Just as our view of ourselves can be distorted, so can our view of others--but in different ways. As I've discussed with the fundamental attribution error, we tend to see other people’s behavior as the result of personality traits more than circumstance. This can lead us to see them in negative terms, as when we see a single case of bad driving as proof that someone is always a bad driver. But it can also cause us to see people in positive terms. If you watch someone give a talk about something they know a lot about, it’s easy to think they’re an all-around brilliant person, even though they wouldn’t sound nearly that smart talking about other things. This is the halo effect, which causes us to see people who are impressive in one way as being impressive in every way. If they’re an expert in physics, we may think they’re qualified to talk about economics, too. Or--as advertisers have known for decades--if they’re good at sports, people will trust their advice about what shoes or cars they should buy.
The flip side of the halo effect is the horn effect, which makes us think people with one unsavory quality must be bad in every way. If we find out that a dishonest acquaintance volunteers at the animal shelter, we assume they must do it for nefarious reasons. They can’t really care about animals, can they? But maybe they do. People are complicated, but we tend to see them as much more one-dimensional than we see ourselves. We sort them into boxes labeled “good” and “bad” when the truth is that most are somewhere in between, or even very good in some ways and very bad in others. The less we know people, the more we think of them in terms of one-dimensional caricatures. If Joe Bob from back home has some unsavory opinions, we may remember that he’s an OK guy in a lot of other ways. But if Joe Schmoe we’ve never met before expresses the same opinions, he must be a nasty piece of work all around.
Other Groups
Our view of others is more nuanced and charitable if we see them as “one of us” instead “one of them”. Human beings have a powerful bias toward ingroup favoritism, on the one hand, and outgroup derogation, on the other. Everybody knows this has been a common theme in history. Many tribes throughout history named themselves something meaning, “The People” or “The Real People”, while their names for others translated as “strangers” or even “enemies”. The lives of those “others” were generally considered less valuable.
We still have those tendencies. Many American conservatives take it for granted that God is on our side, and that American lives are more valuable than foreign lives. In fact, they may even see this as a moral, patriotic viewpoint. Liberals are less likely to think in those terms, but they’re still prone to biased, ingroup/outgroup thinking. They’re outraged by the misdeeds of conservative politicians, but excuse those of liberal politicians. And of course, conservatives do the same thing in the other direction. Both groups see the other “tribe” as more homogeneous and more extreme than they really are (though as I'll discuss later, tribalism and groupthink really can make groups more ideologically extreme and homogeneous). Like most in-groups, both sides of the political spectrum see themselves as diverse and decent, while seeing others as one-dimensional and sinister. You see this all the time on social media. Someone on one side will post a video of an extremist on the other side and say, “See! They’re all alike!”, as though a right-wing or left-wing zealot were representative of the average conservative or liberal. This is another instance of stereotypical thinking, and an excellent example of a logical fallacy I’ll discuss later, called hasty generalization.
Generally speaking, our cognitive biases cause us to favor ourselves over others, and to favor “us’ over “them”. You can sum up several biases in two words: egocentrism and ethnocentrism (ethnocentrism on smaller scales can be called tribalism). Human beings are prone to all these things. We’re predisposed to judge others more harshly than ourselves, and other groups and cultures more harshly than our own. Modern cosmopolitanism has caused many to move away from ethnocentrism, but it’s still a powerful human urge. Its cousin, tribalism, is still pervasive. At the local level, we favor our home basketball team over the other team, and we’re sure they’re committing more fouls than we are. Are those referees blind!? But rival tribes at one level may be part of the same tribe at other levels. Those people in the next town are “the other guys” at the local level, but “one of us” at the state or national level.
The flip side of the halo effect is the horn effect, which makes us think people with one unsavory quality must be bad in every way. If we find out that a dishonest acquaintance volunteers at the animal shelter, we assume they must do it for nefarious reasons. They can’t really care about animals, can they? But maybe they do. People are complicated, but we tend to see them as much more one-dimensional than we see ourselves. We sort them into boxes labeled “good” and “bad” when the truth is that most are somewhere in between, or even very good in some ways and very bad in others. The less we know people, the more we think of them in terms of one-dimensional caricatures. If Joe Bob from back home has some unsavory opinions, we may remember that he’s an OK guy in a lot of other ways. But if Joe Schmoe we’ve never met before expresses the same opinions, he must be a nasty piece of work all around.
Other Groups
Our view of others is more nuanced and charitable if we see them as “one of us” instead “one of them”. Human beings have a powerful bias toward ingroup favoritism, on the one hand, and outgroup derogation, on the other. Everybody knows this has been a common theme in history. Many tribes throughout history named themselves something meaning, “The People” or “The Real People”, while their names for others translated as “strangers” or even “enemies”. The lives of those “others” were generally considered less valuable.
We still have those tendencies. Many American conservatives take it for granted that God is on our side, and that American lives are more valuable than foreign lives. In fact, they may even see this as a moral, patriotic viewpoint. Liberals are less likely to think in those terms, but they’re still prone to biased, ingroup/outgroup thinking. They’re outraged by the misdeeds of conservative politicians, but excuse those of liberal politicians. And of course, conservatives do the same thing in the other direction. Both groups see the other “tribe” as more homogeneous and more extreme than they really are (though as I'll discuss later, tribalism and groupthink really can make groups more ideologically extreme and homogeneous). Like most in-groups, both sides of the political spectrum see themselves as diverse and decent, while seeing others as one-dimensional and sinister. You see this all the time on social media. Someone on one side will post a video of an extremist on the other side and say, “See! They’re all alike!”, as though a right-wing or left-wing zealot were representative of the average conservative or liberal. This is another instance of stereotypical thinking, and an excellent example of a logical fallacy I’ll discuss later, called hasty generalization.
Generally speaking, our cognitive biases cause us to favor ourselves over others, and to favor “us’ over “them”. You can sum up several biases in two words: egocentrism and ethnocentrism (ethnocentrism on smaller scales can be called tribalism). Human beings are prone to all these things. We’re predisposed to judge others more harshly than ourselves, and other groups and cultures more harshly than our own. Modern cosmopolitanism has caused many to move away from ethnocentrism, but it’s still a powerful human urge. Its cousin, tribalism, is still pervasive. At the local level, we favor our home basketball team over the other team, and we’re sure they’re committing more fouls than we are. Are those referees blind!? But rival tribes at one level may be part of the same tribe at other levels. Those people in the next town are “the other guys” at the local level, but “one of us” at the state or national level.
One important caveat here is that we aren’t necessarily wrong when we see ourselves, or our group or culture, as being in the right. Sometimes we really are right, and they really are wrong. Is it ethnocentric for me to say that foot binding and female genital mutilation are wrong? If it is, fine--I think they’re wrong. So, it’s not that siding with our own tribe, in-group, or culture is always wrong; it’s just that things aren’t automatically good or right because it’s us doing them (or because we’ve always done them that way). If our group or culture really is in the right, then we need to be able to give reasons--not rationalizations, but good reasons--why that’s true. If we find that we don’t have good reasons, then we need to change. That’s important, because whole groups of people can be terribly, tragically wrong. In fact, they’re often wrong precisely because they’re thinking as groups, and not as individuals. That's what I'll discuss in the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment