You can’t handle the truth! Conflict counterparts over-estimate each other’s feelings of self-threat

•Attitude conflict—interpersonal disagreement on strongly-held, identity-relevant issues—is pervasive in personal, professional, and policy settings.•Although prior literature focuses on misperceptions of counterpart cognitions during attitude conflict, people often rely on affect to explain others’ behavior.•Individuals systematically over-estimated the levels of self-threat (i.e., threat to the integrity of an individual’s self-concept) reported by conflict counterparts, which in turn increased confidence in persuasion abilities.•The effect was mediated by “naïve realism,” an excessive faith in the objectivity of one’s views.