#85: The fundamental attribution error is ruining your life
Perhaps you're already familiar with what social psychologists have had to say about the fundamental attribution error, but did you know that it has a secret role in magnifying your anxieties about your worth? If you're prone to worrying about how everyone else in your field is more talented and smart than you are, then gather round. Your Imperfectionist friend is here to give you the real explanation - and the antidote.
Episode transcript:
Here’s yet another double standard you’re inflicting on yourself.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello there, and welcome to another virtual gathering of imperfectionists. I put together the last podcast episode while sitting in the garden in the sun, but this time I’m sitting in my little office with the light on, and I woke this morning to the sound of heavy rain against the window. That’s British spring for you. And here’s me talking about the weather - that’s British people for you. How predictable of me. Quick, let’s move on.
I’ve been thinking recently about what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. It’s a form of bias that leads us to overemphasise other people’s personality traits, enduring beliefs, and other aspects of their character and psychology when we’re trying to understand and explain their behaviour, and to ignore the influence of things going on around them. This error arises when, for example, you conclude that the reason someone hasn’t replied to your text message is that they don’t like you or that they’re rude, while overlooking the possibility that they’re just busy or that they got distracted or their phone died. Or when you conclude that the reason another driver cut you up in traffic is that they’re incompetent or inconsiderate, rather than that they had the sort of momentary lapse of attention that affects all of us from time to time. It’s unpleasant to be confronted with other people making judgments like this about us. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being on a date or attending a job interview in which, for whatever reason, you don’t manage to put your best foot forward, and you go away thinking, ‘Ugh, they’re going to think that I’m always like that, but I’m not!’
Now, discussions of the fundamental attribution error tend to contrast the way we explain other people’s behaviour with the way we explain our own behaviour. The thought is that we’re more likely to make this error when explaining other people’s behaviour than when explaining our own behaviour. In other words, while other people’s behaviour flows from their character traits and other enduring aspects of themselves, we see our own choices as being influenced by a variety of factors - not just our personality, but external circumstances like how busy we are, what the people around us are doing, and so on.
However. I’ve noticed something interesting in coaching sessions. I’ve noticed that people who have anxieties about whether they’re good enough do something a little different with their tendencies to make the fundamental attribution error. When they’re evaluating their own performance, these people are in the habit of ascribing their failures to fundamental, enduring aspects of themselves, and their successes to external aspects of the situation. So, if they don’t get shortlisted for a job they applied for, or if they get a disappointing mark on an assessment, they will naturally take this to be a reflection of their own competence. They didn’t get what they wanted because they’re not good enough, not smart enough, not impressive enough, or otherwise unworthy. But then, when they do get what they want, they’re more reluctant to take this to reflect positively on their own worth, and instead they look to aspects of the situation to explain what happened: maybe they got the job because the other applicants weren’t very good, maybe it wasn’t actually the desirable opportunity that they thought it was when they applied, maybe the better applicants pulled out of the race, and so on. In other words, plenty of us privately make the fundamental attribution error when we explain our own behaviour, but in an inconsistent way: bad outcomes reveal us for the worthless people we are, but good outcomes happen despite our worthlessness - they’re lucky breaks resulting from circumstances that enable us to look more successful and impressive than we are.
Does that a ring a bell for you? If so, I’m afraid there’s another dimension to your weird double standards. While your own failures, but not your own successes, reflect your inherent worth (or lack of it), things are reversed when you try to explain the behaviour of your peers. That person who got the job you applied for didn’t simply get lucky - they got it because they’re smarter and more impressive and competent than you are, and because they shone in the interview whereas you fucked it up. But the next time, when you do get the job, the person who came second isn’t less impressive than you are - they were having a bad day and their natural brilliance didn’t shine through during the interview, which meant that you lucked out and got the job despite your inferiority. The fundamental attribution error leads you to view your own failures as reflections of your inferiority, but other people’s successes as reflections of their superiority. This means you can’t win. The odds are stacked against you. You could win a dozen gold medals at the next Olympic Games and, on the way home, swing by the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm to pick up your latest prize, and you’d still go to bed that night ruminating on how you got lucky because all the other, vastly superior contenders got knocked out of the competition for reasons completely unrelated to their worth. Your fear of not being good enough might be what drives you to reach for ever bigger and more impressive goals, but your mindset ensures that you can never truly enjoy your successes.
