After all of this, the students were handed a voodoo doll and told to think of the other person as they stuck pins into it. Soon the actor started to complain of a headache. As you probably guessed by now, the people who were made to hate the actor more often reported they believed they had caused his pain than did the group who met with a polite confederate. Most people were skeptical, but the skepticism was diminished in the group who had been influenced to harbor negative thoughts about the actor. They saw an effect, and given all the possibilities, they saw their own thoughts as a possible cause.
The experimenters had people watch an athlete shoot basketballs into a basket in a second round of this study. The shooter was blindfolded with a trick blindfold he could secretly see through. In one group the researchers asked subjects to visualize the shooter making the shot for ten seconds before each time he launched the ball, and in the other group they asked the spectators to visualize the shooter lifting weights. They went so far as to have the player practice for a minute before they began and miss most of the shots.
The shooter tried to consistently make six out of eight tries, which he usually did. It was an astonishing feat for a person wearing a blindfold, and the two groups saw it differently. When questioned later, most people were skeptical, but those who had visualized the shooter making the basket were nearly twice as likely to say they believed they helped. As with any good magic trick, people wanted to believe that something otherworldly or telepathic might be afoot.
The researchers concluded most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control. The people in the experiments knew they were in a study, so they likely were more skeptical than usual. This skepticism can dissolve away in the right conditions. If you are an avid sports fan, you can’t help but think your mental cheerlead-ing has some sort of positive effect on the game play. You take some credit when your team wins. You think you didn’t cheer hard enough if they lose. This illusion of control is pervasive enough to show up when teachers take credit for the success of their students or people in war zones start to accumulate lucky charms or engage in rituals they think will keep them alive. You ask people to send well wishes and positive thoughts when someone is sick.
In 1975, Ellen Langer conducted a series of studies in which she had people engage in games of chance both with and without some control over how the games were played. In a card game she had people play against both nervous and confident actors, and although the outcome was random, the subjects bet more when they believed their opponents were weak. She had people either pick their own lottery numbers or have them assigned. Those who picked their own numbers asked for more money than those who did not when she tried to buy back the tickets. She also had people flip coins and predict if they would land on heads or tails, but her team manipulated the outcomes. Some subjects were made to believe they guessed correctly fifteen times in row at the beginning, some fifteen times in a row at the end, and a third group fifteen times spread out over all thirty tosses. Those who thought they did well at the beginning said they felt like they could practice to improve their performance on future runs. Those who thought they guessed poorly at the beginning or saw their fifteen correct guesses as being random were less confident. The number of correct guesses were the same in all three groups, but the people who experienced streaks early on believed they had some sort of control. They thought they could beat the odds.
Langer concluded the deciding factors were the cues in the games that made the participants feel as if some skill was involved. Seeing patterns, becoming more familiar with the games, having options as to how to play—all contributed to the illusion of control. As obvious as it should have been, the subjects tended to see randomness as something they could outwit. This is why you are far more likely to participate in games of chance when there are some customizable features. Allowing you to choose your own lottery numbers or pick the numbers to bet on in roulette affects how you see the results. You assume the cold hand of fate becomes a tad less potent if you have some say in how you tempt it.
Flipping a coin or winning at poker are relatively simple in comparison to giant monsters of randomness like stock markets and wars, corporate mergers and family vacations, yet no matter how complex a situation can be, there will be people who assume they can predict and control it. Those who hold power become delusional about how far the power extends.
In 2008, Nathaneal Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford University conducted experiments designed to reveal how the illusion of control is created. They knew previous studies had shown those with high socioeconomic status or who came from cultures where power and influence were highly regarded were more likely to think they were better at predicting the future. People even fear death less when they have a college degree. What if, they asked, you were just asked to think about being powerful?
They divided subjects into three groups. One group wrote an essay about a time in their life in which they remembered being a leader. Another group wrote about a time when they were a follower. The third group served as a control and wrote about going to the supermarket. After the essays were finished, the groups played a game where they had to guess the roll of a pair of dice. If they guessed correctly, they would get $5. The catch was this: Choose yourself or another person to roll.
