Why Common Sense Isn't Common

Common Sense or Power Move? The One Question That Reveals the Difference

Host Leslie Poston argues that “common sense” is often used to end conversations and universalize one person’s perception rather than provide evidence. She explains this through naïve realism (people experience their perceptions as objective reality), embodied cognition (gut intuitions shaped by bodily and lived experience), and positionality (social location shapes what becomes perceptually salient). She cites the “WEIRD” problem in psychology showing many supposedly universal findings don’t generalize across cultures, and connects “common sense” to Gramsci’s hegemony, where dominant-group assumptions become normalized as natural and inevitable. Without endorsing relativism, she notes motivated reasoning can make conclusions feel obvious before scrutiny. She closes with a practical test for sussing out “common sense” claims.

00:00 Common Sense Setup
02:04 Obvious as Default
03:27 Naive Realism Lens
06:17 Embodied Intuition
08:28 Positional Blind Spots
10:04 WEIRD Not Universal
14:08 Common Sense as Power
17:16 Not Relativism
18:03 Motivated Reasoning
20:10 One Key Question
21:13 Practical Takeaways
23:56 Closing and Next Week

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Host

Leslie Poston

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Leslie Poston: 00:11

Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Poston. This week, we're talking about something everyone thinks they have, but nobody can agree on, common sense. By the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a single question, just a few words, that you can use in any conversation to tell immediately whether common sense is doing real intellectual work or just doing power work for someone. But to understand why that question will work, we need to start with what's actually happening in your brain when something feels obvious to you.

Leslie Poston: 00:48

The phrase common sense gets invoked constantly and almost always to end a conversation rather than start one. Someone questions a policy, a decision, or an assumption, and the response comes back, well, that's just common sense. And somehow that's supposed to be sufficient. No argument, no evidence, no explanation needed, just the implication that the answer is so obvious that only someone foolish, naive, or acting in bad faith would even need it spelled out. Think about how often you've heard it used that way.

Leslie Poston: 01:24

Someone raises concerns about a workplace policy, for example, and gets told that any reasonable person would understand why it exists. Someone questions an economic assumption and gets looked at like they've suggested the earth is flat. Someone describes an experience that doesn't match the dominant narrative and gets told that they're overreacting because common sense says that's not how things work. In every case, the appeal to common sense is doing the same job. It's treating one person's perception as the universal default, and framing everyone else's as a deviation from that.

Leslie Poston: 02:04

This move is so routine we barely notice it anymore, but it's worth slowing down and asking what's actually being claimed when someone says common sense. On the surface, it sounds like an appeal to a shared human experience, to a baseline of practical wisdom that we all have access to by of living in the world and paying attention. And that sounds so reasonable. The problem is that when you look at what people actually mean by common sense, that shared baseline almost never holds up. What reads as obvious to one person is genuinely not obvious to another, and not because one of them is failing to think clearly.

Leslie Poston: 02:46

Because their experiences, social positions, and the way their brains have been shaped by both of those things are genuinely different. The perception itself is different, not just the conclusion. And that's the psychological core of what this episode is about. Common sense feels like a fact about the world, but it's actually a fact about the perceiver. And once you understand why it feels so self evident, and where that feeling actually comes from, you start to see the phrase for what it usually is.

Leslie Poston: 03:18

Not a description of a shared reality, but a way of avoiding the work of making an actual argument. Basically, your brain thinks it's the camera, not the photographer. There's a concept in social psychology called naive realism, and it's the most useful lens for understanding why common sense feels so unassailable to the person invoking it. The finding is this: people don't just try to be objective. They experience themselves as already being objective.

Leslie Poston: 03:53

Their perception feels like a direct, unfiltered read on what's actually there. Not just a perspective or an interpretation, but reality. They're not aware of looking through a lens because from the inside looking out, having a lens feels identical to not having one. That might sound abstract, but the consequences are concrete. If you experience your own perception as a straight shot at reality, then someone who sees the same situation differently then isn't just disagreeing with you, they're actually wrong about what's there to you.

Leslie Poston: 04:28

And the most available explanations for why someone would be wrong about something obvious are that they haven't thought about it carefully enough. They're letting their emotions or biases cloud their judgment, or they have some interest in seeing things a particular way. What's much harder to access is the possibility that they're perceiving something you're not, or that your read is as shaped by your experience and position as theirs is by theirs. That possibility doesn't feel available from inside naive realism, because you're not experiencing yourself as having a position. You're experiencing yourself as having the facts.

