Naive Reality: Why You Think Everyone Else is Biased (Except You)

In India, during the May-July 2026 Cockroach Janta Party protests in New Delhi, tens of thousands of youths marched for accountability over NEET exam leaks. Protesters viewed themselves as righteous defenders of a broken education system, while government officials dismissed opposition supporters as opportunists seeking “political mileage” and the Chief Justice of India reportedly likened some unemployed youth to “parasites” or “cockroaches”.

A MAGA/Trump rally. Supporters view their movement as a common-sense, patriotic defense of traditional American values and election integrity, while critics view the exact same event as a dangerous threat to democracy.

Now, here comes the word “Naive Realism”. It is not as difficult a concept as it seems. In simple words, it is the human tendency to believe that we perceive the world entirely objectively – exactly as it is – without any cognitive filter or bias. But is that true?!!

The belief that our perception is perfect is the root cause of our most frustrating political deadlocks. It explains why presenting “facts” to a MAGA supporter or a CJP protester rarely changes their mind. And trust me, it is not their problem nor ours!

Let me be honest here. I came to know about this almost a month ago. And since then, I have been going through a rabbit hole of articles, youtube videos and even some academic paper. I will add the paper in the annexure of this post!

Three Tenets

According to Lee Ross and Andrew Ward, there are three principles or beliefs; the three subconscious assumptions we all make

“I am objective.” The belief that you arrived at your political opinions after careful, rational analysis of unadulterated facts.

Example: A CJP supporter believes their demand for the education minister’s resignation is the only logical conclusion to the exam leak data.

“Rational people will agree with me.” The assumption that if another intelligent person has the same information you do, they will naturally reach the exact same conclusion.

“Those who disagree are flawed.” When people don’t agree with you, you assume it must be because they are misinformed, lazy, irrational, or blinded by their own biases.

Example: Opponents of MAGA often assume Trump supporters are brainwashed by cable news. Conversely, MAGA supporters assume their detractors are blinded by mainstream media bias.

Why Our Brain Falls For It

We are born with “bias blindspots”. A study found people are quick to spot bias in others – a coworker’s self-serving excuse, a stranger’s skewed opinion, a rival’s slanted take, but almost blind to the same bias in themselves. In one study, people even insisted their own judgments were fair and objective right after being shown exactly how they’d just fallen for a well-known bias. The reason seems to be simple: we can’t watch our own mind at work, so our conclusions just feel like “seeing things as they really are,” while other people’s conclusions look like the product of their motives, their upbringing, or their politics. That’s exactly why political arguments go nowhere!! each side is sure it’s looking at the plain facts, and assumes the other side must be blinded by ideology or self-interest, never stopping to wonder whether the same could be true of themselves. It brings to my mind those days I and my colleagues argued about the far right politics gripping Indian government! 🙂

Our brains aren’t cameras that record the world exactly as it is – they’re prediction machines built for efficiency. As a matter of fact, brain is one of the most energy consuming part in our body. And the body is tuned to utilize as less energy as possible. That is because, caveman knew he need more energy to run away from a predator than to spend his energy on some “random” thoughts! (Picture me air quoting that). Instead of processing every minute detail in front of us, the brain relies on what we already know and quickly assume things –> Fill gaps -> come to conclusions and make sense of what we’re seeing. That shortcut is powered by everything we’ve accumulated over a lifetime – our past experiences, the culture we grew up in, our current mood, even what we want to be true, dating all the way back to the caveman I told earlier!, all quietly shaping what we notice, what we ignore, and how we interpret it.

The catch is that this filtering happens invisibly, it flies under the radar of our awareness, so it never feels like filtering at all. We assume we’re looking at the world through a clear pane of glass, seeing things exactly as they are. In reality, we’re looking through something closer to a kaleidoscope – one uniquely shaped by our own history and mistaking its particular pattern for plain, unfiltered reality. See how flawed we are!

Then there is a thing call False Concensus Effect. We tend to assume more people agree with us than actually do. This has a special place in today’s world of social media. We have a tendency to project our won beliefs onto everyone else, just by assuming that most reasonable people see politics or form opinons the same way we do. This is not a harmless guess. What it creates is a more dangerous feedback loop. The more you move to one side of the spectrum, social media will pull you in like a blackhole! That is how people start to listen and see only those content that they agree to. This creates a blindspot towards the opposing opinions and views. IRL also, we’re often surrounded by people who think like us, whether through friends, or the convensional news we choose to watch, which makes our own opinion feel far more universal than it actually is.

