George Carlin had a joke about the highway: anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster is a maniac.
In a short clip from the Institute of Art and Ideas, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky uses it to explain what social psychologists call naive realism: the quiet conviction that we simply open our eyes and see the world as it is. Somehow, each of us has found the exact right speed. Everyone else is off.
She adds a test worth keeping. If you meet one jerk in a day, maybe that person is a jerk. If everyone you meet is a jerk, maybe it’s you. The same goes for reality: if you are certain you see things as they are, and so many people see them differently, perhaps nobody has direct access to it at all.
What I notice from the moderator’s chair
I see that highway in almost every room I work in. Each person arrives at their own speed. The economist finds the activist reckless. The activist finds the official hopelessly slow. The official suspects neither of them has ever had to implement anything. Nobody is lying. Each is describing the road from their own seat.
The one thing a moderator shouldn’t do is rule on who has the right speed. The moment I do that, I’ve climbed into one of the cars.
What I can do is make the speeds visible, and then ask about the destination. What would have to be true for the slower pace to be the wise one? What does this look like from where you sit? And where are you trying to get to? When people start describing their own speedometer instead of judging everyone else’s driving, the conversation changes register. It moves from verdict to description, and description is something others can actually respond to.
The harder part is that I’m driving too. I have my own sense of when a discussion drags or rushes, and of who is wandering off the point. Naive realism doesn’t exempt the person holding the microphone. So the test applies to me first: if the whole room seems to be missing the point, maybe the point is somewhere I’m not looking.
A good conversation doesn’t need everyone to agree on the speed. It needs everyone to acknowledge that we are all trying to get somewhere, and, more often than we admit, to the same place.