## Fundamental Attribution Error—Doing Good vs. Being Good **P. 175** > One thing judgments about moral fiber have in common with judgments about competence and status is that we often make them on the basis of a single data point. Though various experiments show this, there’s no point in trotting one out: just reflect on your own behavior. If you see a person walking briskly past someone lying injured on the sidewalk, don’t you think, “Oh, what a not-so-nice person”? > > I know what you’re thinking: But people who stop to help the needy *are* nice. And people who walk briskly past them *aren’t* nice. > > Actually, you’re wrong! A famous study published in 1973 showed as much. The study was conducted by two Princeton University psychologists, and it involved, for starters, setting up an opportunity for people to be Good Samaritans, to help a stranger in need. Here is how the psychologists described the scene they created: “When the subject passed through the alley, the victim was sitting slumped in a doorway, head down, eyes closed, not moving. As the subject went by, the victim coughed twice and groaned, keeping his head down.” > > Some of the experimental subjects stopped to help, and some didn’t. If you had been watching all this, you probably would have seen essence-of-good-person in the former and essence-of-bad-person in the latter. But there’s actually a different explanation for why some helped and some didn’t. > > The subjects of the experiment were students at Princeton Theological Seminary. They had been told that they had to go give a short, impromptu talk in a nearby building. Some had been told they were late for the talk, while others were told they had time to spare. Of the former group, 10 percent stopped to help, and of the latter group, 63 percent stopped. So ==seeing essence-of-good-person in that 63 percent is misleading at best; it would be more accurate to see essence-of-not-being-in-a-hurry.== > > Aside from degree of hurriedness, there was only one other variable that the experimenters manipulated. Half of the subjects, before heading over to give their talk, were told to read the Bible story of the Good Samaritan and then give their talk on that. The other half read a passage unrelated to altruism. ==It turns out that even reflecting on the Good Samaritan didn’t increase the chances of being a Good Samaritan==. > > This experiment fits into a large body of psychological literature about something called “==the fundamental attribution error==.” The word *attribution* refers to the tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of either “dispositional” factors—in other words, the kind of person they are—or “situational” factors, like whether they happen to be late for a talk. The word *error* refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence. > > The term *fundamental attribution error* was coined in 1977 by the psychologist Lee D. Ross, and its implications can be disorienting. For example, it’s common to think of criminals and clergy as being two fundamentally different *kinds* of people. But Ross and fellow psychologist Richard Nisbett have suggested that we rethink this intuition. As they put it: ==“Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals."== > > The philosopher Gilbert Harman, after reviewing the literature on the fundamental attribution error, raised questions about the very existence of such character traits as honesty, benevolence, and friendliness. “Since it is possible to explain our ordinary belief in character traits as deriving from certain illusions,” he wrote, “we must conclude that ==there is no empirical basis for the existence of character traits==.” > > This may sound like an extreme view, and certainly many scholars interpret the literature on attribution error less dramatically. Most psychologists who study these things will tell you that some personality traits are, in the average person, fairly stable over time. Still, there is no doubt that our attribution of moral essence to people—seeing them as nice, mean, friendly, unfriendly—does run ahead of the actual evidence. I have more than once seen someone in public behaving so rudely or inconsiderately that I immediately saw him as—and *felt* him as—bad. And I have more than once, when under great stress, behaved just as rudely and inconsiderately. Yet I did not consider myself bad—at least, not *essentially* bad—even on later reflection. > > One reason I let myself off the hook is that I understand that the stress caused my bad behavior; it wasn’t the “real me” who did the bad thing. But with other people, I’m less likely to ponder that possibility. That’s what the fundamental attribution error is: I attribute their behavior to disposition, not situation; I locate the badness in them, not in environmental factors. > > Why would the human mind be designed to ignore or downplay situational factors when sizing people up? Well, for starters, remember that natural selection didn’t design human minds to size people up *accurately*. It designed human minds to size people up in a way that would lead to interactions that benefited the genes of the humans doing the sizing up. > > Consider what, for my money, is one of the more ridiculous kinds of arguments people have. It typically starts with the assertion “She’s a really nice person” or “He’s a good guy.” Then someone will beg to differ: “No, she’s not so nice” or “No, he’s actually a bad guy.” These arguments can go on forever without either party saying, “Well, maybe she’s nice to me but not nice to you” or “Maybe he’s good in the context in which I tend to encounter him and bad in the