Leslie Poston: 05:08

Researchers found that this underlies a striking proportion of interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Not the conflicts where people know they disagree on values, but the ones where each side genuinely believes the other is distorting something that should be plain. Those conflicts are particularly resistant to resolution because compromise feels irrational when you're inside them. You don't split the difference with someone who's simply misreading what's in front of them. You correct them, or you wait for them to come around.

Leslie Poston: 05:40

When someone calls something common sense, this is the cognitive move they're making, usually without even realizing it. They're not saying I believe this and here's why. They're saying this is what the situation actually looks like to anyone paying attention. And they're reporting a perception as a fact about the world rather than a fact about themselves, which is exactly what naive realism predicts. The lens is invisible to the person looking through it.

Leslie Poston: 06:06

Meaning the view through it feels like objectivity rather than perspective. And common sense is what naive realism sounds like when it goes social. So where does your obvious come from? If naive realism explains why our perceptions feel objective, the next question is where the actual content of those perceptions comes from. Why does a particular thing feel like common sense to you in the first place?

Leslie Poston: 06:36

The answer has two parts that work together, and both of them matter for understanding why common sense is so much more personal than it sounds. The first part comes from research on embodied cognition. That's a field that focuses on cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy. The core argument is that thinking doesn't happen in isolation from the body that's doing the thinking. Your cognition is shaped by your physical history, by what your body has encountered, navigated, and learned to anticipate.

Leslie Poston: 07:08

This goes deeper than the obvious point that experience teaches you things. It means that the very structures you use to process new situations are built partly from the residue of old physical ones. The way you intuitively understand concepts like balance, boundaries, or resistance is grounded in having had a body that has literally balanced things, encountered boundaries, and met resistance. What registers as intuitive is partly a record of what your nervous system has already worked out through a physical experience of the world. This means two people can encounter the same situation and have genuinely different gut intuition reads of it.

Leslie Poston: 07:52

Not because one of them is thinking more clearly, but because their bodies have been trained on different experiences. Someone who grew up with food insecurity, for example, has a different visceral relationship to scarcity than someone who didn't. Someone who has navigated bureaucratic systems under pressure has a different intuitive grasp of how they actually work than someone who's only observed them from a comfortable distance. These aren't just different opinions sitting on top of identical perceptions. The perceptions themselves are different, shaped by what the body has had to learn in order to function.

Leslie Poston: 08:28

The second part is positionality, or the idea that your location in social structures shapes what's visible to you and what stays in your blind spot. This gets dismissed sometimes as a purely political claim, but it has a straightforward perceptual logic that has nothing to do with ideology. Attention is shaped by necessity. If something has never been a problem for you, you haven't had occasion to develop the psychological or perceptual apparatus for noticing it. You don't build detailed cognitive maps of terrain you've never had to navigate.

Leslie Poston: 09:04

Someone who's never had to think about whether a space is physically accessible hasn't developed the same automatic scan for accessibility that someone who uses a wheelchair or a cane has. And that's not a character difference, it's just how mental attention works. You notice what you've had reason to notice, and you develop fluency in what you've had to practice. If you put those two things together, the feeling of obviousness that is used for common sense starts to look very different. It's not a signal that something is universally true or that any clear eyed person would reach the same conclusion.

Leslie Poston: 09:40

It's a signal that something is consistent with your accumulated physical history and the perceptual habits your particular position in the world has built. That's real information, and it's not worthless. But it's information about you as much as it is about the situation you're perceiving, which is a very different thing from what we think of as common sense. The map of common sense also isn't universal. In 2010, researchers first identified what they dubbed the weird problem in psychology research.

Leslie Poston: 10:14

Weird stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And the researchers' argument was that the overwhelming majority of psychology research had been conducted on this very specific population and then presented as findings about humanity in general. The studies that formed the basis for our understanding of human cognition, perception, and behavior were almost entirely drawn from a narrow demographic slice of the world, predominantly white American undergraduates. And the psychology field up to that point had either not noticed or not cared. When researchers started systematically testing those findings across different cultures, a significant number of them didn't hold.

Leslie Poston: 10:59

Visual perception tasks produced different results. Concepts of fairness operated very differently. The fundamental attribution error, which is psychology's term for the tendency to explain other people's behavior through character rather than circumstance, turned out to be far less pronounced in, say, East Asian populations than in Western ones. Even something as apparently basic as how people perceive lines drawn inside boxes buried across cultures in ways the original research had never anticipated. And these weren't fringe findings.

