Hey everyone, so I thought this might be a useful and short lesson in critical thinking that may help you out with unruly relatives you may encounter at the Thanksgiving feast. I doubt this will help you win any arguments, but sometimes just knowing what’s really going on can be a way to hold on to your sanity and calm. And as usual, this is something that applies to all of us and not just your evil relatives so maybe this can help make you a clearer and more rational thinker too.
Every day we see people do things and wonder what caused them to do it. We want to attribute their behavior to something that makes sense to us so we can feel like we understand why things are happening the way they are. In the field of psychology, our tendency to do this is called attribution.
However, almost all of the time, we don’t actually have all the data to make valid and informed conclusions about other people’s behavior and so we just make things up based on whatever we do know. And according to a lot of social science studies about attribution, we know that we have a tendency to overemphasize personal characteristics and ignore situational factors when we are judging other people’s behavior. In other words, we ignore that circumstances can shape how people act. This tendency to make things personal is called the fundamental attribution error because it’s so widespread and significant to our thinking. The shortest version of this I’ve seen is that we tend to believe that others do bad things because they are bad people but let’s look at a couple of examples.
A waitress might think that the reason someone left a bad tip is because they are just a cheap skate. She’ll rarely consider that it might be because she did or said something that offended that customer and she’ll hardly ever think that it was because the customer simply couldn’t afford to leave a large tip after paying for the meal. Statistically, she will tend to immediately assume the worst about the customer.
This goes both ways too. If someone cuts us off in traffic, we assume they are just a jerk or a bad person. But if we cut someone else off in traffic, we rarely think we did that because we are a jerk. We know that there are situational factors which made us feel that we had to rush through traffic, that we had to drive erratically, because otherwise we’d be late for an appointment or to catch a plane or something like that. We ignore what our own behavior might be broadcasting to others about our own personality when we judge ourselves because we have all the explanatory information that justifies our behavior.
So, the fundamental attribution error explains why we often judge others harshly while letting ourselves off the hook at the same time when we are doing the exact same thing we blame others for. Here are a couple of common examples I see on social media and in the news all the time:
Poor people are poor because they are lazy
Illegal immigrants are evil because they just want to come here and game our system
Now it is true there are some lazy poor people.
It’s also true there are some gamey illegal immigrants.
But just looking at personality or internal factors and ignoring the things going on outside that person to explain their behavior can lead you to some extremely wrong conclusions and its our tendency to do this that makes this error, especially when our explanations are mainly negative.
Good people do bad things all the time. They find themselves in difficult or unusual circumstances and they make a bad decision. To judge a person harshly because of that, especially when you do not know or don’t even try to find out what kind of situation the person was in, is your bad, not theirs.
This also extends out to much broader circumstances than just traffic violations or personality quirks. We make this kind of error all the time when discussing politics. For example, it’s almost a national pastime for Americans to blame the overall condition of our economy on one man: the President of the United States. Every single time a new President takes office, he is either blamed or praised from day one for the state of the GDP as well as whether interest rates, unemployment and taxes are rising or falling. It’s bad enough we use these over-generalized and simplistic markers to judge how the US is doing financially, but when we then assign the reason for the rise and fall of these things to the simple fact of who holds office in the White House and what his personal economic views are, we are making a gigantic and wholly unjustified leap of logic. Even if the President did hold full dictatorial control over every decision making process in our economy, which he most certainly does not and never could, it takes months or even years for any policy or budgetary change to even begin to take effect and more months or years before the full effects of those changes are really seen. Very few people understand the size and scope of the US economy and the multiplicity of factors that drive its ups and downs. So instead of trying to dig in to the details, it’s much easier to just blame it all on one person and think you’ve said something important or significant. Trust me, you haven’t.
Even more interesting is how conspiracy theorists make this error when examining history. This is very common in the conspiracy world. As any good historian will tell you, history is an immensely complex tapestry of interwoven causes and effects. Every event that you have ever seen on the world stage didn’t happen because of just one or two people. It took a myriad of influences, some going back many years from the point of the event, for things to be arranged in the exact right way for that event to take place. And I’m not just talking about the number of people involved, but also environmental factors, government policies, laws and regulations and all sorts of other influencers. And of course there are random chance circumstances which can change everything such as unpredicted weather conditions ruining or delaying carefully laid plans. In short, there is no guiding unseen hand causing all the events of history. Every single educated historian I have ever read or talked to agrees that is simply ridiculous.
But to conspiracy theorists, who tend to think in reductivist simplicities, history is just a series of strong personalities affecting massive changes on a scale that would be impossible for even the world’s best logistical experts. In other words, they look at history in terms of a few individuals who have “made it all happen.” To conspiracy theorists, there is no such thing as random chance or unexpected circumstances. To them, nothing gets in the way of the people who somehow control not just all the events of history, but how we think about those events too. This is another example of the fundamental attribution error. They attribute the cause of every major catastrophe or world-changing event to either one man or small group of men who have sinister, evil intentions and who are working insidiously behind the scenes to plot our demise or slavitude.
Just think about it. Our own lives are a constant struggle against the chaos we encounter every day. Do you really imagine that there are people in the world who have things under such incredible control that not only are they not subject to the same factors that influence and affect your life, but they can merely wave their hand and control the fate of millions? No, that is childishly simplistic thinking.
The truth is that we are complex creatures and the motivations and reasons for our behavior are usually varied. When considering or judging someone else, it is vital that we always remember that. Our personalities most definitely drive how we act but so do our circumstances. Good people do bad things all the time and bad people also do good things all the time too. When you are trying to figure out why, avoid snap judgements because the plain truth of the matter is that you’re assumptions are going to be wrong way more often than they’ll be right. It’s only when you get all the data that you can make informed and rational judgements. And the good thing about this is that most of the time, you’re going to find that people are not nearly as evil as you think they are, even your Uncle Jed or Grandma Jean. So maybe by knowing about and avoiding making any fundamental attribution errors, you can actually have a more relaxing and fun Thanksgiving. I hope you do!
Thank you for watching.