You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  One of the first studies to uncover the machinations of the fundamental attribution error was conducted in 1967 by Edward Jones and Victor Harris at Duke University. They had students read speech transcripts of debaters both in support of and in opposition to the political ideologies of Fidel Castro. (Today they might have used Osama bin Laden.) The students correctly attributed the speechwriter’s ideas as influenced by the speechwriter’s internal feelings when told the person who gave the speech had chosen his own position. If, for instance, the debaters said they disagreed with Castro, the students said they believed them. When the students were told the debater had no choice in the matter and was assigned the position as either pro- or anti-Castro, the students didn’t buy it. If the debater was assigned a pro-Castro position and then gave a pro-Castro speech, the students reading that speech told the researchers they thought the debater really believed what he or she was saying. The situation’s influence didn’t play into their assumptions; instead they saw all the debaters’ words as springing from their character.

  Variations of this experiment are still being conducted today. Each new twist of the variables leads to the same mistakes. In 1997, Peter Ditto had men meet with an actress working for the experimenters. She and the men would have short one-on-one conversations and then she gave a written report of her impressions. When Ditto told the men she had been instructed to give a negative report, the men said she was just following orders. When told she had been asked to give a positive report, the men said although they knew she was just doing her job, they felt that she really did like them.

  You commit the fundamental attribution error by believing other people’s actions burgeon from the sort of people they are and have nothing to do with the setting. When a man believes the stripper really likes him, or when the boss thinks all his employees love to hear his stories about fishing in Costa Rica, that’s the fundamental attribution error.

  It’s hard to grasp just how powerful a situation can be, how much it can influence the behavior of you and people you think you know pretty well. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University that would rattle him to his core and change psychology forever. Zimbardo was interested in the roles you play throughout your life, the characters you create and then pretend to be depending on the situation. He thought perhaps the brutality displayed in war and in prisons had less to do with evil than it did with unconscious role-playing.

  He had twenty-four male students flip coins to see who would be prisoners and who would be guards in a pretend prison set up on campus. Those who were randomly selected to be prisoners wore prison smocks with numbers on the back and ankle chains. Guards wore full uniforms with mirrored shades and wielded wooden batons. The guards were told to refer to the prisoners only by their numbers but never physically harm them. Zimbardo had the local police arrest the mock prisoners at their homes and undergo searches in front of their neighbors. They then went through a simulated booking at the police station, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. After the prisoners had waited blindfolded in a real cell, the police then took them to campus, where they were strip-searched and deloused in the fake jail. After all this, the experiment was supposed to take two weeks. Participants would pretend to be guards and prisoners while psychologists videotaped them and took notes. It ended after six days.

  There was a riot on the second day. One person had to be released on the third day after suffering so much emotional distress the researchers couldn’t bear to keep him confined. What went wrong?

  Zimbardo made sure his participants were middle-class college students with no history of violence or substance abuse. He told the guards to maintain order but didn’t give specific instructions as to how to go about it. At first, both guards and prisoners didn’t take the experiment seriously. They goofed around a bit and were slow to warm to the role-playing, but Zimbardo had the guards regularly wake up the prisoners with whistles and then count them, forcing the prisoners to recite their numbers one at time. Over time, the guards became more aggressive during these counts, more abusive, and cruel. If a prisoner broke a rule, the guards would force that person to do push-ups or place the prisoner in a closet as if it were solitary confinement. On the morning of the second day, the prisoners felt like they had endured enough and barricaded their cells with mattresses while yelling back at the pretend guards. In turn, the guards grabbed a fire extinguisher and doused the prisoners through the bars so they could force their way into the cells. They then stripped the prisoners naked, took away their beds, and began to insult and berate them. To prevent further insurrections, they allowed certain prisoners to wear clothes and sleep on beds if they maintained good, obedient behavior. They also were allowed better food and the indulgences of a toothbrush and toothpaste. After a few hours, the guards took all the privileges away from the compliant prisoners and had them switch places with the defiant ones in an attempt to scramble their minds and destroy any alliances they might have formed by creating doubt in their minds as to who was secretly cooperating with the guards. Before long, the guards were forcing the prisoners to relieve themselves in a bucket and forcing them to simulate sodomy on one another.

  Zimbardo became overwhelmed by the power of the situation just as much as the students had. He started imagining himself as a warden, and when he heard rumors of a possible escape plan being hatched by the prisoners, he tried unsuccessfully to move his experiment into a real jail. Once he saw footage of the guards becoming physically violent when they thought the psychologists weren’t looking, he realized that the situation was getting out of hand. When one of his graduate students visited for the first time and recoiled in horror at the conditions the prisoners were living in, Zimbardo finally saw through her eyes that things had gone too far. On the sixth day, they ended the experiment. The prisoners rejoiced; the guards complained.

