Flawed At The Beginning
Flawed At The Beginning
Why We Misjudge Other People
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
-Richard P. Feynman
Why are there so many problems facing the Jewish community that “everyone” agrees must be solved, yet years go by and nothing actually changes?
I know, a bummer of a question…
During my twenty years of adult involvement in the Jewish community, I always found it depressing that issues such as synagogue affiliation, day school affordability, Israel civility (or incivility), or the general direction of Jewish education inspired unified consternation, yet complete misalignment when it came to implementing solutions.
Yet rather than sit depressed about what I cannot change, I think many of these misalignments stem from a single question:
“What’s our theory of the problem?”
Whenever I am given a large task, before I get to work, I sit down and ask myself why something is a problem, in the first place. And when I am the only one responsible for a solution, as long as my theory is “right,” I can be successful. However, when the group gets larger, if people each have a different theory for why something is a problem, misalignment starts at the outset. Imagine how much more misaligned things become when you are asking multiple institutions, to say nothing of the entire Jewish population, to solve a problem…
I am sticking to my guns that this newsletter will offer minimal editorials and maximal education, but ultimately Moneyball is my passion because I believe most big failures start before the work really begins. If the theory of the problem is wrong, hundreds of hours and millions of dollars can be wasted prior to the inevitable failure of something that should have never begun.
And as we start a new Torah cycle with Parashat Bereishit, it’s time to recognize how our minds often doom us to failure before we even begin.
Fundamental Attribution Error
One reason that leaders are inclined to misdiagnose their theory of a problem is that human beings are predisposed to misdiagnose other people.
(If this is the part where you tell me that you are better than average at reading people, call me a skeptic.1 As Daniel Gilbert says, “If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”)
This is one reason why learning about heuristics is critical. All of us are guilty of these errors, and thus our best hope to “beat” them is awareness.
Lee Ross calls the tendency of the typical person to misinterpret the actions of others the “fundamental attribution error” (FAE),2 defining FAE as the “general tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental influence.” When judging other people, there is an assumption that “a particular subject’s obedience reflected his distinguishing personal dispositions rather than the potency of situational pressures and constraints acting upon all subjects.”
Ok…let’s try and put that into English.
A colleague shows up too late to an important meeting. While this colleague is almost never late, you are having a bad day and are highly stressed. You think to yourself, “Ploni Almoni3 is so irresponsible.” However, Ploni4 is a single parent with two young children at two different schools, and he/she/they had childcare bail for the week.
At that moment, are you thinking more about the person (i.e. “Ploni is irresponsible”) or their situation (i.e. “Ploni is exhausted from a difficult parenting situation”)?
While most of us would like to believe we would gravitate to the latter explanation, in general, psychologists find that we focus on the former much more than the latter. This is the essence of FAE, focusing too much on personal characteristics to explain someone’s actions, and spending too little time looking at situational or environmental factors. And the more the FAE drives our theory of why someone is the way that they are, the more we doom a relationship.
FAE has a variety of implications, particularly when we meet Martin Seligman and his views on learned optimism. But in the meantime, fighting our instinct to label others unfairly begins with emotional intelligence.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
“Josh, I know you humblebrag, or just brag, about the latest obscure book you read. But really? Everyone’s read that book.”
Ok, some real talk.
Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is not exactly in the spirit of Moneyball. Covey states at the end of the book, “I believe correct principles are natural laws, and that God…is the source of them” (317). So the data is minimal. Additionally, many people criticize Covey for igniting a global trend in corporate jargon that demotivate leaders and employees.
(Synergy! Monetize! Operationalize! Pivot! You get the idea).5
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, I won’t blame you, and you can watch this “Weird Al” Yankovic video to laugh and ignore everything else in this section.
However, early in Covey’s book, he provides a personal example that shows the power of FAE, even though he does not use that term. One day, as Covey was riding the subway, a man and his children entered the same subway car. The children started to misbehave, annoying everyone in sight. After a few minutes, Covey demands that the man control his children better, at which point the following encounter took place:
“The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Can you imagine what I [Stephen Covey] felt at that moment?” (31).
FAE has real consequences, and the only way to “fight” our natural instinct is to build the muscles of empathy and compassion. And when others mess up, remember that we are likely to make the same mistake.
Go easy on them, and yourself.
Weekly Links
How Do I Make My Art?: You may have noticed that I switched all of the pictures on the homepage for Moneyball Judaism. All of the new pictures were created using Dall-E, a website that uses generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) to create art using natural language. It’s free, so try it out.
The End of Doomerism: I am an unusual kind of optimist, but that’s a conversation for offline. However, I loved this article on what it means to be an “impatient optimist.” Maybe you will, too.
Donors Want to Give Differently Than Their Parents: We are living through a massive generational transfer of wealth, yet that does not mean that the next generation is going to give in the same way as the previous one. Read this study in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on how the winds are changing.
Ten Ways to Find More Awe: Not a huge fan of lists for this newsletter. I just feel like you can find them somewhere else. But this article about ways to find more awe was wicked awesome (can I say that?).
More Choices Is Not Always Better: We are living in a time where the Jewish community creates endless choices for individual Jews, yet fewer Jews than ever are actually participating. Perhaps having too many choices is part of the problem, given what is called the “paradox of choice”? We will talk about this in greater detail, but this is a great introduction to the current state of “choice overload.”
Next thing you know you are going to tell me you’re an above-average driver! Stay tuned for when we learn about the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Lee Ross, "The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Vol. 10., ed. L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 173–220.
Huh? OK, this newsletter does not have prerequisites for Jewish textual knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we can learn a little Torah, too. In the Talmud and Modern Hebrew, Ploni Almoni is essentially the equivalent of saying “John Doe” or “Jane Doe.” The original use of the term is found in Megillat Ruth 4:1:
וּבֹעַז עָלָה הַשַּׁעַר וַיֵּשֶׁב שָׁם וְהִנֵּה הַגֹּאֵל עֹבֵר אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר־בֹּעַז וַיֹּאמֶר סוּרָה שְׁבָה־פֹּה פְּלֹנִי אַלְמֹנִי וַיָּסַר וַיֵּשֵׁב׃
Now you know…and knowing is half the battle. (G.I. Joe!).
Plonit is the female equivalent.