The Damage

We assume we’re standing at the calm, reasonable center (of the spectrum) – and everyone who disagrees with us must be way out on the extreme edge. This is what a “False Polarization” looks like. We are already convinced that our view is just the objective, sensible read on things. After that, disagreement doesn’t register as a small difference of opinion. It gets stretched into a huge ideological gap. This is what results in what we usually say in a friend argument or in the halls of democracy- “The other side”. And this other side is always pictured as more extreme, more rigid, more hostile than most of them actually are. Should I say it the fun part… is both sides tend to overestimate how far apart they really are, which makes compromise feel pointless and the other side feel like strangers – even when, up close, their actual views are far closer to the middle than either side assumes.

“Reactive devaluation” is the reflex that makes a proposal look worse the moment we find out who’s offering it. It’s not that the idea itself changes but our brain runs a mental shortcut: “if the other side is for it, there must be something wrong with it.” So instead of judging the solution, we judge who proposed the solution. How silly should we be?! A real recent example: when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced fast-track courts to punish those responsible for the 2026 NEET-UG exam paper leak, a protest group called the Cockroach Janta Party immediately rejected it as a hollow “band-aid solution,” demanding the education minister’s resignation instead of engaging with the proposal itself. Whether or not the plan actually had merit almost becomes irrelevant. Once it’s tagged as coming from “them,” the instinct is to reject it on sight, which makes it that much harder for opposing sides to ever agree on anything, even ideas they might have supported if a friend had suggested them instead.

Simply presenting facts rarely works because of naive realism: people already believe they see reality objectively, so contradictory data doesn’t make them question their view. It makes them question your source. Whether it’s a MAGA supporter calling it “fake news” or a government loyalist calling it “misinformation,” the reaction is the same instinct pointed in opposite directions. Worse, research on the “backfire effect” shows disconfirming facts can actually harden a belief instead of changing it, since the argument was never really about the data. It is about whose lens gets trusted, and no one thinks it’s their own that’s warped.

Break The Wheel

If you want to break the wheel of the echo chamber, here is what I learned!

“Epistemic humility” – Yes I read that word in a related book. It simply means accepting the limits, or accept that your opinions could be fallible. It starts with a simple admission: what feels like seeing reality directly is actually your brain’s interpretation of it. It is already filtered through your history, culture, and assumptions. Not a raw, unfiltered broadcast of “the truth.” Accepting that doesn’t mean giving up on facts or pretending every view is equally valid; it means holding your own conclusions a little more loosely, staying curious about what you might be missing, and remembering that the person who disagrees with you is likely just as convinced they’re seeing clearly as you are. That small shift from “I see reality” to “I see a version of reality” – is often the only opening that makes real conversation, rather than a standoff, possible.

Here is the second step – assuming good faith. It means resisting the urge to write off disagreement as ignorance or bad intent, and instead asking, “What experiences or information sources shaped this view that I haven’t seen yet?” It doesn’t mean every position is correct – it’s a temporary switch off of your firewall of thoughts that lowers your guard enough to actually listen instead of just preparing a rebuttal. And it tends to be reciprocal: treating someone as reasonable often makes them more likely to act that way back – I guess!.

Steelmanning means doing the opposite of arguing against a caricature: instead of attacking the weakest, easiest-to-mock version of a CJP demand or a MAGA policy, you build the strongest, most coherent version of it. The test is simple: could the person who holds that view read your summary and say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean”? If they wouldn’t recognize it, you’ve argued against a strawman, not their real position. This is harder than it sounds, because it means momentarily setting aside the urge to win and genuinely trying to understand. But it’s also the only way a rebuttal actually lands, since you can’t change a mind you’ve never accurately understood in the first place.

What I meant to Say!

Our brains are wired for certainty, not doubt. Evolution built us to trust our own perceptions instantly, because hesitating over “is this real?” was rarely useful for survival. But that same wiring, so useful for dodging danger, is a liability for democracy, where the hardest and most necessary skill is turning that certainty down a notch, just enough to ask, “What if I’m not seeing this as clearly as I think I am?” Repairing a fractured democracy doesn’t require abandoning our convictions. It requires the discipline to doubt them occasionally, enough to actually hear someone whose reality looks different from our own.

Think back to a political argument that left you frustrated. One where the other person seemed willfully blind, dishonest, or just plain irrational. Now look at it again through the lens of naive realism: is it possible they walked away from that same conversation thinking the exact same thing about you? Both of you were likely convinced you were simply describing reality as it is, while the other person was distorting it. That doesn’t mean the disagreement wasn’t real, or that both sides were equally right. But it’s worth asking, honestly, whether the certainty you felt in that moment was really “seeing clearly,” or just what bias always feels like from the inside.

Ref: https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Negotiation_and_Conflict_Management/Ross_Ward_Naive_Realism.pdf
The Wisest One in the Room: https://a.co/d/0igqRShG