The Social World Is Not as "Real" as the Physical World

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So picture this: You're a lifelong Democrat and you identify this way pretty strongly. At some point, you meet a guy who really excites you—he may well be the one! He is intelligent, charming, kind, and good-looking. And, as fortune would have it, he is a strong Democrat who actually sits on the Democratic Committee in his town. Bingo—you're on the same page politically.

After dating for several months, he invites you to have dinner with his family, including his parents, brother, and sister. You readily accept, thinking that this may well turn out to be a meeting with your future in-laws—wow! When you get out of the car at their house, you notice a few things that, to put it mildly, surprise you. A large flag on the front porch clearly says "F*ck Biden." You weren't expecting that. You notice that a large pickup truck in the driveway has a bumper sticker that says "Illegal President." As Dreamboat's brother comes out to greet you, you are in for yet another shock: He is wearing a MAGA hat.

You find yourself feeling uncomfortable. All of these stimuli, clearly pointing toward the fact that this is a very "red-state" family, are nothing short of confusing to you in the moment. You truly hear yourself saying under your breath, "This is impossible!" Your shock at this situation is every bit as strong as if you looked up in the sky one day to see two suns.

The situation described here, a bit extreme so to make a point, can be understood, in social psychological terms, as confusing the reality of our social worlds with the reality of the physical world. In fact, in many ways, people seem to process social reality very much how they process stimuli in the physical world.

People Often Confuse Social Reality and Physical Reality

One of the most robust general findings in the field of social psychology is this: People often mistake “social reality” for “physical reality” (see Ross & Nisbett, 1991). Across a broad range of studies, cutting across decades, social psychologists have famously found that people tend to believe that their social attitudes are just as real as their understanding of facts about the physical world. And this tendency is problematic at the levels of:

• How people understand colleagues at work.
• How people think about romantic partners.
• How people perceive political issues.
• How people process whether a leader of a social group is “good” or “bad."

… And beyond.

People have a hard time separating their understanding of the social world, which is largely a world constructed by humans via the creation of narratives in social contexts, from their understanding of the physical world, which is largely created by physical stimuli such as the specific wavelength of a ray of light.

From the false consensus effect (i.e., the tendency to overestimate the degree to which others will agree with our attitudes; see Krueger & Clement, 1994) to our strong tendency to conform to erroneous judgments of others (see Sherif, 1935) to our tendency to pay particular attention to information to materials that are consistent with our take on the social world (see Geher, 2019)—and more—we have all kinds of biases in our perceptions of the social world that tend to lead us to, simply, see the social world as being as real as the physical world (even though it, in many ways, is not).

So we might think of some political stance (e.g., George H. W. Bush was a terrible president) as being just as real as our understanding that the sky is blue.

We might feel that our attitude about some particular celebrity (e.g., Will Smith should forever be held in disdain because of his public actions) is just as “right” as our attitude about a physical fact, such as the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Processes That Promote Our Tendency to Conflate Social and Physical Reality

The field of social psychology has, profoundly, over the past century, documented a broad array of processes that lead people to see their social attitudes (e.g., attitudes about other people) as being just as “real” as their understanding of the physical world (see Ross & Nisbett, 1991).

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These processes include the tendency to be relatively non-empathic when trying to estimate what others think about some situation (e.g., of course that person must think that Trump is an idiot). These processes also result from our tendency to choose to pay attention to information that is consistent with our own values rather than information that contradicts our values (e.g., a self-identified “conservative” is likely to watch Fox News while a self-identified “liberal” is likely to watch CNN). And based on the concept of groupthink, people very often surround themselves with like-minded others, leading to socially created realities that people often treat as they would physical realities (see Janis, 1982).

In fact, we have a broad array of psychological processes that implicitly encourage us to embrace the ideas that we hold and to more easily dismiss contradictory evidence (see Ross & Nisbett, 1991).

In many ways, our entire psychology of the social world seems geared toward implicitly encouraging us to maintain and validate our current attitudes and beliefs and to dismiss information that is incongruous with these beliefs.

Why Our Evolved Social Psychology Can Be So Problematic

The fact that we seem to have a broad array of evolved social psychological processes that encourage us to see our social realities as being just as real as our physical realities leads to social problems at so many levels. Here are just a few examples:

• It is hard for people who feel passionately about some political stance to feel a smidge of understanding or empathy for those who represent “the other side”—and this fact underlies so many problems in the political landscape today.
• In small communities, someone who has been accused of some transgression might find themselves falling fully from grace—from the status of near-royalty to dirt. With no in-between.
• In some situations, a family member might accuse another family member of being horrible, fully expecting everyone to see this person in that same way—as if a person’s relative ranking on “horrible-ness” is as objective as their height or weight.
• In a work situation, someone might tell you some gossip about a colleague that, to their mind, essentially puts that colleague in “cancel territory”—and you might well feel all kinds of pressure to see that person in that same light. As if the reality is clearly black or white. And you may well conform to this negative attitude about said colleague—and never look back. As if it is somehow physically factual.

Bottom Line

We humans are a funny bunch—for lots of reasons. One psychological tendency that leads to problems of the human condition pertains to the fact that, in so many ways, people tend to see “social reality” (their attitudes and beliefs about others in the social world) as being just as real as physical reality (such as the facts that the sky is often perceived as blue and the fact that the moon orbits the Earth).

Our inability to truly understand how social reality is largely constructed by human communications within some social communities while physical reality is rooted in, simply, the observable facts of the physical universe, can be quite problematic.

This issue can help us understand why people are sometimes outraged by the actions of others (what in the world was he thinking!?). This issue can help us understand large-scale political attitudes (that person watches Fox News? Ew!). This issue can help us to understand why people sometimes fall from grace in the eyes of the public (I thought he was a great guy until I found out that he did that. In light of what he did, he is dirt—and everyone knows it).

The reality of the human psychological experience, in fact, is a reality of multi-factorial causation. There are a broad array of factors that underlie human behavior. And, in fact, any and all behaviors have a plurality of causes that exist—at multiple levels.

Human behavior is complex and it is far from perfect.

Perhaps understanding that we have an often-erroneous bias toward thinking that social reality is every bit as “real” as physical reality can help us to see others in our worlds with nuance, compassion, and even grace.

After all, at the end of the day, we all have a ticket on the same ride.

This post is partly based on a post I wrote for my Substack, "The Human Condition".