April 30, 2019 • 43 mins
How do we consider and predict the actions and intentions of others? How much do we lean on an individual’s presumed internal disposition versus the particulars of their situation? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe consider the fundamental attribution error, which breaks down the errors and even dangers of causal cognition.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about
a concept in psychology. But I thought we should get
there with a little bit of sci fi story time. Yeah,
(00:24):
let's do it. Let's let's unearthed one of the classics
here to help us better understand this. Really, and I
think kind of intimidatingly named a concept. Yeah, it's actually,
I think a fairly straightforward concept once you see it
in the in the um context of a story. So
gather ye round the fire and let me tell you
a tale of how one day, the Wayland commercial towing
(00:45):
vessel the U s c S S Mastroma, was in
transit returning a few million tons of ore from an
off world mining planet. I guess you recognize what this
is now, Robert, Oh, this would be really Scott's Alien,
of course it is. So. In the middle of its
turn journey, the crew of the nest Roma was awakened
by a distress beacon emanating from a desolate, uninhabited, wind
(01:07):
swept planet with no indigenous life. So the ship unhitched
from its cargo and it's set down on the planet
to investigate. Three officers, including the captain Dallas, left the
ship in e v A suits to locate the source
of the distress call, leaving the warrant officer, Ellen Ripley
in charge of the vessel until they return. So she's
(01:29):
in command now and while the party is away, Ripley
sits in a cold room alone, breathing stale air, analyzing
the distress signal from the beacon, and she begins to
have a hunch that the signal is not actually a
call for help, but a warning to stay away. After
a few hours, the surface party returns with two crew
(01:51):
members carrying a third member named Kane, who is unconscious,
and the captain of the ship, Dallas, who was again
he was a member of the away party. He asks
Ripley to open the hatch and let them inside, and
Ripley she wants to ask a few questions. First, she
asks what's wrong with Kane. Dallas tells her that he
has something attached to him. Ripley asks, well, what is it?
(02:15):
Dallas says it's some kind of organism, and he orders
her to open the doors and let them in. Ripley refuses.
She says it's against procedure to let an unknown organism
on board, and Kane will have to be kept outside
in quarantine for twenty four hours. Dallas says Kane could
die in twenty four hours and tells her again to
let them inside. Again, Ripley refuses, saying that the quarantine
(02:38):
procedure must be obeyed. Furious, Dallas overrides her and then
gets another crew member, Ash played by Ian Holme, to
use his authority as captain to have the doors opened. Anyway.
They bring Kane inside and take him to medical bay,
where Ian Holme waits, and of course, everything else in
the film spirals out from this um. Ash, of course,
(02:59):
we we later find out, is synthetic. He's an android yea,
and so he's he has some some key programming and
some key directives from the company that are influencing his
excitement here as well. But I don't want to ask
about Ash quite yet. I want to ask about Ripley
and Dallas, and analyzing this scene. I just want to
ask a couple of questions about the character's behaviors. Number One,
(03:23):
why did Ripley refuse to let her crewmates back inside?
And number two, why did Dallas override her? Now you
can answer these questions a million ways, right, But there's
one fundamental type of distinction you could make in the
answers that we want to focus on today, and that's
the distinction between explanations that appeal to circumstances and explanations
(03:46):
that appeal to disposition or character. So some answers to
these questions that could appeal to disposition. How about Ripley
refused because she is inherently lawful and orderly. She obeys
rules in general and appreciates that the procedures exist for
a reason. That seems to you know you, You could
characterize it like that, right, Yeah, as well discussed I
(04:08):
think that's a very easy characterization to make here. You
could also say that she's calm under pressure, she's logical
in working out the consequences of deviating from from procedure.
If you want to look at her less sympathetically, you
could say that she refused to let her crewmates inside
because she's cold hearted, or she's selfish, or she lacks empathy.
I never, I never would make those charges against Rippley,
(04:30):
But someone could, Yeah, they could. Meanwhile, and also thinking
about disposition and character, you could say that Dallas tried
to override Ripley because he's rebellious and impulsive, because he
thinks emotionally rather than rationally. You could say he did
it because he was sexist and he didn't respect Ripley's
ruling because of her gender. You could say he did
(04:50):
it because he was fundamentally caring and wanted to protect
his injured crew member and get a medical attention as
soon as possible. All these things are appealing to things
about him as a person, right, And you know, I
think it it lines up with the way we tend
to watch him film like Alien. Anyway, you were talking,
you mentioned the stale air, and I had to hold
(05:11):
back from jumping in and saying, well, I don't know,
I never thought that the air was stale on the
nest froma I always thought it would be like this,
especially in those really christine white settings that would have
this this this rich, comforting smell of air condition and
like a really well air conditioned house during the summer, uh,
which for some reason is like a something that I
get kind of nostalgic for. I don't know, it looks
(05:33):
stale to me. I mean you can almost kind of
see a film on the surfaces in that in that
bridge room. Well a little bit, but but at any way,
we tend to watch a film like Alien and we
focus on the characters, the monster, and then we we
tend to pick up things about the setting in the environment. Secondly, Uh,
when if you're going to see somebody that is that
(05:54):
is written about Alien or they're probably gonna be focusing
on characters or monster monster's biology. They're probably not as
concerned with well, stars of you know, some of the
aspects that we're gonna be talking about here today. But
those aspects like like the environment, the setting, they're crucial
if you want to invoke the other kind of answer,
(06:14):
you know, answers that do not appeal to character traits
and dispositions, but answers that appeal to external factors and
the details of the situation. So to answer the same
questions according to these kinds of answers, you could say,
maybe Ripley refused entry because the quarantine rules exist, and
the way she's been conditioned as an employee of this
(06:37):
company is to treat them as inviolable, right, And these
are both external factors influencing her behavior in this read right,
And maybe also it was because she felt uneasy on
this hostile planet that nobody had ever been to before.
She was put on guard by the suspicion that the
distress beacon was a warning to stay away. Maybe she
was even physically cold in the cabin of the ship
(06:58):
and this shifted her mood to make her more skeptical
and wary because of all that air conditioning I was
talking about earlier, exactly. Uh, And then you could do
the same thing for Dallas. And maybe Dallas ignored her,
tried to override her because he was in a unique
and terrifying situation. He had a crew member with an
alien attached to it, you know, attached to his face.
That's not normal. This was completely novel and terrifying, causing
(07:21):
him to panic. Maybe he ignored her because he'd been
breathing heavily on his surface walk and was experiencing mild
hyperventilation and this was clouding his judgment. So this distinction
is what we want to hammer home at the beginning here.
It's it's obvious that any time a person or character
in fiction takes an action or makes a choice. That
choice is downstream of both the person and the situation
(07:44):
people have in eight tendencies, but they're also constantly reacting
to the unique circumstances of every moment. And that this
distinction between thinking in terms of disposition and thinking in
terms of situation is the basis of today's episode, in
which will be talking about a psychological phenomenon known as
the fundamental attribution error or f a E. Or maybe
(08:07):
we should just call it FAYE because I think that'll
that will make today's talk easier. Yeah, this one is,
This one is is really interesting and I definitely encourage
everyone to stick with us because I think this is
one of those topics and once you learn a little
bit about your you're gonna you're gonna second guess in
a good way. Uh, most of the ways that you
interact with the with the world, I mean the way
(08:30):
that you judge, uh, the reasoning behind people's actions and choices,
and perhaps even beyond what people or animals are doing,
but just how the world works. Um. And I think
Alien is a fun place to start with us. I mean,
we could really just spend a lot of time out
here out here about Alien and applying f a too.
(08:52):
Like for instance, we mentioned Ash, the the android, you know,
being a synthetic human being created by humans. He's kind
of a simple I model of what humans are. And
even in him we see this kind of conflicting thing,
like is Ash ultimately an antagonist in this film because
of his internal programming or is it more to do
with that external command from the company. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
(09:16):
so he's got a robot is in a way like
a human here. Robots have programming, they have internal kind
of a nature to them, but then there are also
external factors. There are the inputs they're reacting to. And
then the xenomorph uh I means purely from an environmental standpoint,
uh it becomes a juvenile and then ultimately an adult
(09:40):
aboard this truly alien environment on the aboard this massive
spaceship created by these strange creatures that it's never encountered before. Yeah,
I think that is one of the funny things about
the alien lore has come to incorporate elements that are
almost as much inspired by the architecture of the Nostromo
as a ship from first movie as from like the
(10:02):
original idea of the aliens biology. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah,
And speaking of its biology, this is not so much
a plot point in the first film, but it becomes
established that there's a hybrid nature to the Xeno morph
that aspects of its biology are influenced by the host
because it is, you know, it it grows out of
the host. It's born out of its host death and
(10:25):
we but we tend to focus just purely on the
physical aspects of its being, like, oh, it came out
of a dog or some sort of a quadruped and
so it's more quadruped petal in its movements and it's so,
and it's morphology. However, why not nature? Uh what are there?
