How not to make an ass out of you and me

The 'fundamental attribution error' turns us into jerks, but we can overcome it.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

A few years back, when my mother had a prolonged mental heath crisis that affected my own mental health, I often daydreamed about wearing a t-shirt that would immediately grant me grace. It would say:

“Be nice to me. My mom keeps trying to kill herself.”

The imaginary shirt would serve two purposes: It would make people think twice before saying something careless, and it would provide people with context for whatever unpredictable mood I was experiencing that day. It was my version of telling the world “you never know what someone is going through.”

I was reminded of my morbid t-shirt daydream when my friend Teresa shared a story on Facebook recently:

“Last year I was incensed by a neighbor who walked our trails with two aggressive German shepherds that she could barely control. She appeared rude and oblivious. I had worked up an angry dialogue in my head, but I stopped running into her.

Tragically, I found out that she had early onset dementia that progressed rapidly. She was institutionalized and I don't know what became of the dogs. Her husband was left alone.

Kindness, understanding, and caring would have been a much more useful and less stressful response than anger.”

The same day she posted this I also happened to be reading “Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides” by psychologist Geoffrey L. Cohen. I spotted the book on display while at Austin Public Library, and I’m a sucker for anything that might teach me about social psychology (part of my mission for this newsletter is to help the world increase its collective emotional maturity).

What Teresa describes—and what I realized I was trying to avoid with my t-shirt—is a problem known as the “fundamental attribution error.” This is when we make assumptions about other people that are dispositional versus situational, and they’re often self-serving in nature.

As Cohen writes:

“Rather than consider the possibility that someone who cut in our car lane was distracted by worries about a problem at work or perhaps was avoiding a hazard in their lane, we tend to make their behavior personal, both by attributing it to some flaw in their nature and by taking it personally. We often do this despite knowing virtually nothing about the other person or people. We decide they are rude, selfish, prejudiced, sexist, stupid, and so on, belittling them with sometimes wild oversimplification. We commit this error most when somebody else does something that we think we ourselves would never have done—when they seem to be different. The Fundamental Attribution Error is the cognitive mill that turns the grist of our social lives into gossip, judgement and rage.”

Like so many things about basic human behavior, it’s something that everyone does from time to time, although people in individualistic cultures are most prone to it. And at a group level, while research shows that liberals are more likely to assign sympathetic attributions to social problems than conservatives, liberals are just as prone to “reverting” to committing this error in their daily lives, Cohen says.

Learning “situation crafting” as a solution

The good news? We can retrain our brains to make fewer self-serving snap judgements. Cohen offers many examples, including how kids who struggle with aggression can be taught “situation crafting” to avoid taking things so personally, and how parents at high risk of committing child abuse can be taught to reframe their child’s reactions as less self-focused (“my child is crying because I’m a bad mother”) and more situational (“my child is crying because she’s tired”), making their parenting problems easier to think through and solve.

One of my favorite parts of parenting is helping my child understand this. Several kids at her school have had behavioral problems, and rather than write them off as bad kids that she should shun, we talk through the possible situations the kids could be facing at home that make it hard for them to behave at school. Similar conversations come up around homeless people — how complex their life stories probably are.

Cohen’s book delves into many other things that contribute to our current polarized society, revealing that problems like prejudice, stereotyping and authoritarianism are pervasive, whether that’s in school, at work, in the criminal justice system, or in our communities.

Beyond “situation-crafting,” another solution is finding common ground via shared values. He shared the story of how former President Jimmy Carter tugged at the heartstrings of the Egyptian president and the Israeli prime minister during the Camp David Accords, setting the stage for peaceful negotiation. (He cleverly did this via photo souvenirs for their grandkids.)

Trauma is a wedge

What I didn’t see in Cohen’s book, though, was an in-depth discussion of how mental issues affect belonging and connection. So I’ll add my two cents: I know from experiencing trauma that it’s incredibly isolating; there is a strong sense of feeling “other.” During the throes of postpartum depression and anxiety, I felt overwhelmingly alone, even with loved ones in the same room with me.

In my (as-yet-unpublished) book, I call this feeling “the wedge” because it felt like a jagged triangular slab of concrete that was slowly slicing off my connections to the world. This was a time in my life when I likely committed the fundamental attribution error far more than I experienced it.

As you might guess, being stressed out, exhausted, in pain, depressed and/or struggling with untreated trauma can make it harder to take things less personally, and Cohen urges readers to keep that in mind, too. Go easy on yourself and others when you’re not feeling good. Your brain isn’t working at top capacity, and because it’s faster to assign blame than reflect, you run the risk of jumping to false conclusions, isolating yourself or others.

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Fun fact: “Do not make assumptions” and “Do not take anything personally” are two of the four agreements in the classic self-help mega-bestseller The Four Agreements.

Related: Aggression and reckless driving are likely a major factor behind a recent spike in traffic deaths, the New York Times Magazine reports today. Our collective emotional immaturity and unhealed pandemic-era trauma is killing us.

On a happier note: The lovely new walking path that connects the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Capitol includes this spectacular work of art that matches my hair color. 🥴

Joy with prickly pear