There are connections here with impostor syndrome: that persistent tendency to view ourselves as unworthy in spite of evidence to the contrary. I talked about impostor syndrome in episode #11: Why you have impostor syndrome, and what to do about it: Remembering Katherine Hawley. In that episode, I drew on the incisive and useful insights of the much-missed Katherine Hawley, who explained that although those with impostor syndrome are incorrect in their belief that they’re unworthy, they’re not necessarily irrational. Do go and have a listen if you think you might find that helpful - and the episode notes include a link to Hawley’s article on impostor syndrome, in case you’d like to explore further. The double standards that our inconsistent tendency towards the fundamental attribution error lead us to apply can contribute to our impostor syndrome, but they’re not the same thing. The fundamental attribution error doesn’t necessarily lead to impostor syndrome, and if you dive into the literature on it, you’ll find that it doesn’t go in that direction. What leads to impostor syndrome is your tendency to make this error selectively, in the way I’ve described, so that you end up picking up on more evidence for other people’s impressiveness than for your own.
If you do have this tendency, what can you do about it? Well, knowing what you’re dealing with is a big step on the way to fixing it. Without seeing the double standards you’re applying, you take the evidence around you at face value, not realising that it’s skewed through a lens. In this case, that results in your seeing plenty of evidence for other people’s greatness and very little evidence of your own. But I hope that what I’ve said here will enable you to see that the reason you’re seeing more evidence of other people’s greatness than of your own isn’t because that’s just how things are - it’s because you’re interpreting other people’s successes differently to how you interpret your own. It’s a pain that you’re doing this, but being able to say ‘Ah, so it’s just a lens!’ is itself helpful: you can change the lens, after all. I talked about the way we filter what we encounter in the world in a way that is unflattering to ourselves in episode #14: Become your own biggest advocate, with Immanuel Kant.
Ok, so knowledge is power, but how do you apply this knowledge in a way that balances things out and leads you to recognise your own worth in something like the way you’re able to recognise other people’s? Well, one thing you can do is recognise that everyone’s behaviour results from an interaction between their character and other enduring traits and what’s going on around them, and ensure you’re taking into account the whole spectrum of possibilities when you judge yourself and others, instead of focusing disproportionately on, on the one hand, character traits when you’re trying to explain your own failures and your peers’ successes, and on the other hand, circumstances when you’re trying to explain your own successes and other people’s failures. That’s all a bit long-winded, and it might involve a fair amount of mental gymnastics in order, very slowly and laboriously, to push back against your own knee jerk ‘I’m not good enough’ reactions. But I think there’s a short cut here. Next time you find yourself evaluating your own successes dismissively, as the result of luck, ask yourself if you’d take a different view if it was someone else’s success you were evaluating. So, suppose an article you’d submitted to a journal gets accepted for publication, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, I’m awesome!’, you find yourself thinking something like, ‘That’s good news, but I suppose the referees didn’t read it properly, or maybe there aren’t many submissions at the moment so they’ve had to drop their standards, or maybe it’s actually not a very good journal after all’. Consider how you’d have reacted if it had been a colleague whose article got accepted instead. If it turns out that you’d more readily ascribe their good news to their own worth, then that’s a warning sign that your judgment is a bit off. Quite a lot off, actually. And, likewise, next time you get that ‘Sorry, but owing to a very strong field of applicants you were not successful this time’ email in response to a job application, pay attention to the conclusions you draw about yourself, and ask yourself how they compare to the way you’d react to a colleague getting similar disappointing news. If you find that your reaction in your own case is ‘Here’s yet more proof that I’m not up to scratch’, but in the case of your colleague it would be, ‘Well, like the email said, there were a lot of strong applicants - they were just unlucky this time’, then, again, your judgment is skewed.
There’s more to this little exercise than just shining a light on your double standards, though. Comparing your judgments about yourself with your judgments about others is also a helpful way of identifying what character traits and situational factors might potentially feature in the explanation. If you find that your judgments about yourself overemphasise character (when they’re negative judgments) or situation (for positive judgments), but things are reversed when you’re judging other people, then looking at both sets of judgments can help you see more of the spectrum of potential factors that should feature in the explanation. Perhaps your success is due to your being smart and you’re being lucky. Of course, it’s very often the case that we simply don’t know for sure what the correct explanation is - we usually don’t know to what extent someone’s successful job application was a result of particular character traits or skills and to what extent situational factors played a part - so I’m not claiming here that I’m providing you with a formula that will enable you to see the truth. Of course there’ll be uncertainty. But you can take steps to ensure that you don’t unwittingly end up using that uncertainty to widen, in your mind, the gulf between your own worth and that of those around you.
Happy being-a-bit-kinder-to-yourselves, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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