After we memorized the names of all 50 state capitals, we had to choose one state to become a quasi-expert on. It was fifth grade, and I chose Utah because it was the location of Dinosaur National Monument, a massive fossilized sandbar packed to the brim with Jurassic period bones, and dinosaurs occupied most of the free storage area in my eleven-year-old brain. I added Utah to the blank spaces in a form letter request for information that we all copied from the chalk board, and mailed it off to Utah’s chamber of commerce. I didn’t hear anything back after several weeks of waiting, so the information for my project came from an out-of-date edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica.
The culmination of the months-long state assignment was a mock-up state float, a desktop depiction of important things about our chosen state, rendered in some kind of artistic fashion. My float consisted of an upside down double-wide shoebox wrapped in orange crape paper (Utah was orange on the US map hanging in the classroom) topped with a grotesque honeybee made out of knotted yellow and black yarn suspended at the end of a piece of wire inserted into a clay beehive (Utah is “The Beehive State”). The beehive was flanked by the state’s name in block construction paper letters.
Elona sat in the desk behind me. She won the lottery that was held for the dozen or so students who wanted Washington as their state, and her mother had helped her construct a truly amazing Washington-shaped float made out of some kind of homemade plaster, elaborately painted and labeled, and adorned with tiny trees, a toothpick model of the Space Needle, and creative representations of other iconic structures, all resting delicately on a large wooden kitchen cutting board, the kind that slides out from under the counter. The board was too big to fit entirely on the top of her desk, and it stuck out three or four inches to the front and back. When I pulled my chair out to sit down, the back of my wrist knocked the board onto the floor, where her float shattered into tiny Humpty-Dumpty pieces.
The room fell silent. Elona wailed and burst into tears. What happened after that is kind of foggy. I remember the teacher grabbing me and yelling in my face. I remember saying I was sorry and pleading that it was an accident. The teacher eventually convened the class into a kind of classroom tribunal, and asked the other students what should be done about the situation. It seemed obvious to everyone that I needed to be punished. It was suggested that I get an F on my project. It was also suggested that Elona should be allowed to destroy my float—and this suggestion quickly gained consensus.
I tried to plead my case. It was an accident, and, although I was truly sorry it happened, it clearly wasn’t my fault. Eventually, after the teacher was satisfied that I had displayed the appropriate level of contrition, she agreed that I was probably not entirely to blame. Or at the very least, that the act wasn’t intentional. But “negligent float-slaughter” is still a serious crime, and to satisfy the students’ bloodlust Elona would get an automatic A for her float and I would not be able to receive a grade higher than B-.
Here, I want to spend a moment on the students’ bloodlust. I was traumatized by this at the time. How could these people possibly think that I would purposely wreck Elona’s float? These kids were not strangers. Most of us had known each other since first or second grade. I wasn’t a bully. I had no history of violent behavior. I was a rather friendly sort of guy, if a little on the shy side. And, to make things even worse, I had a bit of a crush on Elona. How could they judge me so harshly?
It was several decades before I found an answer to that question in the form of a ubiquitous social-cognitive bias called the fundamental attribution error, now a standard topic in introductory psychology textbooks. Briefly, the fundamental attribution error refers to the fact that when we try to explain the actions of other people, we have powerful tendency to overestimate the influence of internal, dispositional factors (personal traits), and underestimate—or completely ignore—the potential influence of contextual factors (the situation). When someone does something, we automatically see their behavior as a reflection of something about them as a person, rather than as a response to their larger circumstances. Interestingly, this bias is completely reversed when we attempt to explain our own behavior.
The explanation for this bias is twofold. First, there is a matter of knowledge access. When I observe another person acting, I have only their action itself to work with. I see them. I see what they do. What I don’t see is their situation, the larger context in which their action is embedded. I don’t know anything about the thought processes that led them to act in such a way. I don’t know what happened to them earlier that day. I don’t know what their physical or emotional state is. And I often don’t have a clear perspective on the details of their immediate environment. However, when I go to explain my own actions, I have extensive situational knowledge to draw upon. Second, when it comes to our own behavior, self-esteem preservation comes into play. This is especially true for actions that might be viewed negatively by others. So, we are motivated to rationalize our own negative actions in terms of external causes and influences, but we have no such motivation to preserve the self-esteem of other people.