Sure enough, the illusion of control had been properly primed in the group that wrote about being leaders. A full 100 percent of them asked to roll the dice. In the subordinate group, 58 percent asked for control of the roll. The control group fell in between, with 69 percent asking to try their luck instead of handing the dice over to someone else. Of course the dice didn’t care who tossed them. You start to assume you are imbued with gifts others do not possess if you find yourself at the helm of a great and powerful ship. You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country.
Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others.
Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things,
the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.
48
The Fundamental Attribution Error
THE MISCONCEPTION: Other people’s behavior is the reflection of their personality.
THE TRUTH: Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.
You go to a restaurant and your server brings back something you didn’t order. When you send it back, it takes forever for them to return with the correct dish. They forget to fill your glass and seem unable to remember what you are drinking when they do check on you. What sort of tip do you leave?
I waited tables for three years while in college, and I can tell you. If the kitchen got a table’s order wrong, I knew my tip was ruined. It wasn’t my fault, but people consistently punished me as if it was. If the food was cold, or burned, or rare when it should have been well done, the diners would communicate their dissatisfaction by leaving nothing or, worse than nothing, a single coin. Some people are polite right up until the moment of truth when they cast their monetary vote of nonconfidence. Others get violently angry and while still chewing will demand to see a manager. Waiting tables fosters a peculiar sort of acrimony among waiters and waitresses. I never met a server who didn’t know when a bad tip was coming. No one was ever taught a lesson from being shortchanged. Over those three years, I knew the service had more to do with the situation than my own disposition. I could dampen the fallout from the circumstances outside my control by being nice and funny, or striking up a conversation when I felt it was appropriate, but the customers still blamed me when something went wrong.
So have you ever left a bad tip to show your exasperation?
When you are at a restaurant, you have a hard time seeing through to the personality of the server. You place blame and assume you are dealing with a slacker. Sometimes you are right, but often you are committing the fundamental attribution error.
Have you ever watched a quiz show like The Weakest Link or Jeopardy and thought, however briefly, that the host was super-smart? Perhaps there are a handful of musicians, or authors, or professors in your life you’ve placed on a pedestal. You imagine how difficult it would be to hold your own in conversation with these people, as you imagine their towering intellect would crush you as you resorted to prattling on about pasta recipes and your collection of ornate spoons. When you don’t know much about a person, when you haven’t had a chance to get to know him or her, you have a tendency to turn the person into a character. You lean on archetypes and stereotypes culled from experience and fantasy. Even though you know better, you still do it.
You put on and take off social masks all the time. You are a different person with your friends than you are with your family or your boss. Somehow, you forget that your friends, family, and boss are doing the same.
You perpetrate the fundamental attribution error just about every time you read a news story. For instance, every once in a while, someone snaps and goes on a killing spree at the post office. Going back to 1983, there has been a shooting near or in a U.S. post office about every two years. Often, the killer is a disgruntled employee. Sometimes they still work for the United States Postal Service, sometimes they are recently fired. There’s even a phrase for the phenomenon: “going postal.” This is part of the collective unconscious of America at this point. Movies, books, television shows, and even pop music continue to refer to postal workers going on rampages, as recently as 2010. The concept of going postal will remain part of English slang for decades.
Many explanations have been offered for the phenomenon, ranging from stress at the workplace to a frustrating bureaucratic grievance process and the copycat effect. The truth, however, is people are always snapping and going on shooting sprees in the modern United States. There are lists available online of three hundred or more incidents, and you can Google the term “shooting rampage” any time of the year and be guaranteed a mass murder will appear from within the last few weeks. Oddly enough, the homicide rate at post offices is actually lower than in retail, but that’s probably because people in retail are more likely to be killed in a robbery. At any rate, the reason you are familiar with the idea of a lone postal worker killing all his coworkers is that the national media tends to cover these incidents no matter where they occur.
When you hear about a shooting like those at the post office or in a school or at an airport, what is the first thing you assume about the killer? The most comforting thought is that the murderer was crazy. He or she was nuts, and one day something just came over that person. In its own dark way, this is comforting. You don’t want to think potential killers are all around you, or you yourself could lose it in such a grand and total way.
