Visual Common Sense

Abstract

Pictures can tell us a lot – but not as much as we tend to think they do. This metacognitive error and its consequences for legal decision making are the focus of this chapter. 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.

By “naïve realism” I mean people’s tendency to identify a descriptive picture with its contents – to look through the visual representation to the reality it depicts and to ignore the effects of framing, context, and one’s own prior knowledge on one’s interpretation of the picture. Because naïve realism tells people that pictured reality is just out there to be seen and known, it tends to keep them from recognizing that viewers who bring different preconceptions to the viewing may reasonably construe the picture in different ways. So, like appeals to common sense generally, naïve realism tends to cut off discussion about a picture’s meanings on the ground that the picture “speaks for itself.”

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. The concept of that people would tend to be naïve realists about pictures has convergent support from several lines of research in social psychology and the psychology of judgment and decision making. 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.

Naïve realism in response to pictures is also consistent with particular cognitive biases, including the illusion of explanatory depth and the visual hindsight bias. The common thread in these biases is that people are partly unaware of the limits of their own knowledge base or interpretive skills, leading to undue confidence in their judgments – precisely what naïve realism about pictures would indicate.

I conclude by arguing that even in the age of Photoshop and YouTube, when one might think that people are 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.

Keywords: evidence, visual evidence, naive realism, psychology