Given their still-developing moral sensibilities and the limited information they had to work with, the other students’ reflexive desire to see me punished was entirely understandable. Elona’s float was in pieces as a result of a direct physical act on my part. The critical detail that the cutting board protruded into the space needed for the back of my chair was something only known to me—and even then, only after I sent her float crashing to the floor.
The other day, while I was listening to a Sunday morning news show where political talking heads were babbling their inane party-line rhetoric, it suddenly occurred to me that the fundamental attribution error might be used as a way of interpreting many of the major policy differences between the political right and the political left. Part of the reason the two sides of the political divide are talking past each other might be because they are framing things according to a different attributional default. For conservatives on the right, human behavior is driven primarily if not entirely by personal values and internal motives. For progressives on the left, human behavior is largely a response to external systemic forces.
As an example, consider how the two sides of the political divide talk about the sources of poverty. For those on the right, poverty is a personal failing, a sign of laziness and lack of intelligence and initiative. The right’s focus on internal factors here is highlighted by the absurd idea that poor people need to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” (something literally impossible given the physical laws of our universe!). While for those on the left, poverty is a result of lack of access to education and opportunity—often exacerbated by systemic racism—and a side effect of an economic system that is designed specifically to promote the accumulation of wealth among the already wealthy.
Other policy differences seem to follow a similar pattern, with the right seemingly more concerned about individual responsibility and intra-personal factors (“We can’t extend unemployment benefits because then people would have no incentive to go back to work”) and the left more focused on external constraints and systemic forces (“If we don’t extend unemployment benefits, people will lose their homes”).
Even the insane controversy over wearing facemasks fits roughly with this internal-external distinction, with whack-jobs on the far right claiming their personal freedoms are being violated if they have to cover their mouth and nose in public, entirely ignoring that the purpose of wearing a mask is to protect other people by limiting the spread of the virus. These folks see wearing facemasks as an internally-driven personal choice, and consider the external context—a once-in-a-century global pandemic—as irrelevant (or worse: as a government deep-state plot to turn everyone into a communist).
Demographic differences between the progressive left and the far right might explain some of this. For one thing, progressives tend to be more highly educated than those on the far right, and thus more likely to look beyond immediate surface details when attempting to explain things. Recall that a major source of the fundamental attribution error is the lack of access to situational knowledge. More education means a more nuanced ability to understand the broader situation.
In addition, the progressive end of the spectrum is the ideological home of more LGBTQ and people of color, people who have personal, firsthand experience with systemic discrimination, and thus an increased sensitivity to the subtle (and not-so subtle) ways the system can assert its influence. Meanwhile, on the right you have a higher concentration of conservative religious beliefs that preach the importance of internal factors: a person’s experience in the afterlife depends critically on their actions and personal transgressions while alive, and salvation requires an intimate, personal commitment to god.
My purpose here is merely to draw attention to the possible relationship between a common cognitive bias and a person’s political leanings. Differences between the political left and right are obviously too complex to be explained by a simple attributional error. There are no doubt other psychological biases at play as well, along with the potential differences in moral reasoning that I have discussed before.
And finally, I don’t want to give the impression that in casting the folks on the MAGA far right as uneducated virus-spreading religious cucks I am purposely trying to make them look bad. They do that quite well enough on their own. But I also don’t want to give the false impression that I wholeheartedly embrace the progressive view of things either. Because of their attention to the role of systemic forces, I see the “radical” left as the lesser of evils—lesser, but still evil. And I especially don’t want to suggest that I am in any way sympathetic with independents or libertarians or any other wimpy fence-riding faction.
The truth is that everyone on both the far left and far right—and all points in between—is making a fundamental and critical mistake in their judgment of things, a mistake that goes far beyond the fundamental attribution error. A mistake that I will be exploring in detail in part 2.