What do we mean when we say a story is realistic? At first, that may seem simple. One possibility is that realism is a characteristic of the genre – news is real and a soap opera is not. That explanation may work in many cases, but fiction is intended to capture aspects of reality that
From its very beginnings, photography was understood and experienced in terms of its capacity for realism. “It is not merely the likeness which is precious . . . but the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever,” wrote Elizabeth
Critical realism is best understood as the philosophy that maintains that we can know things about the world because we can gain reliable knowledge about it, although always with the proviso that we must not be overly confident or naive about the quality of the information we bring in. Critical realism as an identifiable term
Critical realism is a social science metaphilosophy that offers ethnology an ontological grounding necessary to realize its full potential as the study of humanness. Humanness is a feature of the world derived from, but not reducible to, evolution by natural, sexual, and kinship modes of selection. An emergent feature of humanness is the ability to
A classic position in the history of ideas and theory of science, realism assumes that the world exists independently of human minds, and that it lends itself to intersubjective inquiry, even if humans – individually, collectively, and as a species – may be unable to understand reality in all its aspects (Nagel 1986). In recent
Depressive Realism Definition Depressive realism refers to the findings that depressed individuals tend to be more accurate or realistic than nondepressed persons in their judgments about themselves. Specifically, research suggests that nondepressed people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. This
Naive Realism Definition Naive realism describes people’s tendency to believe that they perceive the social world “as it is”—as objective reality—rather than as a subjective construction and interpretation of reality. This belief that one’s perceptions are realistic, unbiased interpretations of the social world has two important implications. First, that other, rational people will have similar
Experimental Realism Definition Experimental realism is the extent to which situations created in social psychology experiments are real and impactful to participants. Experimental Realism Background The concept of experimental realism was developed in response to criticism that most social psychology experiments take place in artificial laboratory settings and thus are invalid for examining how people
Mundane Realism Definition Mundane realism describes the degree to which the materials and procedures involved in an experiment are similar to events that occur in the real world. Therefore, mundane realism is a type of external validity, which is the extent to which findings can generalize from experiments to real-life settings. Mundane Realism History and