  In the interviews that followed, the students who role-played as prisoners said they felt as if they had lost their identity, and that the experiment had been replaced by a real prison. They questioned their own sanity. They forgot they could leave if they only requested for the experiment to end. The guards said they were only following orders.

  Remember, all of these people were just average, middle-class college students the week prior. Nothing they or anyone else knew about them suggested they were capable of such malice or conformity. It all took place in a row of offices in a building on a college campus, and everyone knew this, but the situation, the external forces, were so powerful that the participants changed into monsters and victims in just one day.

  Decades later, Zimbardo would reject the U.S. government’s claims about the sadism displayed at the Abu Ghraib prison as being the result of the behavior of a few bad apples. The government was committing the fundamental attribution error, ignoring the power of the situation, turning the perpetrators into easy-to-dismiss characters. Although he doesn’t absolve those who tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo suggests whenever people are put into a situation like the one he created in his experiment, the same results will unfold, as they did in 2004 in the Baghdad Correctional Facility and as they have in other prisons throughout history. People are not good at heart, Zimbardo says, but because their environment encourages it. Anyone, he believes, is capable of becoming a monster if given the power and opportunity.

  When you interpret your loved one’s coldness as his or her indifference to your wants and needs instead of as a reaction to stress at work or problems ricocheting in your loved one’s own heart, you’ve committed the fundamental attribution error. When you vote for someone because that person seems likable and approachable, and ignore how much of their persona is contrived for the sake of votes, it’s the same error at work. You commit it again when you assay friendliness as sexual interest, or poverty as the result of laziness. When you look for a cause for another person’s actions, you find it. Rarely, though, do you first consider how powerful the situation is. You blame the person,
not the environment and the influence of the person’s peers. You do this because you would like to believe your own behavior comes strictly from within. You know this isn’t true though. You shift from introvert to extrovert, from brainiac to simpleton, from charismatic to impish—depending on where you find yourself and who is watching.

  The fundamental attribution error leads to labels and assumptions about who people are, but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect. Those impressions will linger until you get to know people and understand their situation and the circumstances in which their behavior is generated. Knowing this doesn’t mean you must forgive evil, but perhaps it can help prevent it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A super-tight hug goes out to Erin Malone, who found my blog and believed it should exist in physical form. Through her confidence and hard work it now does. Thank you so much.

  Thanks too to Patrick Mulligan, who “got it” early on and then slashed and questioned the original manuscript until it made sense. I’m fortunate to have had such a plugged-in editor.

  Boundless thanks go out to my wife, Amanda, who read this book as it came together and kept it from going off the rails many times.

  In many ways this book and the blog from which it sprang started in a psychology class I took seven years after graduating from high school.

  After getting married, my wife and I sold all our possessions and traveled to Germany for no other reason than to see what would happen. We had both gone to a tiny school in a small town in Mississippi, and we both worked the sort of jobs that went along with those foundations—waiting tables, construction, selling coats. Escaping into a strange adventure made a lot of sense at the time. As tramps abroad, we were shocked at not only how naive we were, but how uneducated. We swore to each other when we got back to the States we would get college degrees.

  One of our first college experiences was an incredibly challenging and life-changing course—Introduction to Psychology, taught by one extraordinary teacher, Jean Edwards.

  Edwards’s class wasn’t like the other courses. Nothing about it was remedial. She came every day with a laptop and a projector and used videos, photos, animations, and diagrams to detail the intricacies of how the mind worked. The textbook was an afterthought, a supplement. In her class, she used presentations labored over for years to boggle our minds and shake us out of our delusions. She made us stand up and perform, she put us in and out of groups, she pointed at our faces and made us talk. When the tests landed on our desks, there was no memorization, there were no word banks. Every question was a puzzle that required a deep understanding of the material to unfurl and solve. Once we went on to a full university, my wife and I were astonished to find no course ever compared to hers.

  In one class, she asked us to imagine a man who woke up every day and wrapped his entire body in newspaper before putting on his clothes. He worked hard, provided for his family, and hurt no one. At the end of the day, he would discreetly remove his wrappings before going to bed. She then asked, “Is this person crazy?” For an hour, the class argued about it. Most people’s knee-jerk reaction was “Yeah, obviously.” She nursed the conversation, pointing out our ignorance, asking us to examine our own quirks and neurotic habits. By the end of the class the students had reached a consensus: The newspaper man was as deluded as the rest of us, and therefore not crazy.

  Every class with Edwards was revelatory, not just because of the overwhelming number of eye-opening facts and epiphanies, but also because she showed people like me and my wife there were kindred spirits out there. She had no problem losing an hour of her day to an after-class conversation, and she was always ready to subvert the norms and expectations of her pupils and peers. She made it safe and respectable to be different, and she provided her students with a role model they didn’t know was an option before meeting her. She was a smart, successful, professional woman who questioned everything and dared you to join her. This book, and the blog that led to it, started in that class.

  So, I thank you, Jean Edwards. You changed my life and tilted my view of the world permanently.

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