Behavior, 36(4), 313-322.
Thanks, Thom! These are great papers I hadn't seen before. Very relevant. I will give them a good read and cite them in the next draft.
Love this - very insightful.
I think that if you say that a social problem is complex, people will accuse you of not caring enough about the problem. People who espouse naive realism come across as being more caring, so naive realism gets socially rewarded rather than punished. I will say more about this in a post scheduled for 3/22.
Good point although it's not immediately obvious why we should think those who take naively realistic views are more caring - I'm looking forward to the post.
I wonder if this is just an implication of the underlying assumption: that the answers to moral questions are easy. If someone doesn't arrive at the correct answer to an easy question, this raises the question as to why. If we're ignoring the possibility that our answer is wrong, or at least not obvious, then we likely have to posit that we're talking about someone who could easily profess the right answer, but doesn't. Such a person would then be shirking his clear duty.
Looking forward to this!
Fascinating post. A couple of additional possible explanations to add:
1. The Desire to Participate in a Good vs. Evil Narrative - Most people have a deep desire to participate in a monumental good vs. evil struggle, and a naive realist worldview allows them to more easily identify with the "good" and oppose the "evil". A more nuanced view of the other side would jeopardize the crusade, so the nuance is dispensed with. This is similar to the social benefits point, but in this case the benefits are for the individual's psyche, rather than the individual's integration with the group.
2. The Glorification of Critical Thinking over Fallibilism - It seems like critical thinking and fallibilism are more opposed than most people think, and in general we all learn that critical thinking is to be preferred. Critical thinking involves critically stripping down a question to its base assumptions, a la Descartes, and then arriving at 100% defensible and "correct" positions. Fallibilism is much more defensive and fluid, but that fluidity is many times misconstrued as "hypocrisy" or "waffling" by the critical thinking crowd. There's a perception that critically thinking allows one to arrive at correct conclusions, instead of the better fallibilist approach of disinterestedly following the data and changing opinions when the data changes. I'm still thinking through the extent of this distinction but would be interested in your thoughts on this one
Interesting thoughts - thanks for sharing. I agree re. (1). I'm not sure about (2). I think there are forms of critical thinking that would mitigate against naive realism, but you might be right about critical thinking in practice
Makes sense, I agree. Still thinking through (2) myself. Will likely have a post about this distinction before too long.
Having some professional experience in politics I can attest that an interest in the truth is a handicap.
Ha - interesting.
Similar experience here. Read the recent interview with Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, an economist now leaving the University of Chicago. He notes that his papers were discussed in DC and more generally if they served a cause. In general, few people are interested in constraining their prior beliefs through experience. They are interested in experience (data, studies, etc.) expressing or confirming their prior beliefs.
It seems that to be a politician you have to be a naïve realist. To be selected as a candidate you have to buy into the policy platform of your party. Pointing out that other parties may have better policies than yours on some issues is not likely to win you votes in a selection battle. If virtually all of our politicians then are naïve realists, albeit with different realities, that may lend legitimacy to naïve realism. We see politicians who weigh up both sides of an argument labelled as ditherers, those who change their views as flip-floppers whereas those who stick to their guns are lauded as conviction politicians.
Yes this seems right - but would politicians face these incentives if the public were not first themselves naive realists?
A chicken and egg situation with some positive feedback thrown in? The selection process is often driven by party activists and perhaps party activists are more naive realist than the average member of the public.
Often politicians start out more heterodox, but quickly come to self-edit on the issues where they differ from their base. A good example would be David Lammy a leading Labour politician in the UK. He used to argue passionately for the importance of fathers in Afro-Caribbean British communities- but he quickly dropped this from his platform when he realised it offended White university educated kids from affluent two parent families who happened to be Labour Party voters.
The base has a lot to answer for.
I think your comment misses an important distinction. You have to ACT as if you are a naïve realist. You don't have to be one, though in some ways it helps. Actually, there are at least three ways a politician might not be. (1) truly believe your team has made all the best choices while realizing how they might be wrong (2) going along to get along while realizing the flaws and the strengths of other views (3) not always going along (Manchin, Cheney, Romney, McCarthy, Johnson, ...).
