I know why he said that...

Fundamental attribution error number 1

We travel a lot for the work that we do. Regional New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria have become very familiar haunts in recent years. I personally love getting out and visiting places like Broken Hill and Longreach and Cobden and I always post photos of where ever I am on Facebook.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Leeton in NSW which is 500kms south-west of Sydney and 450kms north of Melbourne – kind of a midpoint. I travel with two hats – the working hat and the tourist hat. To be completely honest with you, sometimes the tourist hat comes out a little too often when I’m driving in a town like Leeton. My first evening in Leeton I drove into town with a couple of goals in mind - first goal was to find a Pharmacy and the second goal was to get to the Pharmacy before it closed at 5pm. I had been given rough directions and when I'm being given directions verbally I tend to focus only on what I consider to be the salient points like the large round-a-bout and the left turn. I tune out a little on the finer details in between. This gets me into trouble sometimes. So I'm driving along the main street of Leeton and trying to find the Pharmacy. 

Thinking I have plenty of time, I firmly placed my tourist hat on. Driving slowly, trying to find the corner the Pharmacy was on and also trying to figure out the most effective way to park, in reverse, on a 45 degree angle in a country town was all going on in my mind. Then I stopped, middle of the main street, where I found a parking spot in readiness to park. To my shock I started to hear horns beeping from a trail of 8-10 cars down the road and the driver behind me started yelling out the window. 

I didn't hear exactly what he was saying so I wasn't certain where it was directed – oblivious me. I started reversing and then realised I had turned the wheel too sharply, so stopped and moved forward to try again. As I moved forward the driver in the car behind me had already proceeded to move around me and he stopped abruptly. I’d almost hit his car. He started yelling abuse out the car window and I quickly put my hand up to apologise and diffused the situation and he sped off. My immediate thought was that he was an impatient, rude and a bunch of colourful superlatives that I won’t repeat, fellow. Did he think he was only one on the road.

In fact I was only guessing at why he was so angry with what was happening. 

The person behind him seemed completely relaxed about it. I really didn't know if it was me making him angry or a combination of things of which I was only partly to blame. 

Maybe he was in a hurry to get to daycare to pick up his kids before they closed, maybe it was a family emergency, or maybe he’d had a crappy day at work and fought with his boss and was just in a really bad mood, or maybe it just me and my bad driving. All of these things went through my head but I, realistically, had no real idea what his real motivation was. And then I realised that what had just happened was that I’d been guilty of making what psychologists refer to as a Fundamental Attribution Error. 

It happens all the time. 

And we fall into this trap on a regular basis. 

When a car cuts us off in traffic, when a family member makes a comment we don’t appreciate, when a co-worker looks at us in a certain way across the conference room in a meeting we ascribe motivations to all of those behaviours when we actually have no idea what the real motivation was or what they are actually thinking. And it happens to us as well. How often have you heard a family member or friend or co-worker say something like “he’s only doing that because he likes you” or "she said that because she's trying to let you know who’s boss." It is spoken with complete authority! How do you know that? Is that what "she" told you? This leads to frustration in ourselves and we start talking about it to others and it potentially leads to conflict. My take is that we get a little short sighted by the behaviour and in the process we don't ask the right questions to understand it and clear it up for us. Next time someone you're interacting with says or does something that you want to attribute a motivation to stop and think about asking them why exactly they said or did that. You might be surprised. At ProActive ReSolutions we've developed  a product that helps minimise fall-out from frequent use of the Fundamental Attribution Error. We call it Straight Talk and we’ll talk more about that in an upcoming blog.

Darren Robertson