Fallacies and Cognitive Biases: Naive Realism ~ by Ransom

This article is part of an ongoing series that began with Fallacies and Cognitive Biases.

The above picture is a detail from "50 Cognitive Biases to be aware of so you can be the very best version of you"

"We believe that we observe objective reality and that other people are irrational, uninformed, or biased."

The blurb needs no elaboration.

This cognitive bias helps conserve energy, survive in a dangerous social environment, and paradoxically gives us the arrogance to learn.

Sitting around believing nothing is a waste of time.  We have to start somewhere.  If our initial belief is that we can't trust ourselves how are we going to learn anything else?

Even the idea that things are not what they seem relies on quite a bit of development.  Our mental model can't start by questioning itself.  Self-doubt is a feature we have to learn.

This cognitive bias gives us a survival advantage by trusting ourselves more readily than others.  Successful lying can give the liar an outsized return on investment.  Given the incentive to lie it makes sense to doubt people who disagree with us until they have surmounted a higher burden of proof than we place upon ourselves, who have to put in the actual work.