So often in life we have this tendency to make appeals to a person’s character or personality when explaining some deviant or undesirable behavior. Bad service at a restaurant? The waiter is lazy. Cut off while driving home from work? The driver is an asshole.
We so rarely take a step back from such situations to consider the broader environment or social context of these occurrences. We feed our psyches a false sense of security so as to make the world more palatable to our tastes. The world isn’t simple, and rarely are people decidedly evil or self-serving.
The theory of the fundamental attribution error, the conceptual bedrock of modern social psychology, argues that people over-estimate the importance of dispositional or personality-based explanations when explaining the behavior of others. We tend to under-value the importance of social or environmental context, the situational or institutional constraints that shape and mold another’s behavior.
Perhaps our waiter was still recovering from a late-night bender, working off a wicked hangover when he attended to our table. Maybe the driver that cut us off, a diabetic, was racing home to get in his next insulin dosing.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of the recently released book What the Dog Saw, offers a softer definition of the above. His version of the fundamental attribution error incorporates any situation where one extrapolates the importance of a measured characteristic to a generalized view of a person, attributing measured habituations to unmeasured or unrelated characteristics.
For example, just because a student is punctual and well-mannered gives no indication to his behavior at home. Again, it’s often our environment that shapes how we act. The fundamental attribution error is entirely other-focused, and so we never make these attributions of ourselves. In explaining our own behavior we will cite situational or environmental factors – we had a long day at work, we were hungry, an eyelash was caught beneath our contact lens – to explain errant behavior.
It’s the rare person who can, with objectivity, place his behavior beneath a psychological microscope and analyze his deeper character. This mindfulness pays dividends in our quality of life.
In a recent online debate I happen to participate in, these very same sorts of attributions were thrown around with abandon. This is often the case during heated argumentation when rational appeals take a backseat to emotional responses.
Next time, consider the institutional constraints of an individual before blanketing them with dispositional pejoratives. The subsequent lessons learned can lead us all closer to the truth.