Are there perhaps aspects of its murderous nature in the
(10:46):
film that that come as much from the murderous nature
of the Homo sapiens that it has grown out of
as well. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. So the alien is
kind of shaped like a man in the first movie
because it comes out of Kane's Caine's Yeah. So, but
is it's in nature shaped like a man. Yes? Is
it also aggressive because it's in some way that the
(11:06):
human attributes are coming through. Yeah, so, you know, this
is all just food for thought, but this is the
kind of rethinking that that is, that is that becomes
possible when you start thinking about the fundamental attribution error. Yes,
and I really do think that this is a really
important concept that that people should have in their in
their tool kit right. And in fact, one of the
(11:27):
reasons I think I was inspired to talk about this
was because a while ago I was reading on edge
dot org. Do you ever read the stuff on their
website that they'll do a thing where they like, ask
one question to a whole bunch of different experts in
different disciplines, and everybody will give an answer to it. Yeah,
I've seen that before. Yeah, it can be interesting. So
like in ten they asked the question what scientific term
(11:50):
or concept ought to be more widely known, and the
American psychologist Richard Nisbit had an answer on the site
where he said, Okay, I think the thing that should
be more widely known is fundamental attribution error. And I
think he's exactly right. It's very useful for understanding the
kind of judgment errors we make every single day, especially
the kinds of errors that lead us to be unfair
(12:12):
and make poor determinations about people and their character. So
to define it succinctly a fundamental attribution error or I
guess we'll be calling it FAE today. In Nesbit's definition
is quote overestimating the role of traits and underestimating the
importance of situations. And I think this is this is
(12:33):
very important, especially when we're considering, you know, how stereotypes
are utilized, either consciously or subconsciously. Yeah, stereotypes really grow
out of out of f A. So I think this
definition he gives is a good one, But I do
want to clarify that f A doesn't only concern character traits.
It also concerns other types of personal or internal dispositions,
(12:56):
such as beliefs, attitudes of Billy d s, and things
like that, as we'll discuss in a bit, Basically, anything
that is a permanent or semi permanent part of a
person rather than a transient effect of the circumstances the
person is in. Yeah, I mean, and certainly the idea
that there's a transient nature to um to our identities
(13:20):
into our mind states. I mean, that's something that we
keep coming back again to again and again on the
show for various reasons, like when we when you know,
when we break down how we think and how our
minds work. Um, you know this, this idea of there
being this this permanent you've just kind of uh fades away. Yeah.
Another way of thinking about the same concept is, uh, so,
(13:41):
as we were discussing, a person's behavior at any given
moment is determined both by their disposition and by their situation.
But the f a E is specifically the fact that
studies show we tend to overestimate how well their disposition
will predict future behavior, and we tend to underestimate how
much their situation will predict future behavior. So exactly how
(14:05):
badly miscalibrated are we? Well? I want to read apart
from Nesbitt's answer in in the short article he has
he and he's studied this bias in human thinking for
many years. He says that, in fact, we are way
way off in our intuitions. Quote. In actual fact, when
large numbers of people are observed in a wide range
of situations, the correlation for trade related behavior runs about
(14:30):
point twenty or less. People think the correlation is around
point eighty. In reality, seeing Carlos behave more honestly than
Bill in a given situation increases the likelihood he will
behave more honestly in another situation from the chance level
of fifty to the vicinity of fifty five to fifty
(14:50):
seven percent. People think that if Carlos behaves more honestly
than Bill in one situation, the likelihood he'll behave more
honestly than Bill in another situation is eighty percent. So
that's that's like hugely off the mark. Yeah, I mean,
it's ultimately not as useful as we think and predicting uh,
how people around us are going to behave and likewise,
(15:12):
I mean the reverse is true, Like do we want
to be that miscategorized in our in other people's judgment
as well? Exactly? So I think maybe we should take
a break and then we come back we can look
a little bit of the research history on this subject.
Than alright, we're back. Um, you know, we're not focusing
as much on alien and for the rest of this podcast,
(15:33):
but we'll probably come back to Ripley, Andrew members and
uh and a little later on too. I'm gonna get
of course, into a little dungeons and dragons, But first up,
we're gonna turn to uh, some of the key studies
on f A. Right, so to quick refresher on the concept.
One way I found that I thought it was put
very well was in a two thousand paper by A.
(15:54):
Nesbit and Nora in Zion, where they say that the
fundamental attribution error quote refers to people's inclination to see
behavior is the result of dispositions corresponding to the apparent
nature of the behavior. This tendency often results in error
when there are obvious situational constraints that leave little or
(16:16):
no role for dispositions in producing the behavior. That so like,
even when we should be aware of what the conditions
and the situations causing the behavior are, we just sometimes
fail to take that into account. And this first study
I want to mention is an example of this. So
this first study was in nineteen sixty seven by Edward E.
(16:38):
Jones and Victor A. Harris called the Attribution of Attitudes
in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. So what happened here, Robert?
Imagine you are a test subject. I invite you to
come into a room and read an essay that I
tell you is written by a student on a debate
team to be delivered as an opening statement and competition.
And I tell you that the topic of the speech
(16:59):
is whether or not marijuana should be legalized, and the
student who wrote the speech was randomly assigned the role
of being either for or against legalization. So you read
the speech. Let's say it is for legalization of marijuana.
It makes a bunch of arguments. It says, you know, uh,
if we legalize marijuana, we will cut down on unfair
(17:20):
harmful outcomes, you know, unfair disparities and incarceration, on organized
crime and things like that. You know, it makes all
the arguments you'd expect. And then I ask you, what
do you think is the debate team members actual personal
view on the legalization of marijuana. Well, that's gonna this
is gonna be kind of tricky. I mean for starters,
(17:41):
I know where all this is going. Yeah, I mean
part of me also thinks that this depends on what
your your personal history is with say debate, with being
assigned essays of this nature. I mean I certainly was
assigned papers like this. Uh growing up, you know where
you had to uh you were just given a side
of a particular issue, and then you had to discuss
the supporting arguments for it, right, I mean, that's a
(18:03):
good way to hone your like persuasive writing skills. Um. So,
so you'd ask people, what do you think the person's
actual opinion is the mere fact that they wrote an
essay in favor of legalization. In fact, it doesn't tell
you anything here because you know that their position was
a signed randomly. So to answer, I don't know what
you do. You might look for little tells in the language,
(18:25):
like but if they're a good writer, then that wouldn't
really come through, right, But really you just wouldn't know.
But I think if we're all honest, if we weren't
put on guard by the by this coming up in
the context of this episode, right, I think we would
mostly be tempted to assume that the writer more likely
shared the view that they were expressing in this speech.
(18:46):
And this study by Jones and Harris in nineteen sixty
seven found that more often than not, people tended to
assume a writer actually privately held the beliefs that they
were expressing. Another example in the study was being pro
or anti Fidel Castro and uh, and they assume this
even when they're told that the writer had been randomly
(19:07):
assigned a position to take. So, I can you know
tell you that Jeffrey here is about to say that
Fidel Castro is great. But I told him he had
to say that. And then he comes out and he says,
Fidel Castro is great, And and I ask you, now,
do you think he actually thinks Fidel Castro is great?
People are more likely to say, yeah, yeah, I think
maybe he does when you have like no reason to
(19:30):
believe that at all. But of course that the core
consideration here is not the judgment of of personal essays
and whatnot, or debate team arguments like if this is
getting at at more everyday manifestations of f A oh sure,
I just want to be clear on that in case
anyone's like, well, why aren't we talking about essays about
(19:51):
Fidel Castro? Well, this because this is this early indication
that people are ignoring crucial situational information and judging a
person's mind state in their character. So people can take
situation into account to some degree, but they naturally tend
to give situation way less credit than makes sense and
give disposition more credit than makes sense. And the words
(20:13):
of the authors here quote. The main conclusion suggested is
that perceivers do take account of prior probabilities and situational
constraints when attributing private attitude, but perhaps do not wait
these factors as heavily as would be expected by a
rational analysis. And so there has been a ton of
other research over the years that has found similar things.
(20:34):
Like a corn In found that when a professor discusses
an idea or a belief in a classroom lecture, students
tend to assume that the professor personally holds that belief
or agrees with that idea. I think a great example
here would be like freudian Ism, because you really can't
talk about the history of psychology without talking about Freud.
