Elections, Radical Moderation, and Destroying the Fundamental Attribution Error
As we're about two weeks out from one of the most divisive and contentious elections in American history, we wanted to highlight an immoderate error that seems more likely to crop up during election cycles, but which plagues us the rest of the time too.
But before we get there, some honesty: one downside to Radical Moderation is that humans aren't really naturally programmed for it. There are parts that are really intuitive, of course, but the human brain has a bunch of biases and other cognitive shortcuts that push us toward extremism, particularly in certain situations. As part of our Radically Moderate project, we'd like to highlight a few so it's easier to see when they're operating in our lives and the lives of those we care about. We're calling these biases "immoderate errors" and while we tackled fear a few weeks back, we're focusing on another big one today, the "fundamental attribution error."
From now on we'll call it the FAE because otherwise it's a mouthful. The FAE sounds super fancy but is actually pretty simple. The FAE just means that when we look at other people's behavior we tend to think their behavior is caused by who they are as opposed to where they are. Another way to put this is that we tend to attribute people's behavior to fundamental character traits or their essential nature rather than to the circumstances they're in or the environment they're responding to.
We see this all the time and we personally fall into it too. It's easy to say "Did you see the way Frank reacted at the game today? He's such an asshole." Or "Why do you never put your socks away? You're so selfish." Or "People who commit crimes are just psychopaths. We need to lock the door and throw away the key."
How the Left views Trump supporters
How the Left views Trump supporters
One problem with all these statements is that they're likely to be wrong, in a fundamental sense. Now, Frank might really be acting like an asshole. We might not be wrong about that. But he's probably not an asshole in every situation. He probably likes his dog or takes good care of his elderly mother. He may even be fully capable of cheerful cooperation off the field. Frank isn't an asshole all the time because his behavior changes based on the specific context Frank is in and who he is interacting with.
How the Right views BLM protests
How the Right views BLM protesters
Lots of social science research demonstrates that most behavior is a complicated interaction between who a person is and the environment in which she finds herself, not a result of intrinsic or unchangeable traits of particular human beings. This means that while I may be what I consider a good person in my current low-stress environment, that could change quickly in a high-stress environment. We have ourselves seen this in stark relief, when we have been solo parenting small children for long periods of time... (The less said about this the better.)
Perhaps the clearest example of the FAE in action is road rage. I have watched friends and family members change from patient and kind humans to raging screaming maniacs during their morning commutes (ahem... I may have been one of these people). While this might seem inexplicable to many of us, the reason is actually pretty simple. All of a sudden, we're taken out of our familiar environments where we can communicate with people and try to understand their situation and instead left within a solitary steel cage where we have to interpret other people's complicated behavior without the tools to do so. We lack social cues --including body language -- and everyone is essentially anonymous. We don't know who they are and can't interpret their intent. Most importantly, we lack signaling to indicate why we're making decisions we are. (I've often thought we need to invent a hand signal to express "I'm sorry!" when driving. A wave doesn't quite do it.) But because we lack that signaling it's easy for us to commit the FAE and label the driver who cut us off a Major Jerk Forever instead of seeing that he didn't see a sign and had to make a quick adjustment.
Even more problematic in the driving example is that everyone of us benefits a little bit from not cooperating fully with everyone else. Running that almost red light will help us shave a minute off our commute. Cutting in front of this slower driver will help us get our kid to school on time. So if everyone has an incentive to cheat just a little bit and we can't communicate to clarify when someone is cheating and when they're just making a mistake, the stage is set for anger. Despite the benefits, for example, of the last second merge on a highway, people interpret that merge as a Jerk Move that only Really Big Jerks make.
Again, let's be clear. There are definitely jerk drivers out there. But as with the jerk Frank, these drivers are probably not jerks in every area of their lives. What's usually going on is that the structure of driving itself -- isolated; poor communication; with apparent benefits if you do cheat a bit -- make it more likely that normal people will behave like jerks. And while we understand why we're making the decisions we're making ("I can't be late to school one more time this week; I had to run that deeply yellow light!") we don't do the same for anonymous drivers. Instead, we assume that we have good reasons for our behavior, while those other drivers are Just Jerks. (This is actually a slightly different though related error, but we don't need to get too technical right now).