Back to the second way, politics involves A LOT of give and take. All politicians offer support to things they don't think best in order to get other things they think more important. Maybe this is a fourth way.
“Here is my question: Why are people naive realists? The truth in politics is rarely self-evident, so why do so many people act as if it is?”
Why is this the question? It seems to me plain and unsurprising that people are naive realists: and hence the thing to be explained is not why people are naive realists, but why and how some people are able not to be!
In other words, is your question is placing the burden of explanation in the wrong place?
I see your point and agree in a way. But I don't think systematic error in any domain should be treated as "plain and unsurprising." To the extent that naive realism is the default way people approach politics, I think it's interesting to explore why. And I don't think it's trivial to explain why. As I go through in the essay, I'm not sure I fully understand its causes. But you're of course right that insofar as naive realism is the default, the exceptions are deserving of special explanation.
"I don't think systematic error in any domain should be treated as "plain and unsurprising.""
Why not? Ask me about quantum physics—which, like modernity, has many features that are either opaque or counterintuitive to the human mind—and I will certainly make (systematic) errors. But I don't think these errors require any explanation, quite the contrary. I'm just suggesting: ditto for politics under mass culture. (In a sense, I'm agreeing with Lippmann!)
Nevertheless, I agree that it's interesting to ask the question you ask. My challenge is slightly mischievous in that respect. (Sorry!)
Yes, was thinking the same, expressly in light of the argumentative theory of reason. And then you posted on the latter!
These are all good explanations, but there's an important one I didn't see here. One prominent feature of politics, even more visible in political debates, is that it feels inherently *moral* in the way it bears directly on questions, dilemmas and disagreements over policies that will viscerally impact lives. Of course, one of the themes of your blog is how so many different things become moralized for social functions. But I think politics really draws this out in unique ways, particularly when we have to discuss politics with one another. So, social benefits - but to me the interesting factor is the moralizing around political discussions that serves as the currency for those benefits.
In this regard, your last two reasons (which I see as part of the same thing, with the unilateral problem as one particular aspect of the latter) are the ones I find most compelling. You could say that "Politics demands action" is another way of saying "Politics is ultimately about doing whatever you can to prevent evil and fight for what you believe is good in the world." The stakes in politics are as high as they get in anything, because politics (thanks to power, which tends to magnify whatever it touches) is where "good" and "evil" cash out; where the rubber hits the road.
So I think if we want to understand the roots and persistence of naive realism when it comes to politics, we need to also consider naive moral realism. Or at least, the way moral baggage supercharges naive realism.
Great points - yes, completely agree. This suggests one solution to problems of naive realism is to reduce the moralisation of political issues, which honestly sounds quite plausible to me (even though of course it's not always possible).
For one thing, it's not clear to me that politics is a special case here. I suspect most people think things are simpler, etc., than they really are. For example, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off a bunch of staff a lot of people very confidently believed that this would be a technical disaster for the company. People on average are probably less informed about software or how to run a tech company than they are about politics but they weren't more humble about their beliefs on this topic.
It also seems to me that people don't end up with a lot of data points that suggest re-examining their political views. In a polarized context there's sort of a built-in "real X has never been tried" defense for any policy -- nobody gets a clean enough win that they can ram through 100% of what they want, so any problems can always be blamed on compromises, an intransigent opposition party, etc. So if they never notice any disconfirming evidence why wouldn't people keep believing the simple stories they already believe? (Possibly this is a combination of "Ignorance" and "No skin in the game").
And I'm not sure how cynical this is, but I wonder if "politics demands action" has it backwards and maybe it's more like "politics justifies inaction" -- in a stable society it can be easier to be a complainer with no responsibility than to actually do things and take blame if they turn out badly.
Good points - agree on all counts. One question, though: maybe politics isn't a special case, but perhaps the more general category of things where we tend to be naive realists has to do with levels of complexity that we are not adapted to deal with, cognitively?
The point about "politics justifies inaction" is interesting. Lots of political debate feels like a kind of politics cosplay (i.e., no skin in the game, just complaining) in ways that relate to this.
