Nobody's Hero

Hey everyone!

Today I’m writing about one of my favorite human biases, the fundamental attribution error! We do this whenever we’re trying to explain why people behave in certain ways. Instead of taking the time to consider every possible cause of an action, we typically just attribute someone’s behavior to a personal trait (Ross, 1977). For example, if a cashier doesn’t return your smile when you’re checking out, what do you think? Gee, what a cold person. That’s an example of ascribing behavior to personal traits. But is that the only explanation? What if he or she just found out that the store is closing down, and his or her livelihood is threatened? You wouldn’t feel like smiling then, either. The failure to think that deeply about the circumstances surrounding another person’s behavior is the fundamental attribution error.

A song by one of my favorite bands exemplifies this effect. It’s about a guy who slips and falls while playing soccer due to “an errant heel” and how literally everyone in his life judges him as being a complete failure because of it. They're committing the error because slipping on a soccer field could be due to something like poor shoes or weather, not just glaring personal flaws!

Here's the song:

On a more personal note, when I decided to write about this error, immediately one particular time in my life sprung to my mind. When I was working on a semester-long group project, one of my teammates made this error constantly and never hesitated to share her conclusions. For example, she noticed that I was not in a happy mood the morning the first assignment was due. Her conclusion was that I was a generally angry person. In reality, I was in a bad mood because she got her portion to me both incomplete and eight hours before the due date. Situations like this occurred frequently, leading her to develop a general dislike of me as she repeatedly attributed my negative behavior around her as being due to my own personality as opposed to her competence. As the Decemberists put it, “[she’d] condescend to fix on me a frown.”

Fortunately, my skin is not so thin that I would take her seriously. Despite my best attempts to avoid it, I ultimately attributed her consistently inconsiderate behavior to a personal fault. Good thing only other people make the fundamental attribution error!

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Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 279–301.

(n = 401)

Keep Talking

I recently attended a talk on what makes for healthy relationships.

I was not surprised by anything presented that night. It's all common sense. Communicate. Validate. Forgiv-iate. (I've been told that you should always give examples in rhyming groups of three, and you gotta do what you're told.) Basic stuff that's always a staple of these talks, but it's still great to get a refresher.

However, one thing that surprised me was the order. Most important was to love and respect yourself, so that you can recognize disrespect when it happens. That, too, is common sense, but is it really most important in a healthy relationship? It might be the most important for getting out of bad relationships, but I feel like communication is far more important for staying in a good relationship.

If you don't communicate and work out your issues as they come up, they act like foreign objects in the human body. They get buried as new layers of relationship-skin form, and eventually start to fester and ooze. It doesn't matter how much you each love yourselves if you're both infected with incommunicitis. That poor communication, to me, is a sign of disrespect to both your partner and the relationship, and it'll turn your skin green like a carrot faster than you can say "mixed metaphor." 

(I do not have a medical degree, despite my vast and clearly accurate understanding of the human body.)

No matter what, it was good to attend and think about all this, and I'm glad I went.

Halo Effect

Hey everyone!

As a quick summary to give you context for the rest of this, people make quick judgments based on whatever little amount of information is given to them (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). This leads us to create an “evaluation” of a person, which is just a conclusion about whether you like a person based on whatever information processing you do automatically. We interpret later information in light of our evaluation of a person; if we like someone or think they exemplify an important trait, we’re more likely to think of them in a more positive light on other things. This is known as the halo effect (Cooper, 1981).

And that brings me to today’s song.

It’s another Rush song, because there’s just no way I’d pass this one up. It’s called “Halo Effect.” It’s probably going to be the most thematically appropriate song I use all semester.

It’s a sad song from their newest album. It’s about a person who falls in love with someone, and lets that love blind them to the person’s harmful traits. For example, the third verse goes: “What did I care? / Fool that I was / Little by little I burned / Maybe sometimes / There might be a flaw / But how pretty the picture was back then.” The narrator looks back over his time spent with the person and recognizes how he couldn’t see the flaws in the other person. That is more or less the stereotypical example, where you like your romantic partner and so you ignore any warning signs that might come up.

It doesn’t just apply to romance, though, and it also doesn’t have to be positive. You can form an initial negative impression of a person, and then find yourself thinking of everything they do as awful.

For example, I had already lived with someone for a semester and realized that he did not exemplify the traits that I consider important in a person, which led me to not like him a great amount. So when he had some ambiguous behaviors like having his mom call him every morning to make sure he went to class or ranting about how unfair it was that the cop gave him a parking ticket (he never bothered to pick up his prepaid parking sticker), I was a little more likely to interpret them negatively.

On an unrelated note, as a result of a mutual lack of real interest in communicating, we didn’t talk a whole lot. This apparently led to problems one morning when we had a Neuroscience test, because he didn’t know about it. (He was not schematic for responsibility or studying.) So he got there, was handed a test, and knew absolutely nothing on it. After cursing under his breath loudly enough for others to hear, he left to complain to the professor that I didn’t tell him we had a test coming up.

Weirdly enough, he didn’t confront me about it.

Cooper, W. H. (1981). Ubiquitous halo. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 218–224.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliff s, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

(n = 497)

Schadenfreude

Hey everyone!

Some of you might have heard the term "schadenfreude" before. This is a German word that means essentially "pleasure derived from the misfortune of others." Essentially, people feel good about themselves when they see other people in a worse situation.

There's a song from the musical Avenue Q that explores this topic, appropriately named "Schadenfreude." It takes the concept a little bit further, to the point where the characters actually inflict bad situations upon other people in order to cheer themselves up. It's a great song, and I've embedded it below.

This concept of schadenfreude is strikingly similar to the concept of downward social comparison, which is a technique people unknowingly use when they're in a negative situation to make themselves feel better, by way of comparing their situation to a worse one (Wills, 1981). When I first encountered the term in the reading, that song was my first reaction, and I knew I had to mention it.

Moving on, another concept I found interesting was self-monitoring. Having a high level of this personality trait, coined by Mark Snyder (1987), means that a person can modify their behavior depending on their social situation. For example, a person at a job interview might not let his politically incorrect sense of humor shine through, in order to make sure the interviewer isn’t offended. In contrast, people low in self-monitoring tend to act the same in every social situation. They would have a hard time holding back and not letting their true self show.

Personally, I am a high self-monitor. When Dr. G brought up how high-self-monitorers dislike using Facebook for fear of all their friends seeing a single, unified persona, it made complete sense to me. I had never been able to put into such clear words why I was never a huge fan of Facebook.

It also reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine back in high school. She told me that it really bothered her that I acted differently around different people. I thought to myself, well of course I act differently around different people, they’re different people! They find different things funny or offensive, or have different inside jokes with me, so why would I try to behave identically in front of everyone?

Naturally, I said none of these things to her, because she was an easily-offended person who would not understand my position, so I just apologized and let her rant.

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P.S. Here's a link to the song "Limelight" by Rush that Dr. G mentioned in class about self-monitoring. I'm one of the three people who raised their hands in class about liking them, and can’t pass up an opportunity to share one of my favorite bands with people.

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Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, pp. 117–140.

Snyder, M. (1987). Public appearances/private realities: The psychology of self-monitoring. New York: Freeman.

Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 245–271. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.90.2.245

(n = 459 words)