Naïve Realism
The human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
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Origin
Coined by social psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s, though the philosophical concept dates to the 1880s. Solomon Asch discussed the idea in his 1952 textbook Social Psychology, writing that people assume their judgments about the social world are objective: "This attitude, which has been aptly described as naive realism, sees no problem in the fact of perception or knowledge of the surroundings."
Updated February 22, 2026