Have you ever been in a situation where you think someone's intentions are malicious, but in fact they were accidental? Then maybe you too have been a part of a prominent phenomena in psychology called the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is a tendency of an individual to think about concepts, ideas, or schemas incorrectly. The idea is that there are two basic causes to our behavior: internal and external causes. Internal causes can be explained by how our personality leads us to perform certain consistent behaviors: we do things because “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” On the other hand, external causes are typically focused on how our environment shapes our behavior and lead us to act the way we do. It is the interaction between these two causes that sum up our behaviour. The fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency of overestimating these internal causes when trying to understand why other individuals act the way they do.
One recent incident in my own life where the fundamental attribution error was present was at Walmart when I was trying to buy a new futon. As I was making my way the the checkout counter with this enormous futon, I saw the man at the service counter eyeing me and the huge couch he had to scan. Obviously I felt uncomfortable, and what made it worse was the fact that he was very grumpy and short with me. By the time he rung me up I had an idea in my head about this guy’s personality outside of his job given that he acted like he completely detested the idea of me being there. The FAE refers to the fact that I attributed his grumpiness to his personality, even though I have never met this person in my life. I did not think about this situation as being anything other than an internal cause, so I did not think to myself “wow, maybe he just had a bad day.” Social psych has helped me analyze the situation at hand, and instead of generalizing his current actions, I stopped, stood back from the situation, and thought to myself that maybe his external situation made him grumpy, and that most people would be grumpy if they were in the same position regardless of their personality. What I found especially interesting about this concept is that we tend to do this more for negative behaviors rather than positive behaviours. We are more likely to point someone out for their wrongdoings more often than we would for pointing someone out for something positive that they have done.
Ars Technica recently had an interesting article on how being drunk increases your chances of making the fundamental attribution error. This article presents an experiment where 92 male participants were led to believe that they were taste testing “juice”, of which half of the participants had juice that contained alcohol, and the other half did not. In order to incorporate a placebo, the experimenters sprayed the rims of the glasses of the participants that were expecting alcoholic beverages just before serving. After handing out the “juices”, participants were given 50 action statements such as “He deleted the email” and participants would have to rate whether or not they found that action to be deliberate or accidental. What they found after the subjects had the time to ingest and absorb the alcohol was that nearly all participants, no matter the condition, judged the unambiguous part correctly. However, when events were ambiguous (that is you can not tell whether they were performed intentionally or unintentionally) they found that “drunk” people were more likely to perceive other individual’s actions as deliberate. The independent variable in this experiment is the fixed amount of alcohol, and the dependent variable is the participant responses in whether or not an action was deliberate or not. The design of this experiment allowed researchers to separate the physical affects of alcohol from the expectancy effects. Therefore (especially when you are drunk) you are more likely to believe that something negative has happened to you through a deliberate act, even though it may have been a complete accident. This intentionality bias is a major factor when correlating alcohol consumption with individual reaction and aggression levels. So the next time you get angry at someone for “intentionally” doing something to you, try to perceive the situation through the eyes of the aggressor, perhaps you will find that it is not as deliberate as you thought, or perhaps it is due to their momentary situation rather than their personality.
Reference:
Yoshida, K. S., (2010). If I’m drunk, you’re a jerk. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210383044
http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/if-im-drunk-youre-a-jerk/
Posted by: Blake DeVries
No comments:
Post a Comment