You're an Idiot
🤬 And other lies I've loved 🤬
"In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” -Kwame Anthony Appiah
“How can they be so stupid?”1
It's just a hunch, but I suspect many of you are asking this question, even if you’re not saying it aloud. And for what it’s worth, people could ask this question no matter how you feel about last week’s election results.2
“Yeah, but I’m right.”
Of course, you are.
It’s adorable.
That’s the great thing about the brain: We are always the most rational person, and everyone else is too ignorant or foolish to see the truth.
“Thank you! This guy gets me.”
So, humor me for a few minutes.
I’m not trying to change your mind.
But what do you have to lose from getting curious?
“My anger.”
Exactly.
And yelling at people on the internet (which, as we know, always works and never exacerbates mental distress.)
Every person has the freedom to make terrible decisions.
It stinks. But if we lose the freedom to make terrible decisions, we will one day lose the freedom to make good decisions.
Could it be that we make the situation far worse by drawing excessive conclusions about that person based on just one terrible choice?
“Maybe, but I don’t make that mistake.”
Sure. Whatever.
While I’ve long seen enough to know the truth about the person people voted for, it’s clear that I don’t know enough about the people who voted for them. And while calling someone “stupid” makes me feel better, it doesn’t change anyone’s mind. Thus, if I want to change someone’s mind, I am going to need to better understand the cognitive mistake at the heart of my name-calling.
This brings us to this week’s big idea.
Correspondence Bias
In one of the earliest issues of Moneyball Judaism,3 we learned about the fundamental attribution error (FAE), a critical finding from Lee Ross that there is a “general tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental influence.”4 Once our judgments become tinted by the FAE, we start to conclude things about individuals or groups that are, at best, incomplete or, at worst, grossly unfair. If you’ve ever decided that certain groups of people are stupid because of isolated behaviors without looking at the context, you are witnessing FAE in action.
FAE has a variety of intellectual descendants, one of which is known as the correspondence bias (CB), a term first identified by Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone (G&M). G&M defines CB as the tendency that "When people observe behavior, they often conclude that the person who performed the behavior was predisposed to do so.”5 Consider actions versus traits:
Just because you observe me doing something in anger does not necessarily mean I am an angry person by nature.
However, while an act of anger does not make me an angry person, many people believe that individual acts demonstrate permanent traits (i.e., they “correspond to each other.”)
The correspondence bias is the tendency to equate individual behaviors with permanent, fixed qualities.
G&M argues that there is “no simple formula” for understanding others because “a person’s inner self is hidden from view,” leading to situations where “people are forced into the difficult business of inferring these tangibles from that which is, in fact, observable.”6
When I observe someone's anger, I see just one of many possible actions, thoughts, or feelings they might experience throughout the day. If I then conclude that this person is an "angry person" based on that one instance, G&M argues that I am making the mistake of inferring "the invisible from the visible," comparing the CB to concluding that “a balloon that rises on a windy day is filled with helium”7:
The situation explains the balloon’s behavior (i.e., it is windy.)
Therefore, let’s wait before we draw a broader conclusion (i.e., the balloon is filled with helium and would rise whether it was windy or not.)
The former is a temporary cause, the latter a permanent one.
In the end, when we acquire a single data point about anything, we need more information before we draw more significant conclusions. Yet, most of us jump farther than any data point could demonstrate.
When someone casts a vote, they decide based on their values and available information. One of the reasons our votes lead to such toxic behavior is that it is incredibly easy to fall guilty to the correspondence bias, assuming that a person is permanently a certain way because of a single decision.
G&M acknowledges that drawing a clear line between actions and traits is murky. Thus, someone may be making a voting decision based on ignorance or stupidity. However, the data suggests we should withhold judgment until we learn more, bringing us to this week’s book recommendation.
Emotional Agility
Susan David is one of many researchers and practitioners who turned our knowledge of the FAE and CB into actionable ways to improve our effectiveness. In David’s case, her big idea comes from this week’s book, Emotional Agility.
Emotional Agility is not solely focused on CB, although we will return to how David applies the concept momentarily. The essence of David’s book is the contrast she draws between two habits of mind:
Emotional Rigidity refers to “getting hooked by thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,” a state of affairs where emotional stimuli lead to an emotional reaction that we cannot shake.
Emotional Agility refers to “being flexible with your thoughts and feelings so that you can respond optimally to everyday situations,”8 maintaining maximal control of how we harness the emotions we experience.
Returning to original examples, the truth is that we often draw the largest and harshest conclusions about others when we are experiencing strong emotions such as anger, frustration, etc. As such, our raw feelings frequently become an all-consuming theory of how other people. Instead, David encourages us to see raw feelings as “messengers we need to teach us things about ourselves.”9 However, if we become too attached to the emotions (i.e., become rigid), we lose an opportunity to improve our effectiveness.
More importantly, when asked to judge similar actions about ourselves, we tend to be far more forgiving. Regarding CB specifically, David notes that “we generally explain away our own bad behavior as a reaction to circumstances” while frequently attributing the behavior of others to “fixed personality traits like phoniness or risk aversion.”10 Like many biases, when we look inward, we tend to find situational explanations for our behavior, yet we do not exercise the same caution about others.
Perhaps this week’s big idea and book recommendation did not make you feel better. It’s hard, bordering on impossible, to learn about these ideas and not recognize the moments when we come up short. But here’s what is fantastic about self-awareness: Knowing that you might fall guilty to these mental traps makes it slightly more likely that you won’t.
I’m pretty emotional right now, and I imagine you are, too. But I never want my emotions to make it impossible to engage in constructive action. When someone makes a political decision with which we disagree, and our immediate reaction is to jump to a significant conclusion about that person’s character, we are consciously in a state of emotional rigidity, even when we are right. Those who stay curious will be more effective at building bridges and changing minds, which I think will benefit all of us right now.
Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown
$3.2 Billion
The total amount of money wagered on the betting site Polymarket on the US presidential election results.
What I Read This Week
Can a Chatbot Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?: This story is true and heartbreaking, and I don’t think it’s the last time we will hear about it; there needs to be accountability before more people are hurt.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Shirk Shared Goals: Katy Milkman teaches me something new about accountability every time she publishes another brilliant piece. This was no exception.
Religion in the Workplace: For the first time in my career, I received a salary from an organization that is not primarily Jewish in mission. It’s been a great experience, making this article even more relevant.
Gender Equity is Not Inevitable: This article gave me pause.
From High Conflict to Good Conflict: Amanda Ripley returns!
Here’s me breaking the fourth wall and making a confession:
I wrote this week’s issue to try and explain my behavior. Truthfully, if someone voted differently from me in this past week’s election, my reaction is that this person is stupid and the apotheosis of our country’s ignorance about civics and government.
Maybe I’m right.
Maybe I’m not.
But I want to explore what happens if I get curious.
This is a luxury not available to everyone, especially the people in danger after this week’s election. But I want to understand my reactions so that I might help win for the causes that I care about, in the future.
Never forget that the people on the other side say the same things about you. Cognitive biases supersede political parties.
Ibid.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 198-199.