…And she’s not normally that way. Human beings have an innate need to make sense of the world around them. This especially applies to the people around you: why you think people act the way they do is a question that continuously affects the way you respond to them. Jim was late to your group meeting. Is he just careless? Or was it traffic on the way? Sara snapped at you when you accidentally bumped into her. Is she just bad-tempered in general? Or is she upset about something else? Whichever reason you choose to believe will determine how you respond to Jim and Sara.
In social psychology, this process of attributing a reason to someone else’s behaviour is called attribution. We do this all the time. And it turns out we can make quite a few mistakes during attribution, called attribution errors. One of these is called the fundamental attribution error or the correspondence bias. The name doesn’t really matter unless you’re a psychologist, but understanding what it is can help us to be more understanding of people, and improve our relationships.
The fundamental attribution error occurs when we observe someone else’s behaviour and decide that the cause of that behaviour is internal, not external. That is, we decide that Joe doesn’t care enough about group meetings to be on time and Sara is a grumpy sourpuss. These are stable, internal dispositions. In contrast, we could’ve decided that Jim was sick and woke late or that Sara just got a scolding from the teacher and was upset. Those are external circumstances. When we attribute someone’s behaviour to the former instead of the latter, we might be falling into the trap known as the fundamental attribution error. The trouble with this, of course, is that people do often act in ways that aren’t really them. They might just be going through a difficult time or be feeling sick or having one of those irritating days when the breakfast was burnt, and you slipped and hit your elbow, then forgot your bag on the way to the bus, had to go back to get it, and then got late to school/ work. We often behave in ways we don’t really mean, too—and it would be nice if people didn’t judge us on the basis of one bad day.
All in all, it makes sense to give others the benefit of the doubt, within limits. We can decide to be more compassionate by deliberately avoiding the pesky correspondence bias. The first step to doing this is to recognise the instances when we make this error. The second step is to evaluate whether that instance truly calls for a firm evaluation of the internal nature of the person you’re observing. This is especially necessary if the evaluation you were about to make was negative in nature, as that is likely to negatively affect your relationship with that person. If you think you don’t have enough reason to infer something about
someone from one incident, then the next step is to actively shift from thinking that this person is [insert appropriate description], and instead think along the lines of, “They’re probably not normally like that. I’ll wait for more examples of such behaviour before I decide.” Because chances are, they were probably just having a bad day.
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