People often misinterpret their own perceptions of people and situations as objective fact, rather than solely their own interpretation.Why are we so certain that the way we view people, circumstances, and politics is correct and that the way others see them is erroneous?psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, the answer resides in a part of the brain he calls the “gestalt cortex,” which helps humans make sense of ambiguous or incomplete information — and dismiss alternative interpretations.
He believes that the most overlooked cause of conflict and mistrust between people and organizations is naive realism. Mental acts that are coherent, effortless, and based on our experiences tend to occur in the gestalt cortex. For example, a person might see someone else smiling and without giving it any apparent thought, perceive that the other person is happy. Because those inferences are immediate and effortless, they typically feel more like “seeing reality” — even though happiness is an internal psychological state — than they do like “thinking,” Lieberman said.
Gestalt was a German school of perceptual psychology whose motto was, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” The approach focused on how the human mind integrates elements of the world into meaningful groupings. Using the first mass-scale neurosurgical recordings of the “social brain,” Lieberman, UCLA psychology graduate student Kevin Tan and colleagues at Stanford University showed that humans have a specialized neural pathway for social thinking.