You go to a party with a date; someone you’ve been seeing for a couple of months.

You like this person.

A lot.

This is your first party and you’re feeling slightly anxious about whether or not they are socially well-adjusted.

You’re about to find out.

You know a lot of people at this party, but somehow you and your date get stuck talking to someone you cannot stand.

This person is, let’s face it, repugnant.

Every time you see them, they are always just a bit too drunk, too loud, and too close, spraying spittle from their big wet red popsicle lips.

Worst of all, they keep interrupting your new person’s sentences, finishing them on their behalf, despite never getting it right.

“After half an hour, I realized—”

“That you should give up and go home!” interrupts the interrupter.

“No, I should probably call them to see if they’re okay.”

You’re mortified and can’t wait until the party is over so you and your date can have a post-mortem and dissect the grotesquery of Old Drunk Wet Lips.

The second you step into the elevator, you turn and profusely apologize to your new person about getting stuck with that absolute horror of a human when—much to your deeper horror your person says—

“Oh, he wasn’t so bad.”

This, naturally, stops you in your tracks.

“What are you talking about?” you say. “That guy is the absolute worst person anyone ever gave birth to!”

“I thought he was sort of endearing.”

Now, either you can appreciate this aspect of your partner, or you can get defensive because HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU LOVE SOMEONE WHO IS TOO BLIND TO SEE THE ABSOLUTE REPUGNANCE OF A REPUGNANT PERSON?

You know you’re right.

Obviously you’re right.

Your taste in people is impeccable—in fact, your taste in everything is top-notch— and that person was a bottom-notch garbage monster.

Your new person is wrong, and you are now consumed with the fact that your partner doesn’t know that they’re wrong, and therefore you must now spend the rest of the night proving to your new person how wrong they are in order for them to be on the same page as you, living the same reality.

Because, like you just said: You are right.

This moment of feeling objectively right about something subjective is called Naïve Realism, and we all—to one degree or another—suffer from it.

Naïve realism is our innate ability to feel that how we see the world, and what we believe about it, is objective and correct. This phenomenon is what finds people stating their opinions as facts.

That what we feel is true is, in fact, true for everyone.

Or, should be.

I used to be one of those people.

For a long time, too long, I felt like my opinions were facts. And it wasn’t until I read somewhere that in order to keep an open mind, you should always carry your opinions loosely, because that signals that you are open to change.

Since I am open to change, I began to ask myself—when I was convinced of my own veridicality, Can I accept that I might be wrong? Is there something more that I can’t see or don’t know?

The answer is almost always yes.

Sometimes when things FEEL true to us, we have trouble understanding how these same things might not feel true to others.

Here’s where we get confused: because we have the ability to physically see and identify things for what they are—a lamp, a vase, a couch, a meal—we conflate our ability to correctly identify them with our feelings about them.

We assume the ability to identify objects means we are unbiased about these objects instead of understanding that it’s not objectivity through which our world is mediated but subjectivity, built and shaped over the course of our lives by our personal experience, family customs, and surrounding culture.

At the heart of naïve realism is a false belief that we experience things exactly as they are, that the world itself is a material object. What we fail to recognize is that there is no “exactly as it is.”

Every person on Earth (and maybe even every animal?) is shaped by different circumstances and experiences. We have separate histories, emotions, and cultural biases. We have been influenced by different things and different people, and all those things come together to create and shape our point of view.

We have only ever been ourselves. We are trapped inside our own egocentric bias. We will never be anyone else, and so we have trouble understanding that an experience, or an opinion that has been backed up by our lifetime of experiences could ever be wrong.

And so, when someone disagrees with us, we assume, naturally, that they are wrong. Of course, everything we perceive and take in cognitively is a personal interpretation and not, in fact, impartial truth.

In philosophy, naive realism falls under the theory of perception, and it’s considered “naïve” because “it claims that humans perceive things in the world directly and without the mediation of any impression, idea, or representation.”

People interpret the world with immense variability, and without knowing about the egocentric bias of Naïve Realism, the source of many conflicts may never be resolved. Dr. Matthew Lieberman is a professor of Social Cognition and director of the Neuroscience Lab at UCLA, and he’s conducted studies into naïve realism and the Gestalt Cortex—the place in the brain where our experience of reality is created.

Naïve realism can negatively impact friendships because of fixed viewpoints. It can cause wars and divorces because people are so certain of their rightness, and reject all other opinions, thoughts, or suggestions.

So, the next time you feel completely and absolutely certain, remember that what’s true for you is not necessarily true for everyone. Once you get good at this, and it becomes reflexive, you can introduce the concept at the dinner table when your family is arguing about politics.

The next time you KNOW you’re right, wonder to yourself if there’s any possible way, you could also be wrong.

Trust me, I’m right about this.

Had you heard of Naive Realism before this article? Do you have examples of how this has shown up in your own life? If so, please share in the comments!

Until next week I remain…