(20:56):
And yet nobody should just like take Freud's word as
like science on psychology these days. So if a professor
in psychology class brings up Freud on some other subject,
the professor will probably think, I'm giving the students historical
context on this topic. But the students may be more
likely to think that the professor is mentioning of you
because they advocate or they agree with it. They're assuming
(21:18):
it's part of the professor's disposition. And I you know,
I've taught rhet comp classes before in which students they
have to learn to write persuasively, and in order to
teach this obviously, you know, to help students improve their work,
you have to question and find flaws in whatever argument
the student is making, even if you personally agree with
whatever thesis they're arguing. And I remember, there could be
(21:40):
this tendency for students to assume that if you're interrogating
their work in this way, it's because you actually personally
disagreed with them, or in a more general case, for
there's a tendency for students to assume that their grades
on papers are a direct unfolding of internal or disposition
a qualities in the teacher professor or so and so
(22:00):
is really mean, she's really strict, etcetera, as opposed to
external factors like there are high standards in this class,
or the paper I wrote had problems with it. Now,
that's not to say there aren't some terrible teachers out
there that could be making these judgments based on these criteria.
But but but you're talking about the the tendency to
(22:21):
misjudge the situation. Yes, though, I mean, I think I
guess most of the time you think you've got a
bad grade because your professor is mean, You're probably wrong
about that. Well, I've been watching a lot of Harry
Potter films, so that now I see what's happening. So
that's that's where my mind is going. Well that that's
a funny thing because one interesting thing is that F
(22:43):
a E seems to me to be necessary for fiction.
Like if you have a scene introducing a character, you
generally have to assume that the character's behavior in that
scene should be characteristic. In other words, it should give
the audience a good idea of that characters personality and traits.
Like if you wrote an opening scene in your screenplay
(23:05):
where a character was behaving un characteristically and just according
to certain situational factors, like Brian Cox says Bob McKee,
the screenwriting guru, you'd yell at you, you know from adaptation. Yeah,
he'd say, that's confusing, it's inefficient writing. You should avoid it,
I guess unless you're like deliberately trying to set up
some kind of ironic reversal, like it's comedy or something.
(23:28):
But even then it can be kind of problematic. Speaking
of Harry Potter, I'm not gonna give any spoilers, but
there is one major character that is eventually introduced and
then you find out, oh, that was never that real
character at all. That was somebody else pretending to be
that character. Um, And in retrospect that can be a
little confusing if you think on it too much. Yeah,
I guess that is. And then in terms of like,
(23:50):
you know, determining the you know, essentially the alignment of
a character. I mean in Harry Potter too, you have
the whole deal with the sorting had What what criteria
is this war hat taking into account? Is it it's
it's on your skull, so I guess it's focusing on
the contents of your head. Uh, But is it taking
into account the the situational um details of your scenario.
(24:13):
I mean, I guess characters do in good writing become
more complex over time as you become more familiar with them.
But I think it's it's it would just generally be
assumed to be bad writing to introduce a character in
a way in which they're behaving really un characteristically for themselves.
I mean, you want to show off early on what
people are like. And I guess this is all simply
(24:33):
because you assume audiences will commit the f A E
with respect to characters. You see a character behave one
way one time, you assume This is indicative of that
character's fundamental dispositions, their beliefs, traits, values, abilities, attitudes, and
not just some situation there in. Well, this is interest.
We should come back to this because I think this
(24:54):
is even more interesting the more we discuss f A. Okay,
and another study from teen seventy nine, this time by
Neapolitan and Girthles, called the Attribution of Friendliness. This did
something kind of like the the Essays thing, except they
just had people meet. They had you know, you'd meet
somebody and you get to decide is this person friendly
or unfriendly? Uh? Fundamentally is that it is their personality
(25:17):
friendly or unfriendly. Now, some of the people in the
study who you were getting to meet had been told
that they were supposed to act unfriendly. And then the
people and the participants were told, oh, this person has
been told they need to act unfriendly, and yet some
of the participants would actually rate the person as fundamentally unfriendly,
(25:38):
even though they'd been told by experimenters that the person
had been assigned this behavior pattern. Uh. And I guess
it's sort of like assuming that an actor who plays
a villain in a movie is actually a bad person.
You know, there's a certain logic to it, Like when
you've seen somebody play a villain in a movie, you
can understand what it would look and feel like for
them to actually be a bad person that somebody else.
(26:00):
That might be harder for you to picture this, but yeah,
I can tell you I've instructed Jeffrey to be a
sour puss when he talks to you. Uh. Then you
talk to Jeffrey and you say, how do you think
Jeffrey normally is. People are like, yeah, he's actually a
sour puss. But there was an interesting turn here that
was fairly simple. Subjects were less likely to make the
fundamental attribution error and assume that that one data point
(26:24):
was indicative of a person's real disposition if they got
to interact with the same person twice. So you meet
Jeffrey once and you're told that he's been instructed to
act like a jerk, you conclude he's actually a jerk.
You meet Jeffrey once and he's friendly. Then you meet
him again and you're told he's been instructed to act
like a jerk. You're more likely the second time to think, Oh,
(26:44):
this isn't really how he is. He's just acting out
the part. Now, this obviously seems related to the general
finding that the better we know a person, the more
we take into account situational information to explain their behaviors,
and the less we know a person, the more likely
we are to resort to disposition. All reasoning, you're probably
at the highest risk to commit the f A when
(27:06):
evaluating a stranger or somebody you're meeting for the first time. Yeah,
I mean, let this gets sound to the basic fact.
You know, the importance of first impressions, right, you never
get a second chance to make a first impression, but
you do get a first chance to make a second
impression and so forth. But but yeah, you got to
count on that second impression taking place. Uh yeah, I
(27:27):
think we can all, I mean we can all can
turn to examples in our own life where we we
either know we made a good first impression or more
likely we know that we didn't. Those are the ones
we tend to remember. Um, I know I've been I
I think I people have told me before that I sometimes, uh,
you know, come off as like less friendly or colder
and first impressions, and a lot of that comes from
(27:48):
me being more of an introvert, you know, I mean,
it's just how I uh, I'm a little more um
um reserved when I'm meeting people for the first time,
you know. Um. But then again, all of this is
pointing to stuff that we all know. Right that you
meet somebody for the first time, that first handshake is
not going to magically convey to you everything you need
(28:11):
to know about that person. But we still does like,
oh goodness, handshakes. Just speaking of of that, like the
ridiculousness of judgments based on handshakes, which which, by the way,
this is this is something we could cover in a
later episode. Yeah, I've heard that is also very cultural
at times, though, yeah, and uh, and it's not something
(28:32):
that's necessarily like known, if you're shaking the hands of
a person from a culture where a lighter handshake is
more appropriate, you're just going to judge them based on
your handshake culture when you in which you know, could
lean more towards the importance of that firm handshake or
something that is lighter uh in touch. But yeah, we
can make all sorts of ridiculous generalizations without wanting to
(28:55):
or realizing just based on something like that. Well, I
think some of the good news about the f A
is that this does seem like one of those biases
were being aware of. It makes a difference, like that
you can overcome this bias with some cognitive effort, and
we'll talk more about that as we go on. Um,
just like thinking about the fact that, oh yeah, the
(29:16):
circumstances of my first impression of a person might not
actually be a reflection, you know, deep reflection of who
they are that can be useful in in changing the
way we think about people. There's another interesting thing I
was thinking about in fundamental attribution error, and it's how
every time you know, you noticed this. Every time there's
like a mass murderer or a terrorist or a serial
(29:38):
killer who gets their identity gets revealed, what happens like
most of the time is they go interview this guy's
neighbors and co workers and they express shock. He was normal, quiet,
he was always nice to me. It's like they tend
to assume that if it was within a person's nature
to commit horrible crimes, the taint of evil should have
(29:59):
been evi within everyday interactions. But why should it have
been like this also seems to me an assumption based
on the FAE. Oh absolutely, I mean this. Of course,
we could go go crazy discussing this. How we when
somebody does something monstrous, we want to interpret their entire
identity as as monstrous and and as less human as possible.
(30:22):
I mean, they're in there their advantages and doing that, right,
it feels less dangerous and you feel and you feel
less in danger from from misjudging people in the future. Yes,
you want to feel like you would have been able
to pick them out immediately. Yeah. I think that's why
we tend to. Um. I mean just think of the
sort of the Wikipedia page photos of say serial killers. Uh.
(30:46):
They tend to run in either direction, right, Either it's
a really charming picture, um, but but you know, to
maybe sort of drive home how oh wow, we never
saw that coming. Or they pick something that is suitably monstrous,
be at the you know the John Wayne Glas gaycy
uh clown photo or you know a particularly snarling um
(31:07):
uh image of Ted Bundy, that sort of thing. Yes,
the more monstrous and inhuman and scary they look in
their media photos, the more comforting it is to us
because we're we're less troubled by the idea that they
could blend in with your life and you wouldn't know
about them, right, Uh, you know this is this This
reminds me a little bit of our photography episodes on
(31:29):
the On Invention, our other podcasts we put together, and
we were talking about the advantages of capturing truth and
in essence of a situation or perhaps an individual through photography.
