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In the late 'sixties, Cuban
leader Fidel Castro, now in the news due to the NAM summit in Havana,
figured in a classic experiment, Subjects listened to pro- and anti-Castro
speeches. They were then asked to rate their pro-Castro stance. When the
subjects believed that the speechmakers had chosen out of free will they
naturally rated the pro speeches as having a more positive attitude. But more
astonishing, this bias persisted even when the subjects were told that it
was purely the random flip of a coin that had determined the pro or anti
stance. The experiment thus drew forth a Murphy's Law (if things can go
wrong they will) of social psychology which says, "Given half a chance
people will make fundamental attribution errors about other people."
An attribution error occurs
whenever you make an unwarranted connection between events and people.
Suppose, for example, you get a wrong number. Would you attribute it to
chance, machine glitch or whatever? Or would you say, "MTNL is like that
only, always making mistakes"? Now if you had a default assumption that
said, " public sector employees make mistakes" You would choose the latter
view disregarding evidence to the contrary.
Thanks to the Castro
experiment, social psychologists found that people tend to have a default
assumption that leads them to believe what a person does is based more on
what "kind" of person he or she is, rather than the social and environmental
forces at work on that person.
This default assumption leads
us into making erroneous explanations for other's behaviour. But when it
came to explaining your own, you tend to be more charitable. Thus, I
overslept because I had a hard day. You overslept because of Your Cow Belt
Culture (or because your generation has no commitment or because you are
slender built and slothful). This is the perceptual difference that the
social psychologist Lee Ross dubbed 'fundamental attribution error' -- too
much stress on supposedly unchanging traits to explain other folk's actions,
too little on situation. One way out of attribution error is to go beyond
your self. Extend the courtesy of extenuation to others as well: ask
yourself how you would behave in the same situation Another way is to look
for unseen causes. Since 'salient' factors are usually over-attributed, look
for factors we wouldn't normally take note of. Then 'they' become like us. |
