Scott O. Lilienfeld et al.
270
Educational and Assessment Implications
Before introducing students to these 10 reasons, it can be helpful to expose them to optical
illusions (e.g., the Muller–Lyer illusion, the Ponzo or railroad tracks illusion) to persuade
them that their raw sensory impressions can be deceiving (Hoefler, 1994). Such illusions
may help to disabuse them of naïve realism. It may also be helpful to provide them with
examples of how naïve realism has led to incorrect beliefs about the natural world, such as
the subjectively compelling belief that the world is flat or that the sun revolves around the
earth. In both cases, people’s raw observations misled them about reality.
Moreover, it may be useful to teach students about the long history of failed treatments
in medicine, including psychiatry. Most historians of medicine have argued that prior to
1890, most of the treatments (e.g., bleeding, blistering) that doctors prescribed to patients
were either ineffective or harmful (Grove & Meehl, 1996), even though most doctors were
persuaded otherwise. Similarly, most early reports of the “effectiveness” of prefrontal
lobotomies were based on surgeons’ informal observations of improvement. One early
proponent of lobotomy wrote that “I am a sensitive observer and my conclusion is that a
vast majority of my patients get better as opposed to worse after my treatment” (quoted in
Dawes, 1994, p. 48).
To assess whether efforts to teach students about the perils of naïve realism are effective,
one can present them with case examples of apparent improvement among clients in psy-
chotherapy, ask them to generate rival explanations for the reported change, and encour-
age them to develop research strategies that would produce more defensible evidence of
treatment effectiveness. If students can accurately identify these explanations and propose
ways of controlling for them (e.g., placebo-controlled designs), they are well on their way
toward shedding their naïve realism.
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