Leslie Poston: 11:34

They were challenges to conclusions that had been treated as established facts about human psychology baked into textbooks and treatment models and policy assumptions. What had been described as universal features of human cognition turned out to be features of a particular cultural context. The psychological mechanisms underneath this are worth naming specifically. Cross cultural research has shown consistent differences in analytic versus holistic thinking styles, with people from more collectivist cultures tending toward holistic processing that attends to context and relationships. While people from more individualist cultures tend toward analytic processing that isolates objects from their context.

Leslie Poston: 12:20

Neither is more accurate. They're different cognitive tools shaped by different cultural environments producing genuinely different perceptions of the same situation. Nisbet's work on geography of thought documented this extensively, showing that these aren't just differences in opinion or values, but differences in perceptual processing itself. The same image, the same scene, the same social situation gets parsed differently depending on the cognitive habits your cultural environment has built. Harding was working on a parallel insight from a different direction when she argued that knowledge is always produced from somewhere by someone, and that the social position of the knower shapes what can be known.

Leslie Poston: 13:05

This isn't a relativist claim that all views are equally valid. It's a more precise claim that every perspective has both things it can see clearly and things it structurally cannot see, and that pretending to a perfectly neutral universal standpoint doesn't eliminate the position. It just hides it. The weird research is essentially an empirical demonstration of exactly that. So what all of this means for common sense is pointed.

Leslie Poston: 13:33

The baseline we've been treating as universal is a cultural artifact. The map of obvious was drawn by someone specific, from somewhere specific, using cognitive tools shaped by a particular cultural environment and social position. When that map gets called common sense and used to dismiss perceptions that don't match it, the people whose experience doesn't fit the map aren't failing to perceive correctly. They may be perceiving things the map was never built to represent. And that's not just an intellectual problem, it has real consequences.

Leslie Poston: 14:06

So what happens when people use common sense as a power tool? Everything we've covered so far has been about cognition, about how perception works, where the feeling of obviousness comes from, and why the baseline we treat as universal turns out to be anything but. But common sense doesn't just operate as a perceptual phenomenon. It operates as a political one as well, and that's where the rubber really meets the road. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively about what he called hegemony, the process by which the values, assumptions, and worldview of a dominant group come to be experienced by everyone as natural, inevitable, and simply the way things are, even by people those values disadvantage.

Leslie Poston: 14:53

The mechanism isn't primarily force or explicit propaganda. It's normalization. When the interest and perspectives of those with power get embedded in the culture deeply enough, they stop appearing as interests or perspectives at all and start appearing as common sense. This is why challenging certain arrangements of power so often gets met not with counter arguments, but with genuine bewilderment. The person invoking common sense often isn't being cynical.

Leslie Poston: 15:22

They've simply internalized the position so completely that they genuinely can't see it as a position anymore. From inside naive realism, which we talked about earlier, that's exactly what hegemony feels like. It feels like you're just looking at the world clearly. Gramsci was writing from a fascist prison in the thirties, but the dynamic he described is easy to find in contemporary life. Notice how often common sense gets invoked in precisely the areas where there is the most disagreement about whose interests are being served: economic policy, criminal justice, immigration, or labor rights.

Leslie Poston: 16:01

The appeal to common sense in these contexts almost always works to naturalize a particular arrangement of power and frame challenges to it as naive or unrealistic. These aren't neutral observations that any clear eyed person would arrive at independently. They're positions with histories, beneficiaries, and with people who are harmed by them. The work that common sense is doing is making the position invisible so it doesn't have to be defended. This is also where the connection to the thought terminating cliches episode we did earlier in the season becomes clear, though what we're describing today operates at a deeper level.

Leslie Poston: 16:41

The thought terminating cliche is a specific linguistic tool phrases deployed to shut down inquiry at the moment it becomes inconvenient, whereas the appeal to common sense is the epistemological foundation underneath those phrases. Those cliches work because they assume there's a shared baseline that any reasonable person accepts, and that questioning it signals unreasonableness rather than curiosity. What we've been doing in this episode is examining that assumption itself, pulling up the floorboards to look at what's actually holding the whole structure up. So we come to the question, is anything knowable? Nothing that we've covered in this episode is an argument for relativism.

Leslie Poston: 17:23

Saying that perception is shaped by experience and social position is not the same as saying all perceptions are equally accurate or that truth is just whatever your particular background has led you to believe. Some claims have more evidentiary support than others. And some perspectives have access to information that others don't. Some things are better documented than other things. The fact that knowledge is always produced by someone doesn't mean it can't be evaluated and compared.