Yes, thinking about it more generally it does seem to be variation, in trying to think of examples that go in the opposite direction I thought of piloting (some people seem to think that believing you could land a jet if the tower was talking you through it is hubris on the level of thinking you could fistfight a bear) and IP law (people seem super skittish about non-lawyers even talking about it). I'm not sure I can think of enough examples to be sure whether it tracks complexity, but I think there's something interesting going on there about what fields we do or don't do it with.
In terms of the "politics justifies inaction" point, in addition to performative debate I was also thinking that which issues are "live" may be affected by this -- in the US progressives are theoretically in favor of the "higher taxes, more services" model, but seem a lot more enthusiastic about arguing for this as the way the federal government should do things (where Republicans have some power to push back) than they are in implementing these policy preferences in states where they have control.
I have been thinking often lately of the "one screen but two movies" problem in politics. This essay is very useful in that thinking. Unfortunately, even the author himself counsels that while useful it is not particularly helpful: "this will only work if we could somehow coordinate to become more reasonable" . . . with emphasis on the indeterminate "somehow."
There's something tragic about this situation, I think!
Good comment. I address this further up the thread with the post which begins. 'Great essay. I think number 7 should be political polarisation...'
On any issue, the Left might possess 30% of the solution or rational trade-off. The Right will possess another 30%. The rest only gets 'solved' when they work together and argue in good faith. Pigs might fly on good faith, these days...
I think that most people are more rational than you give them credit for. My view is that generally speaking (or at least much of the time) people draw more or less correct logical conclusions given their fundamental values and untestable assumptions about how the world works and what is our purpose in it. Take abortion, for example. Both sides are adamant about the self-evident Truth of their beliefs, and both sides are right, correctly deriving their beliefs from a differing set of fundamental values and “metaphysics” or whatever the right term is. How to bridge that gap is the real challenge. I feel like the naive realism concept aims more at how we rationally arrive at our beliefs, when the problem is in a conflict of pre-rational assumptions.
Interesting. Maybe people are more rational than I suggest here - although I think the abortion debate perfectly illustrates people's tendency towards naive realism.
But the idea that life begins at conception and is a sacred gift from God, on one hand, or the idea that forcing a woman to carry a baby to term is oppression on the other, aren’t examples of a distorted representation of a complex reality. Being militant in these political stances isn’t an example of naive realism on either side. Each side holds true and equally valid perspectives on reality, but a different set of core values. For example, I am pro-life. A better understanding of the validity of pro-choice arguments wouldn’t cause me to moderate my conviction of or advocacy for the pro-life position, because it wouldn’t change my fundamental values and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of life. Though it does keep my activism from becoming personal or involving hatred of the other side.
That's a good point, but, for example, when I point out to my conservative friends that in origin, within the Abrahamic Faiths, the soul doesn't begin spontaneously at the point of conception or later, but was pre-existing and merges with the physical, many react with scepticism or disbelief, even when I point out that belief in the Guf is well documented and predates the collection of the Old testament into a single text. It's also a belief common to all other Ancient faiths.
I think the epistemic roots lie somewhere in the Enlightenment, with Descartes et al. We used to see the physical and ideal (or spiritual) worlds as separate but converging with life. Now, even those believe in spiritual truths subconsciously argue from the proposition that the ideal is somehow a byproduct of the physical.
Personally, although a Brit, I tend to favour the 12 to 14 week limit on abortion imposed by most European countries. The first biological signals which tend to argue brain activity beyond an (albeit temporary) state of brain death which the accepted standard for how medical realities translate into law, occur around 110 days. It also strikes the right balance between Rights and Responsibilities inherent to liberty.
I have argued that if the individual state wishes to impose mandates more severe than this limit then they should then accept any responsibilities both financial and social for supporting the child- but conservatives seem to object to this conscience-based solution to limiting liberty.
I am generally sympathetic to conservative positions. I would never for example use to 'just a clump of cells' argument which is so obscene to preciously held moral beliefs. But on this issue my libertarian side tends to win out- one of the consequences of holding a heterodox mindset, ignoring partisan loyalties on most issues.
