Reality testing is the act of comparing realities with others in order to improve the accuracy of your reality. You have one reality about a person, place, or situation, and in reality testing you compare it with someone else’s reality. The skill of reality testing provides the critical thinker with a better way to handle their interpretations of people, events, and things in their environment. Remember, the critical thinker is not dogmatic. The critical thinker is open to alternative realities in an attempt to make his or her reality more accurate.
Goal of critical thinker: To create the most accurate reality possible. Using reality testing or constructive arguing, the critical thinker can modify her original reality when confronted with a more valid argument. The opposite is the dogmatic person who argues just to maintain his reality no matter what proof is presented.
One challenge to creating an accurate reality occurs when we overly rely on assumptions and inferences. Chapter 5 of this text quotes an article by Richard Paul and Linda Edler where they suggest that we need to separate the two subconscious processes of assumptions and inferences from the interpretation of raw cognitions. They wonder how much of our creation of an accurate reality is based on what actually is there, as opposed to preconceived assumptions and then inferences.
I had a student one time who was thrilled to discover he had a learning disability. Sounds strange, but because he had not done well in school, his dad had accused him of being stupid and lazy. The dad’s assumption was that students who do not do well in school are stupid and lazy, so he inferred that his son was stupid and lazy. Now this student had a more accurate reality. A reality he could use to improve himself.
11.6.1: "Asimov" (CC BY 4.0; Zakeena via SketchPort)
“Assumptions are your windows to the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”Isaac Asimov 1
We need to realize that our perception does not necessarily represent the one and only reality of the topic under discussion. Serious problems can arise when people treat interpretations as if they were matters of fact. The dogmatic person avoids reality testing. The dogmatic person does not want to experience the discomfort of having his reality challenged. But as Richard Weaver writes in his book, Understanding Interpersonal Communication,
“Understanding this is a big step toward more effective communication. It will help us become more sensitive to reactions, to experiences, both our own and others’, as personal interpretations of events.” 2 (Weaver, 1984)
Through communication, we can begin to narrow perceptional gaps that divide us, and maybe settle on a similar reality that makes these gaps livable. One goal of the argumentative process is to narrow the differences in perceptions between individuals. The narrowing of that gap can be accomplished by reality testing using the following steps.
Sharing and comparing our realities with those of others can help reduce distortions and differences among the many realities you have created. By being willing to share our perceptions with others we get to see if our perceptions are reasonable. The bottom line is that no two realities are identical.
Our interpretations of the environment are just that, interpretations. Things mean no more or less than what we want them to mean. Thus, meaning assigned to people, events, and things in the world will differ from person to person. Given the almost unavoidable tendency to form first impressions, the best advice for a critical thinker is to keep an open mind and be willing to alter your impressions as events prove those impressions to be mistaken. Only by sharing and comparing our meanings with others’ meanings, can we hope to discover how valid or reasonable our meanings are.
By examining a variety of realities, we may discover a more accurate reality, which might better approximate the extent to which our perceptions correspond to the environment we are trying to describe. In this way, we should find out if our realities about people, events, and things in our environment really are important or unimportant, significant or insignificant, and thus allow us to put our many perceptions into perspective.
If your realities cannot be validated by others, you need to go back and reevaluate the data you used to create the reality in the first place. This process will only work if your perceptions are shared with a random cross-section of people. If you select only those whom you know will validate your interpretation, the process will be meaningless. Just imagine the support you would get for your ideas from your Facebook “friends.” They would probably not be very critical.
You want to buy a certain car. You go to the dealer and talk with a salesperson about that car. When you get home, a friend presents contrary data to you about the car you have selected. Going back to the dealer and salesperson to validate your original interpretation will be meaningless, because he or she has a vested interest in validating your views so that you will purchase the car. Going to sources like Car and Driver, Consumers Digest, and Consumers Report, or talking with other people who own or know about the car, would create a more valid reality test. As author B.P. Allport wrote,
“Individual perceptiveness and sensitivity are limited by the personal perspective, for a person tends to see things which fit the world as he or she sees it. The process of perception leads a person to see what he or she expects to see, to interpret events in familiar terms, and to reconstruct events as one thinks they must have been.” 3
