Not in a cynical way — I’m not saying people are secretly unreasonable, or that reasonableness is an illusion, or that we’re all just rationalizing animals in nice clothes. I’m saying there’s a fundamental mismatch between the view from inside your own head and the view from outside it, and that gap is where most human conflict actually lives, quietly, without anyone fully acknowledging it. You are always the protagonist of your own reasoning. The other person is always working from incomplete information about your intentions. You’re doing the same thing to them. Everyone is doing this to everyone, all the time, and still acting surprised when it produces friction.
The bias has a name — naïve realism — the tendency to believe that you see the world as it actually is, and that people who see it differently are either uninformed, irrational, or motivated by something suspect. It’s not that you think you’re perfect. You’ll readily admit flaws, list mistakes, perform appropriate humility. But when it comes to the specific disagreement in front of you, right now, with this particular person — you’re pretty sure you’ve got it right. You’ve considered their position. You understand where they’re coming from. You just think they’re wrong.
The other person is doing the same thing with the same confidence. They’ve considered your position too. They understand where you’re coming from. They just think you’re wrong. And both of you have access to your own reasoning, which feels thorough and fair from the inside, and limited access to the other person’s, which means you’re filling in the gaps with your best guess, which is usually less charitable than the reality.
What’s hard about knowing this is that it doesn’t help as much as it should. You can understand the dynamic intellectually and still feel, in the moment of the disagreement, that you are simply correct and they are simply not. The knowledge sits in a different part of the brain than the feeling, and the feeling tends to win in real time. You have to actively reach for the understanding and apply it against the current of the conviction, which is effortful and unnatural and requires you to hold your own certainty loosely enough to examine it, which is one of the harder things a person can do.
I had a disagreement recently where I was sure I was right. I’m still pretty sure. But I’ve been sitting with the possibility that the other person’s version of events is internally as coherent as mine is, that they’re not being unreasonable from where they’re standing, that the gap between us might be about perspective rather than correctness. It hasn’t made me change my position. It’s made me hold it differently. More like a conclusion I’ve reached and less like a fact of the universe. That’s a small distinction. It turns out to be everything when you’re in a room with someone who sees it differently.