But the thing about photography is there are snapshots. They
are moments, uh, and are even just our facial features
are something that is in flux. That's uh, that's you know,
(31:52):
versus than that's grounded in micro expressions and uh and
and and momentary expressions. And therefore, yeah, if you have
enough footage of somebody, and you have enough range in
their reactions, you can find the saintly Ted Bundy picture.
You can find a handsome Ted Bundy picture, and you
can find the snarling and monstrous Tad Bundy pictures as well.
And you can do this for anyone, uh, any politician,
(32:15):
any actor, or any individual, as long as you have
enough data to pull from. Well. In fact, I'd even
go maybe to the level of hypothesizing a correlation, which
is that I think a lot of particularly monstrous people
spend plenty of time homing their photogeneity that's a good point,
is that the word photogeneity. They practice being photogenic and
they get good at it. All Right, we're gonna take
(32:37):
a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank alright,
we're back, Okay. I want to pivot to one interesting
wrinkle in the f A, which is that multiple studies
have shown there's a very salient exception to the fundamental
attribution error tendency ourselves. On average, while we're more likely
(32:57):
to overestimate disposition an underestimate situation in interpreting the behavior
of other people, were likely to do exactly the opposite
when that great eye is turned inward. When explaining our
own personal behavior, we tend to overestimate the role of
situational factors and underestimate the role of internal factors like
(33:18):
our inherent character, traits and abilities and attitudes. There are
also studies indicating a self serving bias within the existing
f A bias uh, and it's in it's reversal in
the self. In other words, if I did something good,
that there's a disposition all explanation there, it's because of
something about me. If I did something bad, it's because
(33:39):
of something about the situation I was in. There's a
situational explanation. We've all observed this in others, right, the
way people make excuses when they do something bad and
think it's a fundamental part of their their own virtues
when they do something good. But if we're sufficiently critical,
of course, we we know that notice this in ourselves
as well, right, I mean, there's certainly there's a worthwhile
(33:59):
X size to be able or willing to flip that
in our own self analysis, like how much of the
good that I've done is a product of environment, and
how much of the bad uh it is is correspondingly,
you know, a product of of more ingrained aspects of
my identity. Yeah, exactly, And you know, I was thinking
(34:21):
it's the classic hypocrisy that you see come through so
often when people are considering justifications for help or aid
or relief, Like how commonly have you heard the sentiment,
you know, other people collect unemployment because they're lazy. I
collect unemployment because I had a really rough year and
I lost my job. You know, I've got circumstantial explanations.
(34:43):
Other people there's something wrong with them. This hypocrisy also
comes through in an extremely common phenomenon when people are
faced with like a debate or a disagreement about something.
Just keep an eye out for this when you're reading
your next Twitter argument. Uh, my position is tatd by
the facts, while your position is a result of psychological
(35:04):
facts about you. In other words, my position is the
result of external situational constraints like the facts and the
rules of logic and all that, and your position is
the result of internal dispositional characteristics of you as a person,
your emotional tendencies, your biases, etcetera. Yeah, this is interesting,
(35:25):
We do see. We see a lot of this in
in current discourse. Like, for instance, um, when one is
reminded to think about one's um um place of privilege
in any given topic like that is essentially kind of
coming back to what I was talking about, like thinking
about Uh, you know, if you stop and think about, say,
the good in one's life and think about how much
(35:46):
of that is environmental and situational. Um Uh, It's it's
a worthwhile exercise. Absolutely, Yeah, totally. I mean, well, consideration
of the privileges one has received is exactly asking people
to consider, or is to ask them to think about
the the opposite of the fa that we tend to
apply to ourselves Yeah, to like ask people to consider
(36:07):
situational factors they have benefited from, rather than thinking that
all of their you know, all of the good things
that have happened to them are due to their virtues
and greatness. But in the in the case of like,
you know, arguments about like attributing your opinions to your
psychology and my opinions to my you know, just to
how things are. It's it's just hilarious how often you
(36:30):
see this deployed in arguments today. My opinion isn't even
really my opinion, it's just the way the world is.
It's fully externalized. Your opinion is a direct unfolding of
your personal defects. Yeah, you see it all the time,
and you know from from various sides. But back to so,
you know, you've got the opposite of the fundamental attribution
error taking place when we evaluate ourselves. I wonder why
(36:52):
is this, Like, why do we reverse the bias when
the eyes turned inward? I think one thing is just
that we have the opportunity to observe ourselves in lots
of scenarios, and we come to understand that our behavior
changes according to the situation. Obviously, and this seems in
line with the fact that the better you know a person,
the more you get to sample their behavior, the more
(37:12):
you take situation into account when you're judging them. Right,
And then I guess, I mean, it makes sense that
that we would we would have we would employ shortcuts
in uh in in in in figuring out or guessing
the mind states of others. You know that we I mean,
we would love to think of ourselves as the kind
of person who is so compassionate that every minor character
(37:35):
in their life is given full weight and full consideration.
But we don't have time. We don't have time, we
don't have the mental capacity to do that, So we
end up we've evolved to to utilize all these shortcuts,
which in many cases can be rather unfair and in
some cases perhaps even dangerous. Oh, they can be extremely dangerous.
And one reason is that some studies have shown that
(37:56):
this concept gets extended beyond just the individual will level.
Like there are some studies indicating that both the f
A and the self directed reversal of the f A
extend beyond individuals to groups. In other words, people are
more likely to lean toward disposition all explanations for people
they see as outgroup members and situational explanations for people
(38:18):
they see as in group members. If you see people
as part of your tribe, part of your group, you're
more likely to treat them like you treat yourself, meaning
you you know, take into factor, okay, you know they're
external influences on what they're doing. And if you see
people as outside your tribe, you're more likely to take
their actions as indications of their fundamental character or of
the fundamental characteristics you believe common to their group. And
(38:42):
all of this is, of course terrible if you want
there to be any kind of actual communication between two
given tribes, between two given group given true groups, if
you want there to be any kind of peace, stability
or back and forth. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can
see how this exact bias lies behind all kinds of
problems of of prejudice and stereotyping and all that. But interestingly,
(39:07):
on the other hand, that there are some studies that
indicate that's in some cases at least simply manipulating perspective
through video feeds can reverse the effect, at least on
an individual level. So think about it like this, If
you watch video of a scene taken from another person's
visual perspective. So you're seeing through Jeffrey's eyes or you're
(39:29):
seeing through Ripley's eyes, you are more likely to judge
that person situationally and less likely to judge them disposition
a lee than you would if you're just watching them
from a third person vantage point. And the reverse also
appears to be true in watching video of yourself from
a third person perspective, it makes you more likely to
(39:49):
judge yourself disposition a lee. Interesting. I feel like you're
touched on some of these differences in like third and
first person. I believe there's some studies that look at
this in video gaming and how we interact with our
given characters avatar, which is especially interesting when we think
of games where were we have the ability to jump
back and forth between the two. But the idea of
(40:11):
being able to apply this viewpoint to your own life
and the lives of others, which has a wonderful kind
of black mirror vibe to it. Uh that's interesting. I
like that. Yeah, it is. And I didn't find a
study on this. Maybe there is one I just didn't
come across, But I wondered, can the can the effect
to be reversed through perspective manipulation for group based thinking
(40:31):
as well, like are there ways I mean this in
a way would be the classic like try to put
yourself in somebody else's shoes, Like can you see the
world from the perspective of somebody who you regard as
your out group? And would that help in reducing you know,
the kind of disposition all automatic attributing of characteristics to
(40:53):
them that you do off very limited data. By the way,
I had to explain that saying, uh, wearing somebody else's
shoes walking a mile on someone else's shoes to my son,
I guess for the first time. I guess it had
just not come up before. But then I dropped it
in some you know, daily conversation and he was like,
what what what We're supposed to wear other people's shoes?
