Fundamental Attribution Error(FAE)

I read this book named 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell, a couple of weeks ago. It is a book on 'how little things can make a big difference'. I read about this term called FAE which psychologists describe as the tendency of human beings to invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context while interpreting other people's behaviour.

Lets see if I can make this more simple to grasp. A couple of researchers named May and Hartshorne ran a few tests on about eleven thousand school children all designed to measure honesty. The results were quite revealing in terms of how all children cheated but all in different situations. So the results read something like 'most children deceive in certain situations and not in others. Some cheat in arithemtic tests and some in spelling. When a child deceives depends on his intelligence, age, home background, etc.'.

Now to understand FAE, imagine about how you would describe a friend or a co-worker. You would probably describe your friend as honest instead of saying 'my friend is honest in her personal life but slips a few times in her professional life'. Now, that is what FAE is all about; the tendency to make observations on human behaviour based on inherent traits and forget the role of situations. However, reserachers believe this is a way of deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior. So, when we observe someone who is very serious looking, unapproachable, fiercely independent and sometimes very funny and helpful and caring we try to reduce the description to one absolute term such as unapproachable OR funny. We don't think of the situations in which this person is while portraying those traits.

The whole FAE thing explains how character is not a stable, absolute thing and changes with situation and context. According to the author Malcolm Gladwell 'Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context'. And also, the author suggests that most of our characters seem stable because we are able to control our environment.

I am so interested in this whole concept because it makes so much sense. I feel I do this so often. I observe a co-worker, find him or her to be so competitive so as to cut a few corners to get something done and I start labelling them as 'mean and bad'. Then, I get an opportunity to observe them in a different environment like a friendly get together and the person seems to share the same interests as mine and is so friendly that I start to wonder if I was wrong about what I thought he/she was. I start to question my character as too judgemental or too intolerant to imperefections. Now, with this FAE explanation it seems that the way my brain works is how the brains of all Homo Sapiens was meant to work. It makes it easier for me to understand people and come to terms with the bad and good in each of us. Now, that takes a lot of pressure of my 'mazed mind'!

Thoughts and quotes courtesy: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

'Cast Away' philosophy

I watched the movie 'Cast Away' a couple of days ago. I liked the last few lines that Tom Hanks spoke. It sounded so true and so right. So, I just decided to write it down in my blog.

I'm sure many of you have already seen the movie, but for those of you, who like me, are still catching up on 'lost movie years', here is the storyline. This is a movie about a man who is 'cast away' in an uninhabited island after a plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean (I hope I got that right). He survives in the island for 4 years after which he finds a ship that rescues him. And this is what he says to his friend when he finds out that his lady love whom he thought about day and night in the lonely island is now married happily with a baby girl. He tells his friend that soon after he found he was stuck in this lonely island he decided to kill himself and hung himself from a tree. But the tree branch broke and he realised he did not have the power to even kill himself. So he decided that some bizarre logic was telling him to live on and hope to be rescued. So he started finding ways to stay alive and then one day a tide brings along a broken sheet which he used as a sail for a boat that he builds to reach a ship which then rescues him. So now when his friend asks him how he is going to cope with the loss of his lady love he replies, " I am just going to try to stay alive because the sun will rise and who knows what the tide will bring with it tomorrow?!"

I guess that is how we all ought to live; with hope that the sun will rise to bring us a new day and the tide will bring us a new sail to help us get to our ship of dreams.

Picture courtesy: http://www.itenuscars.com/cast_away.jpg

Dead Dads Club

I am a part of this club! I am quite sure many of you understand what that means. For those of you who prefer straight talk; it just means that I am among the many who have lost their Dads.

I caught this phrase yesterday in a TV series (Grey's Anatomy) I was watching. In this story, a guy loses his father to cancer and then a friend tries to break the ice by saying, 'Welcome to the Dead Dads Club'. I quite liked the way she said it. In fact, what she said next got me thinking more about the topic. The guy who had just lost his father says, 'I don't know a world that does not have my father in it!'. The friend replies, 'It isn't very different!'. How true?! The world isn't different because my father is not in it, but, I am different because my father is not in it.

I am sure many of you who are fortunate enough to have both your parents would probably find it difficult to understand this. Whereas, for many like me who lost his/her father when when he/she was just a year old (or more) this probably would make perfect sense. However, let me make this very clear. I am not trying to say that I had a miserable childhood because my Dad was not there or because my Mom did not do enough. In fact, I never thought too much about not having a Dad until a few years ago. As I age and probe life more, I seem to think much about how all sorts of things influence the person you are or you are trying to be.

The saying that a coin has two sides is true here as well. Not having someone in your life has both pros and cons. For instance, having a Dad would have given me another perspective of life, one different from my Mom's. Having a Dad would have made me understand my personality traits better, because now I don't even know why I act or think in certain ways that my Mom would never do. However, on the up side, not having a Dad has made me learn the virtues of courage, strength and the never-give-up attitude from my Mom who has made us (my sister and I) good human beings. Not having a Dad has made me realize how important it is not to take people who are there for me for granted. Think about it! I don't know what it means to call someone 'DAD', whereas there are millions who don't give a second thought to that word. So, I've come to understand, as always, that there is a reason behind everything that happens in one's life. The key thing is to learn to grasp life from different angles and then accept change in a way that is salubrious to your soul.

Picture courtesy: http://pbskids.org/arthur/friends/dad/images/dad_coloring.gif