When it comes to knowing, people oftentimes believe that they know pretty much everything about anything, but they actually don’t. Social researchers at the University of Ohio have found that people assume naturally that they have all the information about a particular topic even when they don’t. The social scientist named it with a term known as “Illusion of Information Adequacy”.
The study co-author Angus Fletcher said that people follow their instincts and assume to know everything, in fact, they don’t even stop to think if there might be more information out there that might help them to make a much more concrete decision.
To conduct the study in a proper scientific setting and to ensure its reliability and validity, a sample size of 1261 Americans who partook online was taken and divided into three groups. Each group was given the task of reading an article on a fictional school that lacked an adequate water supply.
The first group that read the article started giving reasons for how the school should merge with another school with an ample water supply. Meanwhile, the second group began to reason against the merger after reading the article. The third group gave arguments validating the merging schools and keeping them separate.
Once all the data was collected from the study, it was found that the two groups that only had half of the story had enough conviction to believe that they had more than enough information to make good arguments and decisions. What's really surprising is that the participants of the two groups also assumed that other people would have the same opinion as they did.
However, there were some intriguing results from the findings that the researchers took on a positive note. They noticed that certain participants changed their minds when they were given arguments from the other side of the story after reading their story. The research fits this behavior into the category of not trusting new information or trying to figure out the information to reframe it to fit it into their moral framework.
This study done by Ohio State University falls under the category of Naive Realism, or in layman's terms, a belief in an individual's subjective understanding of being an objective truth.
To further make it clear, naive realism is about how people view the same situation. Still, differently and through information adequacy, it shows that if they have enough information, then they will have the same understanding. However, the major finding of the study is that every human has an innate default mode where they believe with all their heart that they have all the given and necessary information, even when they don’t.
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by Ahmed Naeem via Digital Information World
