Abstract
Pictures can tell us a lot, but not as much as we tend to think they do. A particular common sense attitude toward pictures, naïve realism, tends to make people overconfident in their interpretations of visual evidence and less receptive to alternative viewpoints, as well as to entrench the effects of other, first-order biases. Borrowing from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s classic analysis of common sense, I begin by describing naïve realism about pictures as the exemplar of visual common sense, and I offer an example of it in judicial decision making. I then explain its psychological bases and its various implications for legal judgment. First, it is a special instance of naïve realism generally, a fundamental and familiar phenomenon in cognitive and social psychology. Second, the claim that naïve realism about pictures results from inattention to context and subjectivity, yielding a sense of assurance that our understandings are correct and that alternatives needn’t be taken as seriously, is congruent with the causes and effects of overconfidence generally. Third, the literature on processing fluency provides further support for the claim that seeing visual evidence would tend to generate overconfidence in the beliefs and judgments associated with that evidence, especially for naïve realists. I conclude by arguing that even in the age of Photoshop and YouTube, when people ought to be increasingly sophisticated about their visual culture, naïve realism about pictures remains a common and psychologically powerful default, and therefore of great significance for legal decision making.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, pictures that don’t look to laypeople like ordinarily observable reality, such as many sorts of forensic scientific images, are unlikely candidates for naïve realism because they can’t be as readily incorporated into a useful internal representation of relevant reality. On the other hand, to the extent that these kinds of “expert images” (Dumit 2004) do resemble what laypeople think of as reality, they may appeal to naïve habits of viewing and comprehension, as the example of fMRIs indicates (Feigenson 2009).
- 2.
This is an example of the aboutness principle (Higgins 1998), discussed below.
- 3.
Our brains develop through infancy, childhood, and early adulthood to adapt to our interpersonal and cultural environments. Then, as adults with reduced neuroplasticity but greater conceptual and physical abilities, we try to make our worlds adapt to what our brains have come to expect. This is what psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Wexler describes as brain-world consonance in the ontogenetic sense. Neuroscientist Leif Finkel (1992) has eloquently captured the discrepancy between the mind-world agreement that our consciousness seems spontaneously to yield and the underlying neurophysiology of perception: “The world, to a large extent, is a vision of our own creation. We inhabit a mixed realm of sensation and interpretation, and the boundary between them is never openly revealed to us. And amid this tenuous situation, our cortex makes up little stories about the world, and softly hums them to us to keep us from getting scared at night” (404).
- 4.
Naïve realism about pictures is not about mistaking the picture for direct access to reality in the sense of being fooled into thinking that one is really present at the depicted events, as in the mythologized report of early cinema goers hurrying from the theater to avoid the approach of the train on the screen (Gunning 1995). Naïve realism is about believing that one’s understanding of reality is objectively correct, to the exclusion of all others, because one’s understanding simply copies that reality.
- 5.
The phrase positive illusions, for instance, describes people’s unrealistic but sometimes beneficial optimism about potential health and other outcomes (Taylor and Brown 1988).
- 6.
Kruglanski (2004) offers a helpful framework for understanding the relationship between overconfidence and closed mindedness or cognitive closure. He explains that people are generally subject to competing cognitive motivations, the need for closure and the need to avoid closure. Forming beliefs and reaching judgments always involve a trade-off between, on the one hand, keeping an open mind, seeking out additional information, and entertaining other points of view (i.e., avoiding closure) and, on the other, stopping the information search, ceasing to consider alternative viewpoints, and concluding the cognitive task (i.e., seeking closure). Both are essential to knowledge formation; each presents benefits and risks. Being overly confident leads to closed mindedness by reducing the perceived costs of premature closure, which include the possibility of being wrong (“fear of invalidity”) and the potential for conflict with relevant decision making norms (such as the standard jury instruction to keep an open mind).
- 7.
The extensive research on confirmation bias, the “selective search, recollection, or assimilation of information that lends spurious support to a hypothesis under consideration” (Arkes 1991, 489; see Lord et al. 1979), also supports this reciprocal relationship. Arkes (1991) observes that “a primary reason for unwarranted confidence is that subjects can generate supporting reasons for their decisions much more readily than contradictory ones” (Id, 489, discussing Koriat et al. 1980). So the biased generation of arguments is reasoned to be a cause of overconfidence in a hypothesis. But since the hypothesis is posited to be “under consideration” as part of an ongoing process, it seems that (increasing) confidence in the hypothesis may cause as well as result from bias in the assimilation of further information.
- 8.
“[C]onfident people engag[e] in less thought than people lacking in confidence. One reason for this is that when people feel confident in their current views, there is little need to seek additional information that might lead to change” (Briñol et al. 2010, 23).
- 9.
This, of course, is the aboutness principle (Higgins 1998), discussed above.
- 10.
The construct that comes closest is magic window realism, “the central, but not the sole, component of perceived reality” in the media effects literature (Potter 1988, 27). Magic window “is concerned with the degree to which a viewer believes television content is an unaltered, accurate representation of actual life” (Id, 26). People who score high on the magic window dimension think that television “provides them with a view of how things really are. They believe that television news shows are accurate, complete, unbiased, and objective pictures of ‘the way it is’” (Potter 1986, 162). To the extent that media effects researchers employ magic window and other dimensions of perceived reality primarily to measure people’s ability to distinguish factual from dramatic or fictional programming, however, their measure does not get at quite the same thing as naïve realism about pictures as presented in this chapter, which concerns the extent to which people think that various factual conclusions and evaluative judgments can be uncontroversially read off from an indisputably factual evidentiary picture.
- 11.
Relatedly, psychologist Neal Roese and his colleagues (2006) found that showing mock jurors animations as opposed to diagrams of a vehicular accident case made them twice as susceptible to hindsight bias. The authors speculated: “Our research indicates that the clarity of computer animation can obscure the underlying uncertainty of accident reconstruction, creating a biased feeling of knowing” (308). That is, seeing the animation gave mock jurors a stronger impression that they knew how the accident occurred (as the IOED research would indicate), which made them more likely to believe that, from an ex ante perspective, it would occur (hindsight bias).
- 12.
More recently, however, Nick Schweitzer and colleagues found that showing mock jurors neuroimages did not affect their judgments in criminal cases (Schweitzer et al. 2011).
- 13.
The same inference may also have been prompted by the visual hindsight bias if jurors, knowing that the roof did soon collapse, reasoned that the commanders on the scene should have realized that it would, based on visual evidence that, viewed without the benefit of hindsight, was highly ambiguous.
- 14.
Research shows, for instance, that people have assimilated standard film editing conventions to the point that they don’t notice cuts (the illusion of continuity; Kraft 1986), believing that highly edited Hollywood productions present the depicted reality more or less directly – as long as the structure of the film sufficiently conforms to narrative conventions to allow them to fill in the blanks with their story knowledge (Miller 1990).
- 15.
Indeed, postmodernist anxiety about the possibility of ever having any kind of access to the “really real” may even impel people toward the sense of security offered by the objectivism of naïve realism (cf. Sherwin et al. 2006).
- 16.
It might be thought that even if people start out as naïve realists about pictures, their naïveté and any ensuing overconfidence need not be a major concern for the law because that naïveté can be readily corrected. A detailed analysis of the prospects for debiasing jurors of naïve realism is beyond the scope of this chapter, so I can merely offer my belief that it appears possible in principle and, to some extent, in practice (see Feigenson and Spiesel 2009).
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Feigenson, N. (2014). Visual Common Sense. In: Wagner, A., Sherwin, R. (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_5
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