So cognitive biases
result. Cognitive biases are obviously thinking
in a skewed manner. A bias is just a skew,
right? It means that you tend to do this but you're not entirely fair about it.
It's cognitive. It's a way of thinking but cognition is tied into behavior, right?
Cognition is tied into emotion. How you think about something matters
in terms of how you'll behave in response to it, or how you'll feel about it.
So one of the biggest cognitive biases
is called the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental
attribution error. That's interesting because fundamental suggest it's
at the core of people and it is. Attribution
is your idea of how you attribute cause.
To an actor, an actor not being personal on stage,
but a person. So somebody doing something. Somebody
acting in some way. When you see a behavior,
what do you attribute that behavior to? Do you attribute that behavior
to them as a person because it's characteristic of them? It's a trait of
them,
or do you attribute that behavior to a situational influence?
Well, by and large, we don't attribute people's behavior
to situational influences. We attribute their behavior to them,
almost always and almost without question,
and that's interesting because that's where we get
the error. Because there are so many situational factors that are intangible
and hard to take into account, that are influencing our behavior at any given time
that we just don't even take them into account when making our judgment. We'll
rule them out.
For example, if you've got somebody playing outfield,
and you're a fan of the opposing team,
and they miss a fly ball, you're going to jeer and say, eh, they cant play,
ain't no-good. Now, the person who actually dropped the ball is going to say, well,
the sun was in my eye, right? I looked up and I couldn't see the ball. They
have a situational explanation
for the behavior of missing the ball but the rest of the people in the stadium,
probably even the people on his team, were going to say,
ah, bumbled it. Bad play. Are you a bad player?
That would explain that behavior but
a more common example, from my point of view, is driving in a car.
So you drive in a car and somebody cuts you off,
and what do you say? Do you go, wow, I wonder what the situational
factors were that influenced them to cut me off, or do you just go, asshole.
Just like that judgment was
final and accurate. Do you say jerk,
such a jerk, you don't care about me or my safety.
You're an aggressive person. You start labeling them
and you attribute the behavior being... of them cutting you off
to something stable, a trait characteristic within that person whom
you do not know. If you don't know them,
you can put all kinds of labels on them. You could judge them in all kinds of negative ways and
you'll never be challenged.
Thus you'll never find out if it was wrong or right. But flip that around a minute.
You ever cut somebody off? I'll bet you've cut somebody off before
and when you cut them off did you look at yourself in the mirror and go, you
asshole, you are such a jerk, you don't care about anybody's safety. Did you throw the same
labels
at yourself? My guess is you didn't.
My guess is that you went, ah, that was a stupid error. I'm sorry.
You might even have thrown up your hand, but you might not have because you didn't want them to think you were flipping htem
off.
You want them to know it was a mistake, that you didn't mean it,
that you're not that kind of person. In other words, the situation,
either I was distracted by a conversation I might have been having with somebody in the car,
I was looking down at my radio, or maybe you were doing something you really shouldn't have been doing,
distracted by texting, et cetera. Whatever it is, you know, just
caught up in thought and I drifted over into this lane without checking
or didn't check my blind spot. You have all these situational explanations
for why you cut somebody off, but if somebody cuts you off, it's automatically
the kind of person
they are that accounts for it. Research shows it only takes the average person
three seconds to realize the person they just flipped off
behind them is their boss. I was just kidding.
So, fundamental attribution error. We go to the trait
explanation almost by default every time. So we have an actor-observer effect
because
we attribute other people's behavior to dispositional causes
and we have our own behavior explained often time by situational causes. We have
this discrepancy
and we're not willing to give other people the charity, right,
the benefit of the doubt that we would give ourselves.
If the cause was situational, we want people to know that and take it into
account so they don't misjudge us but that doesn't mean they're going to.
Because of the fundamental attribution error, they're going to assume that,
yeah, that's excuse making. You're just making excuses
unless it happened to them, in which case they'll say the same thing
and now you might think their excuse making, but it's a fascinating process
that is very reliable,
and then we have this self-serving bias. When we look at ourselves, we tend to
interpret our own
history, our own behavior, our own existence
in a much more positive self-serving light than might be objectively warranted
because we make attributions that are very forgiving for ourselves.
If we make a mistake, we will find lots of reasons why we made the mistake that
are core to us,
dispositional. But if something goes right, we want credit for that.
Damn, I'm good. I do good work. Whatever it is, I want credit for things that went
right,
and I will dismiss criticism for things that went bad because I'll just say, well
they don't realize what really was going on.
If I didn't have this boss, or this deadline, or this work team, or this
whatever, whatever, whatever, I would, of course it would have gone right for me.
You'd have a situational explanation and that keeps you from
from dinging yourself, from from looking down on yourself which
is actually predictive of good mental health.
In the extreme, it's narcissism, but in
a mild form because you see yourself in a more positive way than might be
objectively warranted, you're more optimistic, you're
more likely to persevere through barriers and obstacles and
it can be adaptive to have a mild form of this but
being aware of it simply helps you understand yourself better
and helps you understand other people better. Why do people
sometimes seem like they don't take responsibility? Probably because they
don't see themselves as responsible as you see them.
They see themselves differently. That's part of this whole social cognition
thing,
and then I've talked about this before. You have this self fulfilling prophecy.
By making a judgment about people
you form in your mind this schema about them
and then all the evidence is going to fit into that schema.
