Leggi in Italiano“This book is about the way in which communication creates what we call reality.”
This is how Paul Watzlawick opens the foreword to How Real Is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication, first published in 1976. It is one of the books I have enjoyed most, and one that has had a lasting influence on the way I look at the world. I often refer to it in my lectures and in conversations, and each time I find myself returning to that opening sentence. Fifty years after the book appeared, it feels remarkably relevant.
The underlying idea is simple, but unsettling. We tend to assume that reality exists independently of us and that communication merely describes it. Watzlawick invites us to consider something less reassuring: communication helps shape the meaning of what we perceive. There is no need to invent an event to change how it is understood. Sometimes it is enough to present the facts in a particular order, choose one word rather than another, or place them in a context that already suggests an interpretation. And once we have accepted a particular version of events, we can become surprisingly adept at finding evidence that confirms it while overlooking what does not fit.
One distinction in the book has stayed with me in particular: first-order reality and second-order reality. The former concerns aspects of the world that can be observed and tested; the latter concerns the meanings and values we assign to them. Watzlawick uses gold as one example. Its physical properties can be verified, but the value we give it depends on social conventions and relationships. This distinction matters because acknowledging that communication shapes meaning is not the same as claiming that facts do not exist, or that every account is equally true.
What I find especially interesting, given my own research interests, is that Watzlawick devotes an entire chapter to deception in intelligence work. He recounts, for example, Operation Mincemeat in 1943, when the Allies arranged for misleading documents to reach the Germans, apparently revealing secret plans for landings in Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. The operation worked because the circumstances in which the documents were found made them credible, and because its planners anticipated how the intended recipients would interpret them. It is a striking illustration of how disinformation often succeeds by working with beliefs and expectations that are already there.
It is difficult to read those pages today without thinking about social media, propaganda during international crises, and generative artificial intelligence. Synthetic images and manipulated videos offer new ways to deceive, while algorithms can repeatedly expose us to interpretations that reinforce what we already believe. Yet the problem Watzlawick describes is much older than any of these technologies. Our tendency to confuse our representation of events with the events themselves is deeply human. What has changed is the scale and speed at which technology can exploit it.
That may be why I keep returning to How Real Is Real?. The book has taught me to be wary of explanations that fit together a little too perfectly, including those I am most inclined to believe, and to ask where verifiable facts end and interpretation begins. It is not always possible to draw that line neatly. Trying to do so, however, remains a useful intellectual discipline. “How real is real?” Fifty years later, it is still a question worth asking.
Reference: Paul Watzlawick, How Real Is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication, Random House, 1976; Vintage Books edition, 1977, Foreword, pp. xi–xiv; “Deception in Intelligence Work,” pp. 118–139; “The Two Realities,” pp. 140–142. Italian edition: La realtà della realtà. Comunicazione, disinformazione, confusione, Astrolabio-Ubaldini.