Now here's the kicker! Take the example of road rage and apply it to elections. Unless we're faced directly with an individual who is voting for the other party and who can clearly and concisely tell us why they are doing so (an event that doesn't happen often), we look at the mass of voters out there voting for Some Guy We Hate and because we can't see their faces, can't ask them what they're thinking, can't clarify their intent, it becomes really easy to say "those people voting for Some Guy We Hate are obviously Really Bad People." And there's no way to correct that error because we don't know them and can't communicate with them. The only clue we have about who they are as people is a single act of behavior, in this case, their vote. So we place all our moral judgment on that single act and the mistake (because it is a mistake) never gets corrected. (The FAE shows up in elections in other ways too, such as when we give incumbents credit for stuff they have no control over.)
Why does this matter?
The fundamental attribution error matters a lot because it affects the way we think about and interact with people in our lives. It increases conflict and decreases cooperation because it makes us feel as though the people we're interacting with or disagreeing with are fundamentally bad. And when someone is "A Fundamentally Bad Person" it becomes really hard to see the broader context of their decision-making. Even more troubling, their reasons for making the decision they made no longer matter, because all those reasons must be illegitimate if they're the reasons of a Very Bad Person. So we're less likely to cooperate, we're less likely to compromise, and we're less likely to realize the complicated and diverse reasons they may have for behaving as they did. And after a really ugly election, it the FAE can make it very hard to rebuild community with people we view as Very Bad Humans.
The FAE is dangerous on the other side as well, because it can also trick us into thinking that other people are fundamentally good. Despite most child sexual abuse occurring by people children know, parents continue to think of sexual abuse as carried out by Big Bad Strangers who are Very Bad People (we discussed this error here). While parents focus on protecting children from strangers we ignore the coach or the priest or the close relative who may in fact be the greatest danger to our child's well-being. And we ignore those people because we make a fundamental error about how they will behave in a range of contexts. Because we think of them as Good People, we dismiss them as a possible source of danger.
Finally, the FAE is bad for us in general because the divisiveness that it drives is a significant source of stress in our lives. The more polarized an election is, the greater the strength of the FAE, and the worse off we all are.
The Fundamental Attribution Error Today
As we discussed above, the FAE is particularly problematic in today's polarized political climate. It's easy to see the person who voted for one candidate over another as fundamentally dumb or fundamentally selfish or fundamentally dishonest. The dialogue often looks something like this: "People who voted for Trump are racists!" Or "People who vote for Biden hate freedom!" In reality, people who vote for Trump or Biden have complicated reasons for doing so, some of which they may not even fully understand (see some interesting discussions here, here, and here).
Voter decisions are based off a complex set of mental algorithms that include their own political/religious upbringing and values, their personal experiences, their socio-economic status, their current peer group, the media they consume, their stage of life, and a host of other complicated factors that come together in unpredictable ways, though the most reliable predictor of voting patterns is, especially today, party affiliation, which is often a shortcut for all those other things. Voters are also usually uninformed about the full range of their candidate's political positions and how those political positions will actually be carried out (or not). None of this means that we can't say people who vote for particularly problematic candidates aren't wrong. People make wrong decisions all the time! But making an incorrect decision is fundamentally different from being a Fundamentally Bad Person.
And let's be clear: the evidence suggests that all of us behave in pretty irrational ways when it comes to voting, so no one gets to take the ultimate high ground here (though some voting decisions are obviously better than others). (See Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized and Jason Brennan's Against Democracy for deeper dives.)
Why is the FAE an Immoderate Error?
The FAE is an example of what we'll call from here on out "immoderate errors." These errors don't make someone a bad person (see above!), but they do tend to lead all of us down the path toward immoderate outcomes.
