Visual common sense

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.