(41:14):
Like how does that even work? And it is kind
of weird, Like if I wear someone else's shoes there
there's so many of factors like that that's not going
to really give me any idea what their their personal experiences,
their personal truth or their you know, what kind of
of of constraints and privileges they're dealing with. Yeah, it
really should be walk a mile and somebody else's Google
(41:35):
glass that say filming from their perspective, I don't know
what the real product there now is walk a mile
and somebody else's go pro. Yes, all right, we're gonna
go ahead and close out the episode right now because
we're gonna have to split this one into We're going
a bit long here, so this was part one of
our look at f a E. But our next episode
(41:57):
will continue the discussion and uh, and I'll make sure
we get some dungeons and dragons in there, just to
just to continue the uh, the the partial focus on
fantastic elements to keep the big cat magic going. Yeah,
we gotta do it. Uh. In the meantime, if you
want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, you know where to go. Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's the website. You can get
the show there, but you can also get the show
(42:19):
any number of other places. Wherever you do get Stuff
to Blow your Mind, make sure that you have subscribed,
and make sure that you've rated and reviewed the show,
because these small steps help us out immensely in the
long run. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
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(42:39):
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
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to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart
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(43:01):
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about
a concept in psychology. But I thought we should get
there with a little bit of sci fi story time. Yeah,
(00:24):
let's do it. Let's let's unearthed one of the classics
here to help us better understand this. Really, and I
think kind of intimidatingly named a concept. Yeah, it's actually,
I think a fairly straightforward concept once you see it
in the in the um context of a story. So
gather ye round the fire and let me tell you
a tale of how one day, the Wayland commercial towing
(00:45):
vessel the U s c S S Mastroma, was in
transit returning a few million tons of ore from an
off world mining planet. I guess you recognize what this
is now, Robert, Oh, this would be really Scott's Alien,
of course it is. So. In the middle of its
turn journey, the crew of the nest Roma was awakened
by a distress beacon emanating from a desolate, uninhabited, wind
(01:07):
swept planet with no indigenous life. So the ship unhitched
from its cargo and it's set down on the planet
to investigate. Three officers, including the captain Dallas, left the
ship in e v A suits to locate the source
of the distress call, leaving the warrant officer, Ellen Ripley
in charge of the vessel until they return. So she's
(01:29):
in command now and while the party is away, Ripley
sits in a cold room alone, breathing stale air, analyzing
the distress signal from the beacon, and she begins to
have a hunch that the signal is not actually a
call for help, but a warning to stay away. After
a few hours, the surface party returns with two crew
(01:51):
members carrying a third member named Kane, who is unconscious,
and the captain of the ship, Dallas, who was again
he was a member of the away party. He asks
Ripley to open the hatch and let them inside, and
Ripley she wants to ask a few questions. First, she
asks what's wrong with Kane. Dallas tells her that he
has something attached to him. Ripley asks, well, what is it?
(02:15):
Dallas says it's some kind of organism, and he orders
her to open the doors and let them in. Ripley refuses.
She says it's against procedure to let an unknown organism
on board, and Kane will have to be kept outside
in quarantine for twenty four hours. Dallas says Kane could
die in twenty four hours and tells her again to
let them inside. Again, Ripley refuses, saying that the quarantine
(02:38):
procedure must be obeyed. Furious, Dallas overrides her and then
gets another crew member, Ash played by Ian Holme, to
use his authority as captain to have the doors opened. Anyway.
They bring Kane inside and take him to medical bay,
where Ian Holme waits, and of course, everything else in
the film spirals out from this um. Ash, of course,
(02:59):
we we later find out, is synthetic. He's an android yea,
and so he's he has some some key programming and
some key directives from the company that are influencing his
excitement here as well. But I don't want to ask
about Ash quite yet. I want to ask about Ripley
and Dallas, and analyzing this scene. I just want to
ask a couple of questions about the character's behaviors. Number One,
(03:23):
why did Ripley refuse to let her crewmates back inside?
And number two, why did Dallas override her? Now you
can answer these questions a million ways, right, But there's
one fundamental type of distinction you could make in the
answers that we want to focus on today, and that's
the distinction between explanations that appeal to circumstances and explanations
(03:46):
that appeal to disposition or character. So some answers to
these questions that could appeal to disposition. How about Ripley
refused because she is inherently lawful and orderly. She obeys
rules in general and appreciates that the procedures exist for
a reason. That seems to you know you, You could
characterize it like that, right, Yeah, as well discussed I
(04:08):
think that's a very easy characterization to make here. You
could also say that she's calm under pressure, she's logical
in working out the consequences of deviating from from procedure.
If you want to look at her less sympathetically, you
could say that she refused to let her crewmates inside
because she's cold hearted, or she's selfish, or she lacks empathy.
I never, I never would make those charges against Rippley,
(04:30):
But someone could, Yeah, they could. Meanwhile, and also thinking
about disposition and character, you could say that Dallas tried
to override Ripley because he's rebellious and impulsive, because he
thinks emotionally rather than rationally. You could say he did
it because he was sexist and he didn't respect Ripley's
ruling because of her gender. You could say he did
(04:50):
it because he was fundamentally caring and wanted to protect
his injured crew member and get a medical attention as
soon as possible. All these things are appealing to things
about him as a person, right, And you know, I
think it it lines up with the way we tend
to watch him film like Alien. Anyway, you were talking,
you mentioned the stale air, and I had to hold
(05:11):
back from jumping in and saying, well, I don't know,
I never thought that the air was stale on the
nest froma I always thought it would be like this,
especially in those really christine white settings that would have
this this this rich, comforting smell of air condition and
like a really well air conditioned house during the summer, uh,
which for some reason is like a something that I
get kind of nostalgic for. I don't know, it looks
(05:33):
stale to me. I mean you can almost kind of
see a film on the surfaces in that in that
bridge room. Well a little bit, but but at any way,
we tend to watch a film like Alien and we
focus on the characters, the monster, and then we we
tend to pick up things about the setting in the environment. Secondly, Uh,
when if you're going to see somebody that is that
(05:54):
is written about Alien or they're probably gonna be focusing
on characters or monster monster's biology. They're probably not as
concerned with well, stars of you know, some of the
aspects that we're gonna be talking about here today. But
those aspects like like the environment, the setting, they're crucial
if you want to invoke the other kind of answer,
(06:14):
you know, answers that do not appeal to character traits
and dispositions, but answers that appeal to external factors and
the details of the situation. So to answer the same
questions according to these kinds of answers, you could say,
maybe Ripley refused entry because the quarantine rules exist, and
the way she's been conditioned as an employee of this
(06:37):
company is to treat them as inviolable, right, And these
are both external factors influencing her behavior in this read right,
And maybe also it was because she felt uneasy on
this hostile planet that nobody had ever been to before.
She was put on guard by the suspicion that the
distress beacon was a warning to stay away. Maybe she
was even physically cold in the cabin of the ship
(06:58):
and this shifted her mood to make her more skeptical
and wary because of all that air conditioning I was
talking about earlier, exactly. Uh, And then you could do
the same thing for Dallas. And maybe Dallas ignored her,
tried to override her because he was in a unique
and terrifying situation. He had a crew member with an
alien attached to it, you know, attached to his face.
That's not normal. This was completely novel and terrifying, causing
(07:21):
him to panic. Maybe he ignored her because he'd been
breathing heavily on his surface walk and was experiencing mild
hyperventilation and this was clouding his judgment. So this distinction
is what we want to hammer home at the beginning here.
It's it's obvious that any time a person or character
in fiction takes an action or makes a choice. That
choice is downstream of both the person and the situation
(07:44):
people have in eight tendencies, but they're also constantly reacting
to the unique circumstances of every moment. And that this
distinction between thinking in terms of disposition and thinking in
terms of situation is the basis of today's episode, in
which will be talking about a psychological phenomenon known as
the fundamental attribution error or f a E. Or maybe
(08:07):
we should just call it FAYE because I think that'll
that will make today's talk easier. Yeah, this one is,
This one is is really interesting and I definitely encourage
everyone to stick with us because I think this is
one of those topics and once you learn a little
bit about your you're gonna you're gonna second guess in
a good way. Uh, most of the ways that you
interact with the with the world, I mean the way
(08:30):
that you judge, uh, the reasoning behind people's actions and choices,
and perhaps even beyond what people or animals are doing,
but just how the world works. Um. And I think
Alien is a fun place to start with us. I mean,
we could really just spend a lot of time out
here out here about Alien and applying f a too.
(08:52):
Like for instance, we mentioned Ash, the the android, you know,
being a synthetic human being created by humans. He's kind
of a simple I model of what humans are. And
even in him we see this kind of conflicting thing,
like is Ash ultimately an antagonist in this film because
of his internal programming or is it more to do
with that external command from the company. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
(09:16):
so he's got a robot is in a way like
a human here. Robots have programming, they have internal kind
of a nature to them, but then there are also
external factors. There are the inputs they're reacting to. And
then the xenomorph uh I means purely from an environmental standpoint,
uh it becomes a juvenile and then ultimately an adult
(09:40):
aboard this truly alien environment on the aboard this massive
spaceship created by these strange creatures that it's never encountered before. Yeah,
I think that is one of the funny things about
the alien lore has come to incorporate elements that are
almost as much inspired by the architecture of the Nostromo
as a ship from first movie as from like the
(10:02):
original idea of the aliens biology. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah,
And speaking of its biology, this is not so much
a plot point in the first film, but it becomes
established that there's a hybrid nature to the Xeno morph
that aspects of its biology are influenced by the host
because it is, you know, it it grows out of
the host. It's born out of its host death and
(10:25):
we but we tend to focus just purely on the
physical aspects of its being, like, oh, it came out
of a dog or some sort of a quadruped and
so it's more quadruped petal in its movements and it's so,
and it's morphology. However, why not nature? Uh what are there?