Most obviously, the FAE is a rejection of the Radical Moderate's call for humility. We aren't being humble if we are assuming things about someone's basic character as a human being that we cannot possibly know. The guy who cuts me off on my commute may be behaving selfishly in the narrow context of driving, but he may also be capable of incredible acts of generosity with his family or parish or friends. I don't know and because of the very structure of driving I can't easily find out. Same goes for someone I think is making a Giant Voting Error. I don't know most voters and can't really understand why they're doing what they're doing.
The FAE is also a violation of our appreciation for complexity and diversity. People live in very different situations, experience different stressors, and have a variety of background experiences that color the way they move through the world. Assuming that everyone we disagree with or have conflict with is a Very Bad Person rejects the reality that people make complex and diverse decisions precisely because their lives differ from our own. And that's ok!
And that leads us to the Radically Moderate principle of truth-seeking. The FAE is not just hubris and all that other stuff. It's also very likely to be wrong. Incorrect. False. Social science research bears this out, but our own experiences do too. Each of us does things we later regret. We make decisions in the heat of the moment or in stressful situations or with incomplete information that do not represent who we are in our deepest selves. It's both factually and morally wrong to make assumptions about other people that we don't want them making about us.
Which brings us to the final way that the FAE is an Immoderate Error. The FAE violates our commitment to treating other human beings as unique individuals, rather than as members of a particular essential category or group. Every time we say "that guy is such an asshole!" or "man, Betty is a bitch" we reduce complex and unique individual human beings to a negative and essential group membership from which they cannot escape. We strip away everything that makes them unique human beings: their values, their experiences, their living situation, their stressors and joys, their families and friends, and we stick them into a box with other Jerk People and we label it and shove it on a shelf. Once on that shelf, we often never take the time again to dust it off and take a closer look. This is a loss for us, a loss for them, and a loss for human community. So don't do it!
Practical Tips for Avoiding the FAE
Let's be real though. The FAE is a pretty basic human bias. It's hard to avoid and most of us do it unconsciously. So how do we get out of it?
The first step is just noticing when we're doing it. When we catch ourselves making these kinds of basic claims about people's essence as human beings, whether we know them or not, we can simply stop and say "Oh! There's the FAE again."
Once we start noticing when we do it, we can start to de-fang its hold on our brains by adding in the context, complexity and diversity that the FAE strips away. What else was going on when this person behaved in this particular way? Do we know? Can we find out?
If we can't find out, as in the case of driving or randos on the internet or any other anonymous interaction, it's probably best to put our humility hat on and say "well, I don't know why she's behaving like that, but I'm guessing something is going on" and leave it at that. For a lot of purely anonymous interactions with people we'll never see again, leaving explanations for other people's behavior in the "unknown" box is the safest route. The classic phrase "not my circus and not my monkeys" can sometimes inject some humor into otherwise rage-inducing situations. When we don't know these people, we don't know why they're behaving the way they are, we can't easily find out, and they're not doing actual harm (just pissing us off), it's often best to just shrug and put on some music and be grateful our day is probably going better than theirs. This is much harder for political decisions that may lead to harm, but we still have no control over those people and committing the FAE in response to their mistake doesn't make us more virtuous, it just makes us wrong and stressed out. There are other better ways to engage with people we disagree with than lumping them all into a box labeled "Idiots I Don't Like."
For people we know or can know, sometimes asking will be the most important and most moderate thing you can do. "Hey Frank! It looked like you were upset at the game yesterday. What's going on?" Or "Betty, it seems like you might be frustrated at work. Can I help?" Or "Hey Joe! I'd love to hear why you support X-Candidate-I-Hate-With-The-Fiery-Passions-of-My-Soul. Can we grab a beer and talk about it?" Start with humility and then move to curiosity to figure out what's going on.
Or we can take the classic humility route and just say "there but for the grace of God go I." We might very well be facing tomorrow whatever this person is facing today and our life is better if we focus right now on what we can know and can control. Whatever the outcome, we'll be happier and less stressed out if we can let go of thinking of our fellow citizens as idiots or monsters.
All right, enough from us! What about you? When do you notice the FAE in your life? When do you find it crops up the most? How are you working to limit its hold on your brain? Has rejecting the FAE helped you in your interactions with other people? Let us know in the comments!