By: Aurora Dziadul | Staffwriter
It’s a rainy Monday morning and you’re stuck in traffic trying to make your way back over the bridge after spending the weekend away. A three-car pileup is blocking one side of the road and traffic barely moves as the two lanes try to merge into one to make it past the accident and onto the bridge.
After what seems like hours of little progress, you finally see your chance to move into the other lane when suddenly the car behind you speeds up and takes your spot. “What a jerk!” you scream, laying on the horn to let your frustration out. How dare they cut you off and take the spot you’d been waiting for! What a terrible person they must be!
Now consider this: It’s a rainy Monday morning, and you’re stuck in traffic caused by a bad accident that’s blocking one lane of the route. You have an important midterm that counts for almost half of your grade, and your professor’s a stickler about getting to class on time. You have little over thirty minutes to get over both bridges, find a place to park, and hopefully make it into class without getting soaked. Traffic has barely been moving, when you finally see an opening up ahead for you to merge into the other lane. You speed up to take the spot, only to be met by the person next to you honking their horn and yelling at you. It wasn’t your fault, though! You have somewhere to be!
If you haven’t figured it out by now, the two situations described above are in fact the same one. Only in the second version it’s you who is cutting the other person off. Yet you had a real reason for it, right? While that may be true, it’s highly likely that in the first situation that person had a reason for it too: Maybe they were late for an important meeting, were rushing to the hospital to visit someone, or even were just having a really awful morning. The point is, we all have reasons for doing the things we do, and it’s not because we’re complete jerks.
This demonstrates a phenomenon that psychologists have termed the fundamental attribution error. Basically, it means that we tend to overlook the situational factors that are contributing to other people’s behavior, and instead believe it to be a direct reflection of their personality.
Interestingly, we do not make that error in judging our own behavior, in fact, we oftentimes overexaggerate the influence of situational factors in deciding our behavior (especially when it resulted in failure). This is called making self-serving attributions, which many psychologists believe we do in order to boost our own self-esteem.
How do we end up making such vastly different judgements about other people’s behavior versus our own? As demonstrated in the example at the beginning of this article, the same behavior is explained in a completely different way depending on whether it was performed by us or by someone else.
Two psychologists, Jones and Nisbett, proved that it results, quite literally, from our point of view. When viewing someone else’s behavior, they are the center of our attention, so we tend to make judgements about them. However, when we are performing the behavior, we are focused on our environment and so we make attributions relating to it.
Jones and Nisbett found the individuals actually made dispositional (personal) attributions about their own behavior when watching a video of themselves.
What is the takeaway from this? Next time you find yourself becoming annoyed with someone and are tempted to attribute it to their terrible personality, take a step back and think about all the things they could be dealing with that you don’t know about. Not only will it make others feel better, they may also start offering the same courtesy to you. Being understanding of others’ situations, as well as taking some personal responsibility for some negative outcomes that perhaps were in your control, will improve yourself and your relationships.