Yet, most of the time, the people who snap don’t wake up one day with murder on the brain. The rage builds for years. They are usually frustrated and angry because of grievances at work. They build an identity around their jobs and think they’ve lost everything when they get fired. They often suffer from a sense of anomie and isolation and believe they can go out in a blaze of glory. Many feel as if they’ve been tormented and shamed for too long and want to settle a score. To them, life has become a relentless, depressing assault and they are powerless. The situation, in their minds, is driving them mad.
You see killers on a rampage as lunatics, but coworkers and family rarely agree. They say the job and the stress drove them to madness. Friends say if it wasn’t for the job, things would have been different. For you, on the outside, it is easier to blame the personality of the murderer as if that person was bound to kill one day no matter what. As distressing as it may be, it is another way the fundamental attribution error drives you to jump to conclusions. You see the person, and ignore his or her surroundings, and then cast blame on only the individual.
If it could happen to anyone, it could happen to you. It’s an unpleasant thought to imagine evil could be more the result of a series of terrible events and social pressures than the working of a deviant mind. Knowing this is so does in no way excuse those who harm others, but nevertheless it seems to be true. If this rattles you a bit, don’t worry, it means you are still sane.
In your school there were geeks and nerds, jocks and princesses. There was a class clown and a slacker, a misanthropic poet and an energetic politician striving for grades. You love stories. Movies and books with a cast of characters make sense to you because in life you tend to turn everyone into a character whose behavior is predictable. The mind struggles to make sense of the world. You are always aware of the minds of others and are always searching for an explanation as to why people are behaving the way they do.
Psychologists know most behavior is the result of a tug-of-war between external and internal forces. People aren’t characters without nuance who can be easily predicted. You seem like a different person at work than at home, a different character at a party than you are when you’re with your family. On paper, this seems like common sense, but you easily forget about the power of the setting when judging others. Instead of saying, “Jack is uncomfortable around people he doesn’t know, thus when I see him in public places he tends to avoid crowds,” you say, “Jack is shy.” It’s a shortcut, an easier way to navigate the social world. Your brain loves to take shortcuts. It is easy to ignore the power of the situation. Seeing people through the lens of their situation is one of the foundations of social psychology, where it is referred to as attribution theory.
If someone walks up to you in a bar and offers to buy you a drink, the first thoughts in your mind won’t be an analysis of the person’s face or the temperature in the room. Your first thoughts will be assumptions as to the person’s intent. Is this an attempt at seduction? Is this an act of kindness? Is this person a threat? To what, you ask, can this person’s behavior be attributed? You can’t be sure of the answer, so it shifts and bounces from one possibility to the next.
When you see a behavior, like a child screaming i
n a supermarket while the seemingly oblivious parents continue to shop, you take a mental shortcut and conclude something about the story of their lives. Even though you know you don’t have enough information to understand, your conclusion still feels satisfying. Your attribution, the cause you believe to have preceded the effect, could be right on the money. Often, though, you are not so smart.
A study in 1992 by Constantine Sedikides and Craig Anderson had Americans explain why they thought other U.S. citizens would want to defect to the former Soviet Union. Most people rushed to judge, with 80 percent saying the defectors were probably confused or traitorous. They imagined them as characters whose personalities predicted their actions. America, after all, is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is where these subjects grew up and enjoyed life. When the researchers then asked why a Russian might defect to the States, 90 percent said the Russian was probably fleeing horrible living conditions or looking for a better way of life. From an American state of mind, the Russians weren’t motivated by their personalities, but by their environment. Instead of turning them into traitors, which would be deeply unsettling since they were coming to the subject’s home country, Americans had to place the blame for their behavior on something external.
According to psychologist Harold Kelly, when you conjure an attribution for someone else’s actions, you consider consistency. If one of your friends gets into a fight with someone you know, you first look to see if their behavior is consistent with their past behaviors. If they are always getting into fights over petty disagreements, you place the blame on their personality. If they are usually calm, you place the blame on the situation. Usually, this shorthand works, and in our evolutionary past it was easy to check for consistency among the people one saw every day. In the modern world, you can’t check for consistency with your waitress or the people on the subway. You can’t tell if the person on the shooting rampage was being consistent, or if the person who just cut you off in traffic is always an asshole. When you can’t check for consistency, you blame people’s behavior on their personality.
You Are Not So Smart Page 23