context in which you encounter him.” > > From natural selection’s point of view, there’s no reason for people to give much weight to such a possibility—that possibility that niceness and goodness are largely situational, not dispositional, properties. After all, the essence model—the belief that each person has a generally good or a generally bad disposition—works pretty well. If someone is consistently nice to you, it makes sense to get into a relationship of reciprocal niceness—in other words, a friendship. And a belief that the person is essentially good does a fine job of drawing you into that friendship. > > What’s more, this belief will make it easy for you to go around *saying* that this person is good—which is handy, since speaking highly of a friend is part of the reciprocal altruism that constitutes friendship. Seeing essence-of-good in your friends lets you discharge this part of the deal effortlessly. It frees you from the nagging awareness that, for all you know, when you’re not around, your friends spend their time bilking on elderly people. > > If, on the other hand, someone is consistently mean to you, then seeing essence-of-bad in him is what leads to optimally self-serving behavior on your part. Not only will you avoid doing favors that would probably go unreciprocated anyway; you’ll go around saying, with conviction, that he is a bad person. And it makes sense to say that your enemies are bad people, since the more you can do to undermine their stature, the less likely they’ll be in a position to hurt you. > > Actually, in the modern world, this may not be such an effective strategy. But in the small hunter-gatherer societies in which humans evolved, persistently badmouthing people might indeed have had an appreciable effect on their social standing. It also would have served as a warning to others not to get on your bad side. > > To summarize, ==there’s one situational variable that always biases our evaluations of people: every time we see them doing something, they’re doing it in our presence, and for all we know they behave differently around or toward other people.== But it makes sense—in a self-serving way—for us to ignore this variable and attribute the behavior we see to their disposition. That way we’ll see them as possessing the essence—good or bad—that it’s most in our interest to see them possessing. Conveniently, our friends and allies will have essence-of-good, and our rivals and enemies will have essence-of-bad. **P. 179** > But what if reality intrudes on this convenient illusion? ==What if we do happen to see or hear of an enemy doing something good? And what if we see or hear of a friend doing something bad? Doesn’t this threaten to vaporize the essence we’ve come to see in them?== > > Yes, it does pose that threat. But our brains are very good at fending off threats! In fact, our brains seem to have a mechanism designed to deal with this particular threat. You might call it the essence-preserving mechanism. > > It turns out that the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation. > > There are two kinds of cases in which we tend to do this: (1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her job. > > This interpretive flexibility shapes not only our personal lives but international relations. The social scientist Herbert C. Kerman has noted how it keeps enemies on the enemies list: ==“Attribution mechanisms...promote confirmation of the original enemy image. Hostile actions by the enemy are attributed dispositionally, and thus provide further evidence of the enemy’s inherently aggressive, implacable character. Conciliatory actions are explained away as reactions to situational forces—as tactical maneuvers, responses to external pressure, or temporary adjustments to a position of weakness—and therefore require no revision of the original image.”== This helps explain why, when wars approach, people who welcome them do their best to demonize the leader of the counters they want to go to war with. In the run-up to one of America’s two wars with Iraq, the (then) hawkish American magazine *The New Republic* put an image of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on its cover with one embellishment: his mustache was cropped so that it looked like Hitler’s. Not very subtle, but effective—because once someone is firmly placed in the enemy box, our attribution mechanisms make escaping the box very hard. If, for example, someone like Hussein lets international inspectors into his country to look for weapons of mass destruction—which he did shortly before the Iraq War of 2003—it must be a trick. He must be hiding those weapons of mass destruction somewhere. After all, Hussein has essence-of-bad, if not essence-of-evil! > > And, to be sure, Hussein *had* done horrible things. But failing to think clearly about him led to more horrible things: the death of well over 100,000 innocent people in the Iraq War and its aftermath. > > ==War offers a good example of how essence can spread from one level to another. You start out with the idea that a nation’s leader is essentially bad. From this you move to the idea that an entire nation—the nation of Iraq or Germany or Japan—is your enemy. This then translates into the idea that all the soldiers of that country—or even all the *people* in that country—are essentially bad. And if people are bad, that means you can kill them without feeling the sting of conscience.== The United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities—cities, not military bases—and drew virtually no protest from Americans. --- - From [[20210225-R2 Why Buddhism is True|Why Buddhism is True]]