hypersync

A quote from the book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society," by Farhad Manjoo:

"It's important to remember that the death penalty advocates and opponents in Ross and Lepper's study didn't know that they were interpreting information in a skewed way. Indeed, Ross says, each of us thinks that on any given subject our views are essentially objective, the product of a dispassionate, realistic accounting of the world. This is naive realism, though, because we are incapable of recognizing the biases that operate upon us. Think of the Dartmouth and Princeton football fans I told you about earlier. When they looked at identical film clips of a game, each side 'saw' a different reality. They did not know - and really, could not know - that their perception of the event didn't match the reality of it because, for them, the perception was indistinguishable from its reality. How they 'saw' the game was how it really was.

"What's dangerous about this naïveté is that it spins out into our appraisals of other people. We're jarred and offended when other people don't agree with what, to us, is so brilliantly clear. 'If we think we see the world the way it is,' Ross explains, 'then we think that reasonable people ought to agree with us. And to the extent that people disagree with us, we conclude that they are not reasonable - they're biased'... 'If we let you look at other people's responses, we find that exactly to the extent that the other person disagrees with you, you think they're biased. You think their opinion reflects biases rather than rational consideration.'" (p. 152)