"Shared reality is the experience of having in common with others inner states about the world. Inner states include the perceived relevance of something, as well as feelings, beliefs, or evaluations of something. The experience of having such inner states in common with others fosters the perceived truth of those inner states. Humans are profoundly motivated to create shared realities with others, and in doing so they fulfill their needs to have valid beliefs about the world and to connect with others."
- "Shared Reality: Construct and Mechanisms" Current Opinion in Psychology vol 23 October 2018 Elsevier
"One of the biggest lessons I've learned covering the daily information wars of the Trump era is that a meaningful percentage of Americans live in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information."
- Charlie Warzel, "Welcome to the R.N. C.'s Alternate Universe" August 27, 2020, New York Times
It's no surprise that we have a scientific theory about shared reality, or that the study of shared reality theory has heated up over the past decade. If you watched footage from the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, you can see that the two parties and their followers are not inhabiting the same reality. Each group clings to their interpretation of facts - or even different subsets of facts - and creates shared interpretations and beliefs while diverging more and more from the reality of the other group.
For example, let's look at just a few diverging messages from the conventions:
DNC - President Trump has failed the American people with a disastrous coronavirus response and many thousands more will die because of his continued ineffective policies.
RNC - President Trump triumphed over the coronavirus and now the pandemic is in our rearview mirror.
***
DNC - Trump's racist and sexist policies denigrate millions of Americans and are eroding the constitutional rights of women, dark-skinned people, LGBTQ communities and others.
RNC - Trump loves women and all dark-skinned people and can demonstrate this love by having members of diverse groups speak at his convention.
***
DNC - Police departments need better training and hiring practices and more money should flow to social services than to policing.
RNC - The radical left wants to completely defund the police and allow minorities to bring anarchy to the suburbs.
***
Take as a given that I am biased toward facts used by the DNC, the evidence supports only those claims. There are no facts (based on my daily reading of five different newspapers) that support any of the RNC's conclusions. But sadly, that does not detract from the reality shared by people watching the RNC. They share their reality with other viewers of FOX News and proponents of conspiracy theories on social media. Warzel, from the NYT article, called this group a "meaningful percentage" of our population.
The realization that our country is split into different human tribes, making sense of the world in different shared realities, makes my stomach ache. The divide seems large when you realize that the person next to you sees what you see but interprets it in radically different ways. I can't bear to watch the RNC as it hurts me to see what I consider to be lies propagated on innocent people. For me, misinformation and misinterpretation of facts threatens not only my family and my country but our entire planet. I don't know what to do about this, except to try my best to defeat Trump in the coming election. Even if we start with that propitious beginning, our work to unite the country will have just begun.
