You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (30 page)

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 in 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.

One of the first studies to uncover the machinations of the fundamental attribution error was conducted in 1967 by Edward Jones and Victor Harris at Duke University. They had students read speech transcripts of debaters both in support of and in opposition to the political ideologies of Fidel Castro. (Today they might have used Osama bin Laden.) The students correctly attributed the speechwriter’s ideas as influenced by the speechwriter’s internal feelings when told the person who gave the speech had chosen his own position. If, for instance, the debaters said they disagreed with Castro, the students said they believed them. When the students were told the debater had no choice in the matter and was assigned the position as either pro- or anti-Castro, the students didn’t buy it. If the debater was assigned a pro-Castro position and then gave a pro-Castro speech, the students reading that speech told the researchers they thought the debater really believed what he or she was saying. The situation’s influence didn’t play into their assumptions; instead they saw all the debaters’ words as springing from their character.

Variations of this experiment are still being conducted today. Each new twist of the variables leads to the same mistakes. In 1997, Peter Ditto had men meet with an actress working for the experimenters. She and the men would have short one-on-one conversations and then she gave a written report of her impressions. When Ditto told the men she had been instructed to give a negative report, the men said she was just following orders. When told she had been asked to give a positive report, the men said although they knew she was just doing her job, they felt that she really did like them.

You commit the fundamental attribution error by believing other people’s actions burgeon from the sort of people they are and have nothing to do with the setting. When a man believes the stripper really likes him, or when the boss thinks all his employees love to hear his stories about fishing in Costa Rica, that’s the fundamental attribution error.

It’s hard to grasp just how powerful a situation can be, how much it can influence the behavior of you and people you think you know pretty well. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University that would rattle him to his core and change psychology forever. Zimbardo was interested in the roles you play throughout your life, the characters you create and then pretend to be depending on the situation. He thought perhaps the brutality displayed in war and in prisons had less to do with evil than it did with unconscious role-playing.

He had twenty-four male students flip coins to see who would be prisoners and who would be guards in a pretend prison set up on campus. Those who were randomly selected to be prisoners wore prison smocks with numbers on the back and ankle chains. Guards wore full uniforms with mirrored shades and wielded wooden batons. The guards were told to refer to the prisoners only by their numbers but never physically harm them. Zimbardo had the local police arrest the mock prisoners at their homes and undergo searches in front of their neighbors. They then went through a simulated booking at the police station, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. After the prisoners had waited blindfolded in a real cell, the police then took them to campus, where they were strip-searched and deloused in the fake jail. After all this, the experiment was supposed to take two weeks. Participants would pretend to be guards and prisoners while psychologists videotaped them and took notes. It ended after six days.

There was a riot on the second day. One person had to be released on the third day after suffering so much emotional distress the researchers couldn’t bear to keep him confined. What went wrong?