Shared reality and the case of the invisible ships
Shared reality or consensus reality is the idea that social groups construct their understanding of the world around them: what is good, what is right, and what is important. It determines how information is interpreted and things that can’t don’t fit with the consensus tend to be ignored.
An example is the invisible ships story which holds that when explorers reached North America, indigenous people couldn’t see their ships because they had no cultural understanding of large sea-going ships. While these stories are likely myths, they capture something important about human perception.
As the psychologist Linnda Caporael has put it, human perception prioritizes social connection over accuracy. If information threatens group cohesion, our brains ignore it or revise it. And there are lots of ways our brains ensure that the stimuli around us conform to the consensus view.
Interpretation of ambiguous information
When information is ambiguous, for example, we can interpret it in a way that fits with what everyone else says, such as lab experiments in which people agree with an incorrect consensus view of which line matches a reference line or how far apart blinking lights are in a dark room (Asch 1951, 1952, 1955, 1956; Sherif 1935).
This may explain why Republicans are more likely to believe we are in an economic contraction that isn’t actually happening. The economy is complex, and as prices rise and consumer confidence is sluggish at the same time that the stock market hits record levels and unemployment is low. That’s the kind of ambiguous circumstance that’s ripe for interpretation according to shared reality instead of actual reality.
Ignoring inconvenient information
Shared reality also determines which information gets attended to and which gets ignored. Plenty of research supports that people see what they expect to see, rather than what is actually present. For example, in a famous experiment in which participants watched a video of a basketball game, half of participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk across the screen for five seconds. And a Pennsylvania road crew paved over a dead deer in the highway.
It turns out that political ideology determines which political news we’re aware of too. A Morning Consult study compared awareness of various 2022 political events according to whether respondents were Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. Democrats were 12 percentage points more likely than Republicans to be aware of former Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s comments on drug use, while Republicans were 11 percentage points more likely to be aware of probes into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Two distinct shared realities
When we can look at the trial facts, legal proceedings, and trial outcome and see either justice served or a sham trial according to our political party, it is an indication that America is increasingly home to two disparate shared realities.
Shared reality is a product of interactions with our social groups—the people we live, work, and play with on a daily basis. As we spend less time with other people and in our communities, we get more and more disconnected from the reality of the people around us. Instead we have a Democratic and a Republican reality presented in media and culture which is distant from most of our daily lives.
We have to be in contact with our neighbors and community members in order to create and maintain our sense of shared reality. The more we interact with one another, the more we create a joint understanding of the world around us. And that’s what lets us cooperate with each other to address our problems and not just survive, but thrive.