Are there perhaps aspects of its murderous nature in the
(10:46):
film that that come as much from the murderous nature
of the Homo sapiens that it has grown out of
as well. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. So the alien is
kind of shaped like a man in the first movie
because it comes out of Kane's Caine's Yeah. So, but
is it's in nature shaped like a man. Yes? Is
it also aggressive because it's in some way that the
(11:06):
human attributes are coming through. Yeah, so, you know, this
is all just food for thought, but this is the
kind of rethinking that that is, that is that becomes
possible when you start thinking about the fundamental attribution error. Yes,
and I really do think that this is a really
important concept that that people should have in their in
their tool kit right. And in fact, one of the
(11:27):
reasons I think I was inspired to talk about this
was because a while ago I was reading on edge
dot org. Do you ever read the stuff on their
website that they'll do a thing where they like, ask
one question to a whole bunch of different experts in
different disciplines, and everybody will give an answer to it. Yeah,
I've seen that before. Yeah, it can be interesting. So
like in ten they asked the question what scientific term
(11:50):
or concept ought to be more widely known, and the
American psychologist Richard Nisbit had an answer on the site
where he said, Okay, I think the thing that should
be more widely known is fundamental attribution error. And I
think he's exactly right. It's very useful for understanding the
kind of judgment errors we make every single day, especially
the kinds of errors that lead us to be unfair
(12:12):
and make poor determinations about people and their character. So
to define it succinctly a fundamental attribution error or I
guess we'll be calling it FAE today. In Nesbit's definition
is quote overestimating the role of traits and underestimating the
importance of situations. And I think this is this is
(12:33):
very important, especially when we're considering, you know, how stereotypes
are utilized, either consciously or subconsciously. Yeah, stereotypes really grow
out of out of f A. So I think this
definition he gives is a good one, But I do
want to clarify that f A doesn't only concern character traits.
It also concerns other types of personal or internal dispositions,
(12:56):
such as beliefs, attitudes of Billy d s, and things
like that, as we'll discuss in a bit, Basically, anything
that is a permanent or semi permanent part of a
person rather than a transient effect of the circumstances the
person is in. Yeah, I mean, and certainly the idea
that there's a transient nature to um to our identities
(13:20):
into our mind states. I mean, that's something that we
keep coming back again to again and again on the
show for various reasons, like when we when you know,
when we break down how we think and how our
minds work. Um, you know this, this idea of there
being this this permanent you've just kind of uh fades away. Yeah.
Another way of thinking about the same concept is, uh, so,
(13:41):
as we were discussing, a person's behavior at any given
moment is determined both by their disposition and by their situation.
But the f a E is specifically the fact that
studies show we tend to overestimate how well their disposition
will predict future behavior, and we tend to underestimate how
much their situation will predict future behavior. So exactly how
(14:05):
badly miscalibrated are we? Well? I want to read apart
from Nesbitt's answer in in the short article he has
he and he's studied this bias in human thinking for
many years. He says that, in fact, we are way
way off in our intuitions. Quote. In actual fact, when
large numbers of people are observed in a wide range
of situations, the correlation for trade related behavior runs about
(14:30):
point twenty or less. People think the correlation is around
point eighty. In reality, seeing Carlos behave more honestly than
Bill in a given situation increases the likelihood he will
behave more honestly in another situation from the chance level
of fifty to the vicinity of fifty five to fifty
(14:50):
seven percent. People think that if Carlos behaves more honestly
than Bill in one situation, the likelihood he'll behave more
honestly than Bill in another situation is eighty percent. So
that's that's like hugely off the mark. Yeah, I mean,
it's ultimately not as useful as we think and predicting uh,
how people around us are going to behave and likewise,
(15:12):
I mean the reverse is true, Like do we want
to be that miscategorized in our in other people's judgment
as well? Exactly? So I think maybe we should take
a break and then we come back we can look
a little bit of the research history on this subject.
Than alright, we're back. Um, you know, we're not focusing
as much on alien and for the rest of this podcast,
(15:33):
but we'll probably come back to Ripley, Andrew members and
uh and a little later on too. I'm gonna get
of course, into a little dungeons and dragons, But first up,
we're gonna turn to uh, some of the key studies
on f A. Right, so to quick refresher on the concept.
One way I found that I thought it was put
very well was in a two thousand paper by A.
(15:54):
Nesbit and Nora in Zion, where they say that the
fundamental attribution error quote refers to people's inclination to see
behavior is the result of dispositions corresponding to the apparent
nature of the behavior. This tendency often results in error
when there are obvious situational constraints that leave little or
(16:16):
no role for dispositions in producing the behavior. That so like,
even when we should be aware of what the conditions
and the situations causing the behavior are, we just sometimes
fail to take that into account. And this first study
I want to mention is an example of this. So
this first study was in nineteen sixty seven by Edward E.
(16:38):
Jones and Victor A. Harris called the Attribution of Attitudes
in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. So what happened here, Robert?
Imagine you are a test subject. I invite you to
come into a room and read an essay that I
tell you is written by a student on a debate
team to be delivered as an opening statement and competition.
And I tell you that the topic of the speech
(16:59):
is whether or not marijuana should be legalized, and the
student who wrote the speech was randomly assigned the role
of being either for or against legalization. So you read
the speech. Let's say it is for legalization of marijuana.
It makes a bunch of arguments. It says, you know, uh,
if we legalize marijuana, we will cut down on unfair
(17:20):
harmful outcomes, you know, unfair disparities and incarceration, on organized
crime and things like that. You know, it makes all
the arguments you'd expect. And then I ask you, what
do you think is the debate team members actual personal
view on the legalization of marijuana. Well, that's gonna this
is gonna be kind of tricky. I mean for starters,
(17:41):
I know where all this is going. Yeah, I mean
part of me also thinks that this depends on what
your your personal history is with say debate, with being
assigned essays of this nature. I mean I certainly was
assigned papers like this. Uh growing up, you know where
you had to uh you were just given a side
of a particular issue, and then you had to discuss
the supporting arguments for it, right, I mean, that's a
(18:03):
good way to hone your like persuasive writing skills. Um. So,
so you'd ask people, what do you think the person's
actual opinion is the mere fact that they wrote an
essay in favor of legalization. In fact, it doesn't tell
you anything here because you know that their position was
a signed randomly. So to answer, I don't know what
you do. You might look for little tells in the language,
(18:25):
like but if they're a good writer, then that wouldn't
really come through, right, But really you just wouldn't know.
But I think if we're all honest, if we weren't
put on guard by the by this coming up in
the context of this episode, right, I think we would
mostly be tempted to assume that the writer more likely
shared the view that they were expressing in this speech.
(18:46):
And this study by Jones and Harris in nineteen sixty
seven found that more often than not, people tended to
assume a writer actually privately held the beliefs that they
were expressing. Another example in the study was being pro
or anti Fidel Castro and uh, and they assume this
even when they're told that the writer had been randomly
(19:07):
assigned a position to take. So, I can you know
tell you that Jeffrey here is about to say that
Fidel Castro is great. But I told him he had
to say that. And then he comes out and he says,
Fidel Castro is great, And and I ask you, now,
do you think he actually thinks Fidel Castro is great?
People are more likely to say, yeah, yeah, I think
maybe he does when you have like no reason to
(19:30):
believe that at all. But of course that the core
consideration here is not the judgment of of personal essays
and whatnot, or debate team arguments like if this is
getting at at more everyday manifestations of f A oh sure,
I just want to be clear on that in case
anyone's like, well, why aren't we talking about essays about
(19:51):
Fidel Castro? Well, this because this is this early indication
that people are ignoring crucial situational information and judging a
person's mind state in their character. So people can take
situation into account to some degree, but they naturally tend
to give situation way less credit than makes sense and
give disposition more credit than makes sense. And the words
(20:13):
of the authors here quote. The main conclusion suggested is
that perceivers do take account of prior probabilities and situational
constraints when attributing private attitude, but perhaps do not wait
these factors as heavily as would be expected by a
rational analysis. And so there has been a ton of
other research over the years that has found similar things.
(20:34):
Like a corn In found that when a professor discusses
an idea or a belief in a classroom lecture, students
tend to assume that the professor personally holds that belief
or agrees with that idea. I think a great example
here would be like freudian Ism, because you really can't
talk about the history of psychology without talking about Freud.
(20:56):
And yet nobody should just like take Freud's word as
like science on psychology these days. So if a professor
in psychology class brings up Freud on some other subject,
the professor will probably think, I'm giving the students historical
context on this topic. But the students may be more
likely to think that the professor is mentioning of you
because they advocate or they agree with it. They're assuming
(21:18):
it's part of the professor's disposition. And I you know,
I've taught rhet comp classes before in which students they
have to learn to write persuasively, and in order to
teach this obviously, you know, to help students improve their work,
you have to question and find flaws in whatever argument
the student is making, even if you personally agree with
whatever thesis they're arguing. And I remember, there could be
(21:40):
this tendency for students to assume that if you're interrogating
their work in this way, it's because you actually personally
disagreed with them, or in a more general case, for
there's a tendency for students to assume that their grades
on papers are a direct unfolding of internal or disposition
a qualities in the teacher professor or so and so
(22:00):
is really mean, she's really strict, etcetera, as opposed to
external factors like there are high standards in this class,
or the paper I wrote had problems with it. Now,
that's not to say there aren't some terrible teachers out
there that could be making these judgments based on these criteria.
