Naïve Realism and Musical Preferences: An exploration of the relationship between strength of opinion and perceived objectivity

Abstract

One significant occurrence that has been observed within the realm of social psychology is the tendency for people to adhere to their own narratives and perceptions of the world because they believe them to true and unbiased, otherwise known as naïve realism. The experimenter conducted a study to investigate whether this naïve realism persisted even with topics that are generally accepted as being a subjective decision, rather than an objective one. The study attempted to determine if there was a correlation between the strength of opinion participants’ had towards genres of music and how objective they believed that opinion to be. The results of the study revealed that there was no significant interaction between strength of opinion, perceptions of objectivity in self, and perceptions of objectivity in others.