Nasie, M., Bar-Tal, D., Pliskin, R., Nahhas, E., and Halperin, E. (2014). “Overcoming the barrier of narrative adherence in conflicts through awareness of the psychological bias of naive realism.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(11), 1543-1556.
Tests whether teaching people about naive realism increases openness to an adversary’s collective narrative in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The intervention worked among participants with hawkish views, who became more receptive to the other side’s narrative and were better able to recognize the bias in themselves. Dovish participants were already more open at baseline and less able to identify the bias in their own thinking.
Evidence that naming the bias can help the least open participants in a divided room, provided they apply it to themselves. It supports teaching the ladder, lens and self-talk model to participants alongside any lens tool, and it cautions that the effect is conditional.