3BI: limited perception, supernatural explanations, and the fundamental attribution error
Welcome to my 3BI newsletter sharing three insights from the world of behavioral science on psychology, decision-making, and behavioral change. Sign up here to have every new edition delivered straight to your inbox.
Limited perception
One of the most important concepts to understand about our psychology is the limits to our perception and cognition and, most importantly, how our mind fills such gaps in information.
Look at the image below and focus on the dot on the left. While focused on left dot, observe what direction the object on the right is moving.
Image from Vox/Patrick Cavanagh
It appears that the object on the right is moving diagonally, up to the right and then back down to the left, but it’s actually moving up and down in a straight, vertical line.
Such visual illusions demonstrate how our perceptions are not always aligned with reality and that simple shifts in focus can alter the world as we see it. Our brains are incredibly powerful, but they cannot process every aspect of the physical world, retain all of humanity’s knowledge, or understand the thoughts and motivations of others.
Unfortunately, our mind isn’t designed to simply spot and recognize these gaps in perception, but instead to fill them with explanations that to help us make sense of the world. From Vox:
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”
Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.
Supernatural explanations
One of the most common ways we’ve filled such gaps throughout history is with the supernatural, from religion to astrology.
From Behavioral Scientist:
Humans have long used religion to understand the world. The ancient Greeks believed that Poseidon governed the waves at sea, and Athena guided soldiers in battle. In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang’e orchestrates the cycles of the moon, and the Dragon King controls rainfall. Throughout history, cultures have developed supernatural explanations to explain the mysteries of life.
Supernatural explanations turn religion into a powerful meaning-making tool. In what is known as the “god of the gaps” theory, prominent thinkers like Nietzsche and Drummond proposed that religion evolves to fill gaps in human understanding.
In a recent study, the authors aimed to better understand how and when such reasoning is applied. There is much in the world that we can’t explain or fully understand, so what phenomena or gaps in knowledge do we tend to fill in with supernatural or religious explanations? Interestingly, they found that it tends to be used to explain natural events rather than social ones:
Among these explanations we found a striking pattern: supernatural explanations were more common for natural events than for social events. All but one of the societies that we surveyed had a supernatural explanation of at least one natural phenomenon, and most had more than one. Most of the societies in our sample had supernatural explanations for disease (96 percent), food scarcity (92 percent), and natural hazards (90 percent). In contrast, supernatural explanations were present for warfare in 67 percent of societies, murder in 82 percent, and theft in 26 percent.
Why is this?
Why are supernatural explanations so pervasive for natural phenomena? We believe the most likely reason is the absence of clear, identifiable agents behind natural events. Humans tend to personify the world around them. Research suggests that people interpret events in terms of a responsible agent acting with intention to affect another person or being. For instance, people are more likely to attribute a family’s tragic death to divine intervention when a dam breaks spontaneously, rather than when a dam worker deliberately releases the water. When tragedy strikes and there is no clearly responsible person to blame, people turn to the heavens.
Perhaps we feel as though we understand humans well enough to explain their actions, but nature feels foreign and more mystical.
Read more at Behavioral Scientist and check out the paper here.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Despite our feelings to the contrary, we typically aren’t great at assessing the motivations for human actions, either. From Psyche:
A classic idea in social psychology is that, in seeking to explain someone’s behaviour, people tend to inflate the importance of dispositions and neglect the importance of situations. The idea dates to the beginning of the field, appearing in the work of Kurt Lewin (1930), Fritz Heider (1944) and Gustav Ichheiser (1949). In his 1977 paper, Lee Ross coined a term for it: the ‘fundamental attribution error’.
This is one of the most long standing biases documented in psychology. Once again, though, our understanding of why and how we apply this bias is incomplete. In a series of studies, a group of researchers sought to understand the impact of two key inputs to the fundamental attribution error: values and relationships.
We hypothesised that people’s attributions would change based on whether the offender violated a moral value that the attributor particularly cares about, as well as whether the offender is a stranger or someone closer to them.
Sure enough, they found that judgement of a person’s actions were heavily influenced by morals and familiarity:
We found a clear pattern in which study participants attributed acts to the person (as opposed to the situation) to a greater extent if the act violated a moral value that they especially cared about.
…
In the scenarios where they or a close other committed a violation, participants tended to make more situation-oriented, less person-oriented judgments. It’s as if situation-based explanations functioned as morally consistent excuses protecting ‘me and my mates’.
This is consistent with the social and tribal nature of humans. We have an innate desire to maintain the integrity of the social groups we identify with, and thus judge those who we identify with differently than those we don’t.
Such judgement of people’s motivations has important consequences:
Because character attributions are judgments of a person’s internal tendencies, they can be a powerful means of moral condemnation (eg, ‘That driver who cut me off is a complete asshole’). By contrast, situational attributions can help exculpate or excuse a transgressor (eg, ‘That driver was probably under a lot of pressure’). Since our attributions reflect our understanding of what caused a behaviour, they inform how it should be dealt with, now and in the future. For example, a convicted criminal might explain to a parole board that he has completely changed since the time of his offence; this emphasises the role of the person as the cause of the crime. Alternatively, he might explain that he will have a completely different set of circumstances than he previously did, emphasising the contribution of the situation in bringing about a crime. Which will give the parole board more confidence that the individual will not reoffend? When people tend to attribute wrongdoing more to the person, arguments about complete personal change may be more persuasive.
It’s a good to get in the habit of paying attention to how we attribute causes to people’s actions to spot bias and, generally, we should aim to give more grace to others outside of our own circles. Much tragic conflict and injustice emerges from the assumption that those in perceived out-groups - whether opposing political parties, different ethnicities, or even rival sports fans - do things we don’t like because of inherent moral failings. Noticing who we do and don’t give the benefit of the doubt to can be very illuminating.