You're not going to see them objectively anymore. Once you've made
your judgment, you will treat them in ways
that are consistent with that judgment and you're very likely to bring about
behavior that seems consistent with the judgment,
thus confirming that you are right, giving you false pride,
and false confidence in your judgment.
Labeling people has a powerful effect and you want to be very careful about this
because it happens so subtly,
people are so confident they've made the right decision. Look on Facebook
if you want a little bit of judgment. It don't take long to see people firing off and
they've got
full, you know, judgements rendered on people they've never met before
when they have just scraps of information about the situation that we're considering.
I'll give you a real situation. I was in
a local elementary school where my kid was going to school and they had a teacher
appreciation break.
That morning they were having a breakfast for the teachers and they asked parents to come in
and look after the classroom. Now, you know what we know about memory. I think
it was a first grade classroom,
might've been kindergarten or, I don't thing it was kindergarten, I think it was a first grade
classroom, could have been second grade.
Anyway, I walk into this classroom as a teacher,
you know, was walking out. I'm the volunteer that's going to look after the class
and the teacher says thank you for coming today, seemed like a nice person,
and then she says now before I go, I want... look out for that one
cause he's a liar. And she says this in front of all this class.
All these little kids are looking over, and there's child sitting by her desk
in a little desk that's attached to her desk while all the other kids sit everywhere
else,
and she says that in front of everybody. Watch this one, he's a liar,
and then she says, he just got back from suspension if that tells you anything
about him.
I said, okay. It does tell me something about the situation. It tells me a lot more
about the teacher than it does about this
first-grader. What the hell do you got to do to get suspended in first grade?
This woman had a very negative opinion about this guy and she says,
he's got homework to do, all these other kids can watch TV.
They had a movie they were going to have. They could have snacks and watch the movie.
He's got to do his work but he'll never finish it.
I said okay thanks, just neutral.
She walked on. I then go over to the guy who looks up to me, this little
first grade kid and he
looks up at me sheepishly. He's Hispanic, which is interesting, and he's in a
predominantly white room,
right? I don't make any judgment about that, it's just noted,
difference in skin tone, but possibly a difference in culture,
probably a difference in how he's treated and maybe a difference in
whether he has access to resources at home that would help him with homework and
stuff. If
his family for instance didn't speak English well,
then if he was sent home with homework, it would be hard for them to help him with
that homework.
Anyway, it's math homework. There's these little inchworms and stuff.
it's got underneath them a little ruler with ticks on it that says, you know,
one, one and a quarter, one and a half, two, whatever,
and he looks up at me. I said, well, what do you think it is? I don't give this kid
any smiles or anything, I said, what do you think it is? He's like,
3? I said, write it down. He writes 3.
And he does the next one, and he does the next one, and the other kids are doing the thing, they're now
watching the movie.
He looks up at me and I'm like, well what do you think it is, he's like, one and a half. I said is it closer to one and
three-quarters or one and a half, he's like,
one and three-quarters, write it down. That's it. I did that about three or four times.
This kid finished all of his work, like that. Just a little bit
of neutral encouragement where I didn't take her labeling of him
to be a justified label. I took it to be a highly biased label
based on some conclusions she had drawn about the kid. She was trying to warn me
so that I would make these conclusions about the kid before I ever
knew the kid.
But I just watched him do all this homework in 10 minutes that she said he'd never finish
all day.
After that, it was snack time, and he said, can I pass out snacks?
I said, go-ahead. Again, I'm not going, oh, you did a good job. I'm not giving him lots of positive
feedback, I just said, go-ahead.
He got up with a tray full of snacks and went around pretty as you please to every single kid
and each kid pulled a snack off the tray. And then he went back to his own little desk
attached to the teacher's desk
and he got his snack and interestingly, he spilled his drink,
and he looked at me like he thought I was going to beat him to death. He looked
frightened
when he spilled that drink. I just looked at him and went,
shrugged my shoulders. And he smiled, and he got up and got paper towels and he cleaned it up himself.
He didn't get in trouble. He just fixed the problem. After it was all over,
time to get all the trash up. He said, can I collect trash. I said, absolutely, go ahead.
He went around again to every person and got all this trash.
Now, that don't look like a devil kid to me. That looks like a kid
willing to do some really cool and pro-social things and get his homework
done,
etc., etc. Do you think I told that to the teacher? Absolutely not,
because she already concluded he's a little liar
going to be expelled again probably and that anything that I said in the
positive, she would think
I would be naive and that he played me and manipulated me
into thinking something that certainly wasn't true. But can imagine,
if she's already drawn these conclusions, how she treats this child in class,
and the things that you would do if you were thought to be a liar, if you were
told
in front of everybody you were a liar, that you were no good, that you aren't able,
this kid's going down a bad road because this woman is going to tell the next
teacher that he gets
in the next grade up, watch out for this one, he's a liar,
he's a bad one, and by having that already
in their mind, they will then treat the child differently. The child will
act differently and they will confirm their suspicions. Anything he does good is
going to be considered to be
manipulative and ingenuine. Anything neutral he does, they'll consider negative,
anything negative he does is going to be evidence that you were right to begin
with.
That's fascinating because there's been a lot of studies that show when you randomly
manipulate
teachers' impressions of children as being smart kids or not so smart kid
they actually get differences in grades and socialization
based on that. That's the self-fulfilling prophecy. Happens at your work,
happens at your church, it happens in your schools, it happens because human beings
do it.