From a utilitarian perspective, 42% of women who have an abortion fall below the Federal poverty line. 60% already have one or more children- a recipe for making scarce financial and parenting resources scarcer. 86% are unmarried. Given what we know about fatherless boys, crime and underachievement, and given the high likelihood of many bouncing into the foster/care system (which has even worse results than a state of fatherlessness)- a total ban on abortion would seem the perfect recipe for a high crime dystopia, burdened by the expense of North Korean levels of incarceration.
We desperately need to start teaching teenagers the consequences for a child of being born into a community without fathers. It's a far greater driver of disparities than race, as Raj Chetty's research on social mobility effectively proves. The Left blanches at the subject, but ask any single mother what she wants for her daughter- the answer is the same- get a good job, meet a nice man, settle down and have kids. They know how difficult it is to raise kids as a single parent. Yet the Left refuses to offer simple and effective preventative education which could massively improve lives for the better- all because of the insistence that families come in all shapes and sizes and because some vague belief in stigmatisation is somehow worse than having a measurably worse probable future life by every metric.
On the “success sequence” I couldn’t agree with you more. My only explanation for why it isn’t taught is that elements of the Left are more interested in other social objectives than in actually reducing poverty. Maybe there’s a connection to naive realism there, I don’t know.
The Left is also more female. This has always been the case to an extent, but in the last decade it's been accelerating. In the UK, rather than simply stopping keeping data on differential rates of physical and sexual abuse against single mothers and their children versus married women and their children (a 15:1 ratio in the US, according to a City Journal source), the British Government actually destroyed all historical data as well from public sources such as libraries on the basis that it was 'discriminatory'.
There is real element of 'should we expect women to remain trapped in loveless marriage for the sake of their kids' argument bound up in the issue. The answer is it depends. Is the relationship abusive or acrimonious to the extent that husband and wife cannot treat their relationship like a business partnership with a shared goal (possibly resorting to an open arrangement outside the home and shared social environment)? A recent study showed that divorce has a higher negative impact on a child's future academic performance than the death of a parent- so the answer would appear to be an emphatic 'yes'- with the obvious exception of abuse and relationships so toxic they result in a permanently disrupted home.
Women are more prone to negative emotions, so perhaps it's a moral justification to prevent feelings of guilt. The problem with the 'grass is greener' thinking which would substitute another man in the father role for the biological father, is that all the data shows that substitute fathers are almost always inferior for the kids. Why? Because one of the positive roles biological fathers play in parenting is contradicting the mother when they are wrong about parenting issues, especially in terms of overprotectiveness or negotiating with children (always a bad idea). Stepfathers don't tend to correct mothers when they are wrong about parenting.
Have you read Warren Farrell's The Boy Crisis? The prose style wasn't to my taste, but it's full of good points and data. He's also done some more in depth interviews on YouTube.
On the beginning of life question, as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I do believe that the soul exists before conception. I had no idea this was a common belief outside of modern mainstream Christianity. Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll have to read about this. (Of the two sides in the abortion debate I referenced, neither one fits my beliefs perfectly. I used them as examples.)
The Guf or Guff is a Talmudic reference. I first came across the subject when watching the movie The Seventh Sign, a reasonably ok film about the threat of Biblically themed end of the world scenario.
So many good points, Geary. I’ll break up my response into multiple comments. First, I think the British experience indicates that people are by and large pretty reasonable, even on abortion. This was my original point. If the democratic process is not subverted (as it was by Roe v Wade) even on this divisive issue, people will come to a reasonable compromise. Not because they have overcome their naive realism, but because people with very different fundamental values and beliefs are reasonable and able to work out a compromise. I think with time that will also happen in the states.
A great piece. There's lots to ponder here. Perhaps, truth is not self-evident, period. Not just in politics. This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Bertrand Russel:
We all start from ”naive realism,” i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
Interesting - yes, I agree naive realism is not restricted to politics.
Great list.
I might add coalitional interests. Winning in politics means building coalitions, and coalitions require compromise (and sometimes hypocrisy). If I want abortion an you want affirmative action, I might support affirmative action (even if I don't like it) in order to get you to endorse abortion (even if you don't like it).
To reduce painful cognitive dissonance or to signal loyalty to the coalition I may even come to convince myself that I actually like the thing I don't, or at least make excuses for it.