But but but you're talking about the the tendency to
(22:21):
misjudge the situation. Yes, though, I mean, I think I
guess most of the time you think you've got a
bad grade because your professor is mean, You're probably wrong
about that. Well, I've been watching a lot of Harry
Potter films, so that now I see what's happening. So
that's that's where my mind is going. Well that that's
a funny thing because one interesting thing is that F
(22:43):
a E seems to me to be necessary for fiction.
Like if you have a scene introducing a character, you
generally have to assume that the character's behavior in that
scene should be characteristic. In other words, it should give
the audience a good idea of that characters personality and traits.
Like if you wrote an opening scene in your screenplay
(23:05):
where a character was behaving un characteristically and just according
to certain situational factors, like Brian Cox says Bob McKee,
the screenwriting guru, you'd yell at you, you know from adaptation. Yeah,
he'd say, that's confusing, it's inefficient writing. You should avoid it,
I guess unless you're like deliberately trying to set up
some kind of ironic reversal, like it's comedy or something.
(23:28):
But even then it can be kind of problematic. Speaking
of Harry Potter, I'm not gonna give any spoilers, but
there is one major character that is eventually introduced and
then you find out, oh, that was never that real
character at all. That was somebody else pretending to be
that character. Um, And in retrospect that can be a
little confusing if you think on it too much. Yeah,
I guess that is. And then in terms of like,
(23:50):
you know, determining the you know, essentially the alignment of
a character. I mean in Harry Potter too, you have
the whole deal with the sorting had What what criteria
is this war hat taking into account? Is it it's
it's on your skull, so I guess it's focusing on
the contents of your head. Uh, But is it taking
into account the the situational um details of your scenario.
(24:13):
I mean, I guess characters do in good writing become
more complex over time as you become more familiar with them.
But I think it's it's it would just generally be
assumed to be bad writing to introduce a character in
a way in which they're behaving really un characteristically for themselves.
I mean, you want to show off early on what
people are like. And I guess this is all simply
(24:33):
because you assume audiences will commit the f A E
with respect to characters. You see a character behave one
way one time, you assume This is indicative of that
character's fundamental dispositions, their beliefs, traits, values, abilities, attitudes, and
not just some situation there in. Well, this is interest.
We should come back to this because I think this
(24:54):
is even more interesting the more we discuss f A. Okay,
and another study from teen seventy nine, this time by
Neapolitan and Girthles, called the Attribution of Friendliness. This did
something kind of like the the Essays thing, except they
just had people meet. They had you know, you'd meet
somebody and you get to decide is this person friendly
or unfriendly? Uh? Fundamentally is that it is their personality
(25:17):
friendly or unfriendly. Now, some of the people in the
study who you were getting to meet had been told
that they were supposed to act unfriendly. And then the
people and the participants were told, oh, this person has
been told they need to act unfriendly, and yet some
of the participants would actually rate the person as fundamentally unfriendly,
(25:38):
even though they'd been told by experimenters that the person
had been assigned this behavior pattern. Uh. And I guess
it's sort of like assuming that an actor who plays
a villain in a movie is actually a bad person.
You know, there's a certain logic to it, Like when
you've seen somebody play a villain in a movie, you
can understand what it would look and feel like for
them to actually be a bad person that somebody else.
(26:00):
That might be harder for you to picture this, but yeah,
I can tell you I've instructed Jeffrey to be a
sour puss when he talks to you. Uh. Then you
talk to Jeffrey and you say, how do you think
Jeffrey normally is. People are like, yeah, he's actually a
sour puss. But there was an interesting turn here that
was fairly simple. Subjects were less likely to make the
fundamental attribution error and assume that that one data point
(26:24):
was indicative of a person's real disposition if they got
to interact with the same person twice. So you meet
Jeffrey once and you're told that he's been instructed to
act like a jerk, you conclude he's actually a jerk.
You meet Jeffrey once and he's friendly. Then you meet
him again and you're told he's been instructed to act
like a jerk. You're more likely the second time to think, Oh,
(26:44):
this isn't really how he is. He's just acting out
the part. Now, this obviously seems related to the general
finding that the better we know a person, the more
we take into account situational information to explain their behaviors,
and the less we know a person, the more likely
we are to resort to disposition. All reasoning, you're probably
at the highest risk to commit the f A when
(27:06):
evaluating a stranger or somebody you're meeting for the first time. Yeah,
I mean, let this gets sound to the basic fact.
You know, the importance of first impressions, right, you never
get a second chance to make a first impression, but
you do get a first chance to make a second
impression and so forth. But but yeah, you got to
count on that second impression taking place. Uh yeah, I
(27:27):
think we can all, I mean we can all can
turn to examples in our own life where we we
either know we made a good first impression or more
likely we know that we didn't. Those are the ones
we tend to remember. Um, I know I've been I
I think I people have told me before that I sometimes, uh,
you know, come off as like less friendly or colder
and first impressions, and a lot of that comes from
(27:48):
me being more of an introvert, you know, I mean,
it's just how I uh, I'm a little more um
um reserved when I'm meeting people for the first time,
you know. Um. But then again, all of this is
pointing to stuff that we all know. Right that you
meet somebody for the first time, that first handshake is
not going to magically convey to you everything you need
(28:11):
to know about that person. But we still does like,
oh goodness, handshakes. Just speaking of of that, like the
ridiculousness of judgments based on handshakes, which which, by the way,
this is this is something we could cover in a
later episode. Yeah, I've heard that is also very cultural
at times, though, yeah, and uh, and it's not something
(28:32):
that's necessarily like known, if you're shaking the hands of
a person from a culture where a lighter handshake is
more appropriate, you're just going to judge them based on
your handshake culture when you in which you know, could
lean more towards the importance of that firm handshake or
something that is lighter uh in touch. But yeah, we
can make all sorts of ridiculous generalizations without wanting to
(28:55):
or realizing just based on something like that. Well, I
think some of the good news about the f A
is that this does seem like one of those biases
were being aware of. It makes a difference, like that
you can overcome this bias with some cognitive effort, and
we'll talk more about that as we go on. Um,
just like thinking about the fact that, oh yeah, the
(29:16):
circumstances of my first impression of a person might not
actually be a reflection, you know, deep reflection of who
they are that can be useful in in changing the
way we think about people. There's another interesting thing I
was thinking about in fundamental attribution error, and it's how
every time you know, you noticed this. Every time there's
like a mass murderer or a terrorist or a serial
(29:38):
killer who gets their identity gets revealed, what happens like
most of the time is they go interview this guy's
neighbors and co workers and they express shock. He was normal, quiet,
he was always nice to me. It's like they tend
to assume that if it was within a person's nature
to commit horrible crimes, the taint of evil should have
(29:59):
been evi within everyday interactions. But why should it have
been like this also seems to me an assumption based
on the FAE. Oh absolutely, I mean this. Of course,
we could go go crazy discussing this. How we when
somebody does something monstrous, we want to interpret their entire
identity as as monstrous and and as less human as possible.
(30:22):
I mean, they're in there their advantages and doing that, right,
it feels less dangerous and you feel and you feel
less in danger from from misjudging people in the future. Yes,
you want to feel like you would have been able
to pick them out immediately. Yeah. I think that's why
we tend to. Um. I mean just think of the
sort of the Wikipedia page photos of say serial killers. Uh.
(30:46):
They tend to run in either direction, right, Either it's
a really charming picture, um, but but you know, to
maybe sort of drive home how oh wow, we never
saw that coming. Or they pick something that is suitably monstrous,
be at the you know the John Wayne Glas gaycy
uh clown photo or you know a particularly snarling um
(31:07):
uh image of Ted Bundy, that sort of thing. Yes,
the more monstrous and inhuman and scary they look in
their media photos, the more comforting it is to us
because we're we're less troubled by the idea that they
could blend in with your life and you wouldn't know
about them, right, Uh, you know this is this This
reminds me a little bit of our photography episodes on
(31:29):
the On Invention, our other podcasts we put together, and
we were talking about the advantages of capturing truth and
in essence of a situation or perhaps an individual through photography.
But the thing about photography is there are snapshots. They
are moments, uh, and are even just our facial features
are something that is in flux. That's uh, that's you know,
(31:52):
versus than that's grounded in micro expressions and uh and
and and momentary expressions. And therefore, yeah, if you have
enough footage of somebody, and you have enough range in
their reactions, you can find the saintly Ted Bundy picture.