Leslie Poston: 17:54

It just means you have to do that evaluation explicitly with evidence and argument rather than outsourcing it to the assumed agreement of quote what everyone knows. Kunta's research on motivated reasoning is useful here because it describes something directly relevant to how common sense operates in practice. Her work showed that people tend to arrive at conclusions that serve their existing beliefs or identities first, and then construct reasoning that appears to justify those conclusions after the fact. The reasoning feels genuine to the person doing it, which is what makes it so hard to dislodge. What this means for common sense is that the feeling of obviousness frequently precedes any actual examination of the situation, And the quote any reasonable person would see this framing gets applied afterward as a way of lending authority to a conclusion that was never really interrogated.

Leslie Poston: 18:48

So the gut read comes first, and the claim to universality comes second. This connects back to embodied cognition and positionality in a way that's worth making explicit. If your intuitions are shaped by your physical history and your location in social structures, and if those intuitions tend to arrive pre justified as common sense, then the intuitions that feel most obvious to you are precisely the ones most worth examining. I'll say that again. The intuitions that feel most obvious to you are precisely the ones that are most worth examining.

Leslie Poston: 19:24

Not because they're wrong. They may well be right. But because they're the ones your brain is least likely to subject to scrutiny on its own. The feeling of self evidence is a signal to pay attention, not a signal to stop thinking. What I've been building toward on this episode is a fairly simple practical distinction.

Leslie Poston: 19:43

There's a difference between I have good reasons for believing this and here they are, and any reasonable person would obviously see this. The first is the honest account of where you're standing and what you can see from there, and the second is the attempt to make your position invisible by universalizing it. The argument behind what you're calling common sense might be a genuinely good one, but until you've actually made it, we can't take it as common sense. So what to do with all of this? At the start of this episode, I promised you a single question that would tell you whether common sense is doing real intellectual work or is just someone's power trick.

Leslie Poston: 20:22

Here it is. When you hear something or say something called common sense, think whose life experience would make this obvious. That's it. It sounds almost too simple, but sit with the question for a second. We're not asking whether something is true or false.

Leslie Poston: 20:40

We're not requiring you to be confrontational or to challenge anyone directly. We're just asking you to locate the perceiver and ask whose accumulated physical history, social position, and map of the world produces this specific feeling of self evidence. And once you start asking that, the whole apparatus that this episode has been describing kinda becomes visible in real time. It's like when you read a news article and you ask yourself who paid for this story, who benefits from this framing to test if it's factual. The most immediately useful thing that I can leave you with in this episode is the ability to notice when common sense is being used as a substitute for an argument rather than as a shorthand for one.

Leslie Poston: 21:24

There's a legitimate version of the phrase where it points to something genuinely well established that doesn't need relitigating every time someone raises an eyebrow, but that's a different animal from invoking common sense to close down a conversation you'd prefer not to have or to signal that someone asking questions is being unreasonable rather than curious. Learning to feel the difference in yourself is the beginning of being a more honest thinker, and it also makes you considerably harder to manipulate, which is so important right now. You'll start noticing when other people are doing it to you and what work that move is doing in the moment. The second thing worth taking seriously is that someone who sees a situation differently than you do might be seeing something you're not. Not always, of course, and not as a blanket rule that dissolves all disagreement into equally valid perspectives, but often enough that it's worth asking the question before concluding their perception is the defective one.

Leslie Poston: 22:21

This is very true when the person has direct experience with something you've only observed from the outside. The research on perspective taking is consistent on this point. We're worse at it than we think we are, and the situations where we feel most certain are often exactly the ones where our blind spots are largest. Because certainty and scrutiny don't tend to coexist comfortably. And we remember from our comfort episode how much our brains love to be comfortable.

Leslie Poston: 22:49

The third is to notice when common sense is being deployed politically and ask whose sense it actually is. What does this framing take for granted, and what does it make invisible? Who benefits if this particular arrangement of things stays in the category of facts that don't need explaining? These aren't cynical questions, and they're not an invitation to distrust everything. They're just the questions that follow naturally from taking seriously what the research in this episode actually shows.

Leslie Poston: 23:18

That perception is shaped by position, and that what feels universal is often particular, and that the naturalization of one group's assumptions as obvious truth is itself something that happens for reasons and serves someone's interests. None of this requires giving up on the idea that some things can be known and that some arguments are better than others or that expertise means something. It just requires being honest about the difference between having good reasons for believing something and believing that any reasonable person would obviously agree with you. Those are not the same claim even when the conclusion might be identical. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.

Leslie Poston: 23:57

I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and send this episode to a friend if you think they'd enjoy it. And tune in next week where we're going to be talking about what psychology says about the idea of giving a 100%.