Often building meta-narratives to justify the positions of the coalition is taken on by the chattering classes.
Interesting - yes, seems right.
I believe that this is a case where Gresham's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law comes into play. Bad political chat drives out good. Being a nuanced and thoughtful person makes it harder for you to put up with those who are only there for power politics and for the satisfaction of sadistic urges -- especially if they decide to demonstrate their power by joyfully crushing you.
I mostly disagree with the 'naive realism' theory. I think that if the fundamental problem is not that people believe that their beliefs -- political and otherwise -- are 'objective, unbiased, and unmediated interpretations of self-evident facts'. They are perfectly aware that their beliefs are subjective, biased, and supported by whatever data they can find and conscript in that role. After all, they will be the first to tell you this about _your_ views when you disagree with them. When they make statements that cause you to think that their problem is naive realism they are lying to you and often to themselves as well. Self-deception is rewarded in politics, for the reasons you outline in this note.
Now there was a time, when there was a shared Christian morality, that we had a way to address this sort of problem, which we didn't characterise as an epistemological failure. We knew perfectly well that what was going on was a moral failure, and that sinful people were deceiving us on purpose. They were the problem, while the people who were just making mistakes, including the naive realism sort mostly weren't. You'd point out their errors, and they would say something like 'Ooops, I never knew that. Thank you for bringing that up.' This could take a while, as people are often egotistically attached to their erroneous beliefs, and often because the facts are ambiguous and support more than one interpretation. As long as everybody is acting in good faith, trying to be truthful, it doesn't matter how many disagreeing naive realists you have in the mix.
It's when you don't have an effective way to remove liars and those who are acting in bad faith from the mix that things go to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. The reasonable people leave and the remainder get down to fighting over who gets to reign in hell.
Interesting thoughts - thanks for sharing. Although I'll add that I don't think what you say undermines the claim that naive realism is widespread, even if it does involve self-deception (self-deception might be widespread, after all).
Our disagreement isn't over the _existence_ of naive realism, but the extent to which it is a problem in civilised discourse. If we removed all the people who are arguing in bad faith from our discussions, we could better judge how much of a problem it is. I could be underestimating it. But I strongly suspect you would be amazed at how many people would be removed.
Conversations I am having on substack are now quite nice. But I have been through this experience many times before. A new place for conversations opens up. People flock to it, delighted to have a place to exchange ideas and politely disagree about things, in the service of amusing themselves, learning things, and finding new truths.
More people show up. They are in it for status, and likes, and money and sex and the whole kit-and-caboodle of social goods you can get if you are only willing to lie, first a little, and then a lot to give people what they want to hear. Bad conversations ensue. Bad conversations drive out the good ones, the reasonable people leave, and everybody sighs and says 'why is it always like this?'
"They are in it for status, and likes, and money and sex and the whole kit-and-caboodle of social goods...."
Wow, sex on Substack?! Tell me where to sign up!
Thnaks for writing this essay Dan
Thanks Rolando.
Perhaps someone else already pointed this out: if someone believes that p (where 'p' can be any proposition), then she is going to believe that p is true ( p iff it is true that p). This simple conceptual fact makes that content available for furhter inference ('if p, then q, and since p, q must follow). £Aren't we naive realists with respect to any propositional content? It is a further fact to publicly ascribe truth to a belief -- such a public ascription signals endorsement, and all the relevant features of public endorsements of a proposition apply.
I don't think so. It's true that to believe that p is to believe that p is true. However, it is possible to step back and reflect on the likely partiality and fallibility of one's beliefs as a whole, and people rarely seem to do this. More generally, in addition to our beliefs, we also have beliefs about our beliefs and the processes by which we acquire them, and it's with respect to these second-order beliefs that people tend to be naive realists.
Fascinating read. I wonder if a 7th driver / reinforcer of political naïve-realism could be added: the role cultural consumption (novels, films, music, etc) plays in fixing - and making invisible - one’s ideological priors. For instance, books and films that support an individualist ethos will in turn lead to particular political truths appearing more ‘natural’ and self-evident.
Nice - yeah that sounds plausible.