We are victims of our own minds through the various cognitive biases we come with as standard, and which people rarely decide to work on, because they are not aware they have them. We covered many of them in our articles “Ways your mind betrays you (part one)” and “part two”.
With the people around us in our personal and working lives, we tend to apply rules that we don’t apply to ourselves when it comes to defining those people on the basis of a few facts or behaviours.
To explain it simply, I’ll use an example from the editor Shana Lebowitz:
Your co-worker hands in a project late, and you assume your co-worker is lazy or unreliable. If next week you are the one who hands in a project late, you will most likely think that in your case it was down to a whole series of problems (personal or otherwise) that serve as an excuse or explanation for why you, in your case, are not lazy or unreliable, and that it was simply due to perfectly reasonable circumstances.
Psychologists call this phenomenon the “fundamental attribution error” or the “correspondence bias“.
Basically, it boils down to the tendency to assume that other people’s behaviour is the result of flaws in their personality, while the same behaviour, when we are the ones doing it, is always down to situational factors.
According to Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, the fundamental attribution error comes from four factors:
1. You are not fully aware of the situation contributing to the person’s behaviour.
Your co-worker might have handed in the project late because they were dealing with a family emergency that week, but there is no way for you to know that unless they tell you.
2. You have unrealistic expectations of that person, and even of yourself.
You believe that even if you had had to deal with a family emergency, you would still have managed to hand in the project on time. As Gilbert himself puts it, we tend to underestimate the power of certain situations and how they would affect us when they are affecting someone else. And we tend to overrate ourselves when we believe that something affecting a colleague at that moment would not affect us in the same way.
3. Your interpretation of the person’s behaviour may be exaggerated.
An outside observer might notice that your co-worker is sincerely apologising and giving reasons when handing in the project late. But you might interpret the apology and the reasons as confirmation of the idea that your co-worker is lazy and unreliable.
4. You are unable to correct your mistaken first impressions.
Even once you find out that your co-worker really was dealing with a family emergency, your mental bandwidth may be so taken up that you can’t correct your belief that your co-worker is unreliable.
We often tend to project our own flaws onto the people around us. So, as a rule, when someone is quick on the trigger to label a colleague over a single fact we know nothing about, it may be because we are trying to pin on someone else a label that we ourselves identify with.
And this bias can go further and is more common than we think, as with people who say that a successful person just got lucky. For some people, the fact that someone around them succeeds means that person has had a lot of luck.
If they themselves had been very successful, it would be because, in their case, they knew how to do it, because they are a genius, because they’re worth it.
If they fail, it is down to bad luck; but if someone else fails, it is because that person is an idiot.
That is why, before judging someone’s actions, we should ask ourselves whether we are really applying to them the same standard we would apply to ourselves in the same situation.
Further reading
Featured image: Robert Barr, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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