You can find a handsome Ted Bundy picture, and you
can find the snarling and monstrous Tad Bundy pictures as well.
And you can do this for anyone, uh, any politician,
(32:15):
any actor, or any individual, as long as you have
enough data to pull from. Well. In fact, I'd even
go maybe to the level of hypothesizing a correlation, which
is that I think a lot of particularly monstrous people
spend plenty of time homing their photogeneity that's a good point,
is that the word photogeneity. They practice being photogenic and
they get good at it. All Right, we're gonna take
(32:37):
a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank alright,
we're back, Okay. I want to pivot to one interesting
wrinkle in the f A, which is that multiple studies
have shown there's a very salient exception to the fundamental
attribution error tendency ourselves. On average, while we're more likely
(32:57):
to overestimate disposition an underestimate situation in interpreting the behavior
of other people, were likely to do exactly the opposite
when that great eye is turned inward. When explaining our
own personal behavior, we tend to overestimate the role of
situational factors and underestimate the role of internal factors like
(33:18):
our inherent character, traits and abilities and attitudes. There are
also studies indicating a self serving bias within the existing
f A bias uh, and it's in it's reversal in
the self. In other words, if I did something good,
that there's a disposition all explanation there, it's because of
something about me. If I did something bad, it's because
(33:39):
of something about the situation I was in. There's a
situational explanation. We've all observed this in others, right, the
way people make excuses when they do something bad and
think it's a fundamental part of their their own virtues
when they do something good. But if we're sufficiently critical,
of course, we we know that notice this in ourselves
as well, right, I mean, there's certainly there's a worthwhile
(33:59):
X size to be able or willing to flip that
in our own self analysis, like how much of the
good that I've done is a product of environment, and
how much of the bad uh it is is correspondingly,
you know, a product of of more ingrained aspects of
my identity. Yeah, exactly, And you know, I was thinking
(34:21):
it's the classic hypocrisy that you see come through so
often when people are considering justifications for help or aid
or relief, Like how commonly have you heard the sentiment,
you know, other people collect unemployment because they're lazy. I
collect unemployment because I had a really rough year and
I lost my job. You know, I've got circumstantial explanations.
(34:43):
Other people there's something wrong with them. This hypocrisy also
comes through in an extremely common phenomenon when people are
faced with like a debate or a disagreement about something.
Just keep an eye out for this when you're reading
your next Twitter argument. Uh, my position is tatd by
the facts, while your position is a result of psychological
(35:04):
facts about you. In other words, my position is the
result of external situational constraints like the facts and the
rules of logic and all that, and your position is
the result of internal dispositional characteristics of you as a person,
your emotional tendencies, your biases, etcetera. Yeah, this is interesting,
(35:25):
We do see. We see a lot of this in
in current discourse. Like, for instance, um, when one is
reminded to think about one's um um place of privilege
in any given topic like that is essentially kind of
coming back to what I was talking about, like thinking
about Uh, you know, if you stop and think about, say,
the good in one's life and think about how much
(35:46):
of that is environmental and situational. Um Uh, It's it's
a worthwhile exercise. Absolutely, Yeah, totally. I mean, well, consideration
of the privileges one has received is exactly asking people
to consider, or is to ask them to think about
the the opposite of the fa that we tend to
apply to ourselves Yeah, to like ask people to consider
(36:07):
situational factors they have benefited from, rather than thinking that
all of their you know, all of the good things
that have happened to them are due to their virtues
and greatness. But in the in the case of like,
you know, arguments about like attributing your opinions to your
psychology and my opinions to my you know, just to
how things are. It's it's just hilarious how often you
(36:30):
see this deployed in arguments today. My opinion isn't even
really my opinion, it's just the way the world is.
It's fully externalized. Your opinion is a direct unfolding of
your personal defects. Yeah, you see it all the time,
and you know from from various sides. But back to so,
you know, you've got the opposite of the fundamental attribution
error taking place when we evaluate ourselves. I wonder why
(36:52):
is this, Like, why do we reverse the bias when
the eyes turned inward? I think one thing is just
that we have the opportunity to observe ourselves in lots
of scenarios, and we come to understand that our behavior
changes according to the situation. Obviously, and this seems in
line with the fact that the better you know a person,
the more you get to sample their behavior, the more
(37:12):
you take situation into account when you're judging them. Right,
And then I guess, I mean, it makes sense that
that we would we would have we would employ shortcuts
in uh in in in in figuring out or guessing
the mind states of others. You know that we I mean,
we would love to think of ourselves as the kind
of person who is so compassionate that every minor character
(37:35):
in their life is given full weight and full consideration.
But we don't have time. We don't have time, we
don't have the mental capacity to do that, So we
end up we've evolved to to utilize all these shortcuts,
which in many cases can be rather unfair and in
some cases perhaps even dangerous. Oh, they can be extremely dangerous.
And one reason is that some studies have shown that
(37:56):
this concept gets extended beyond just the individual will level.
Like there are some studies indicating that both the f
A and the self directed reversal of the f A
extend beyond individuals to groups. In other words, people are
more likely to lean toward disposition all explanations for people
they see as outgroup members and situational explanations for people
(38:18):
they see as in group members. If you see people
as part of your tribe, part of your group, you're
more likely to treat them like you treat yourself, meaning
you you know, take into factor, okay, you know they're
external influences on what they're doing. And if you see
people as outside your tribe, you're more likely to take
their actions as indications of their fundamental character or of
the fundamental characteristics you believe common to their group. And
(38:42):
all of this is, of course terrible if you want
there to be any kind of actual communication between two
given tribes, between two given group given true groups, if
you want there to be any kind of peace, stability
or back and forth. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can
see how this exact bias lies behind all kinds of
problems of of prejudice and stereotyping and all that. But interestingly,
(39:07):
on the other hand, that there are some studies that
indicate that's in some cases at least simply manipulating perspective
through video feeds can reverse the effect, at least on
an individual level. So think about it like this, If
you watch video of a scene taken from another person's
visual perspective. So you're seeing through Jeffrey's eyes or you're
(39:29):
seeing through Ripley's eyes, you are more likely to judge
that person situationally and less likely to judge them disposition
a lee than you would if you're just watching them
from a third person vantage point. And the reverse also
appears to be true in watching video of yourself from
a third person perspective, it makes you more likely to
(39:49):
judge yourself disposition a lee. Interesting. I feel like you're
touched on some of these differences in like third and
first person. I believe there's some studies that look at
this in video gaming and how we interact with our
given characters avatar, which is especially interesting when we think
of games where were we have the ability to jump
back and forth between the two. But the idea of
(40:11):
being able to apply this viewpoint to your own life
and the lives of others, which has a wonderful kind
of black mirror vibe to it. Uh that's interesting. I
like that. Yeah, it is. And I didn't find a
study on this. Maybe there is one I just didn't
come across, But I wondered, can the can the effect
to be reversed through perspective manipulation for group based thinking
(40:31):
as well, like are there ways I mean this in
a way would be the classic like try to put
yourself in somebody else's shoes, Like can you see the
world from the perspective of somebody who you regard as
your out group? And would that help in reducing you know,
the kind of disposition all automatic attributing of characteristics to
(40:53):
them that you do off very limited data. By the way,
I had to explain that saying, uh, wearing somebody else's
shoes walking a mile on someone else's shoes to my son,
I guess for the first time. I guess it had
just not come up before. But then I dropped it
in some you know, daily conversation and he was like,
what what what We're supposed to wear other people's shoes?
(41:14):
Like how does that even work? And it is kind
of weird, Like if I wear someone else's shoes there
there's so many of factors like that that's not going
to really give me any idea what their their personal experiences,
their personal truth or their you know, what kind of
of of constraints and privileges they're dealing with. Yeah, it
really should be walk a mile and somebody else's Google
(41:35):
glass that say filming from their perspective, I don't know
what the real product there now is walk a mile
and somebody else's go pro. Yes, all right, we're gonna
go ahead and close out the episode right now because
we're gonna have to split this one into We're going
a bit long here, so this was part one of
our look at f a E. But our next episode
(41:57):
will continue the discussion and uh, and I'll make sure
we get some dungeons and dragons in there, just to
just to continue the uh, the the partial focus on
fantastic elements to keep the big cat magic going. Yeah,
we gotta do it. Uh. In the meantime, if you
want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, you know where to go. Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's the website. You can get
the show there, but you can also get the show
(42:19):
any number of other places. Wherever you do get Stuff
to Blow your Mind, make sure that you have subscribed,
and make sure that you've rated and reviewed the show,
because these small steps help us out immensely in the
long run. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Alex Williams and try Harrison. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
(42:39):
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart
Radio's hows to of Works. For more podcasts from my
(43:01):
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