An Easy Way to Improve Your Understanding of Human Behavior
The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.— Stanley Milgram
In our quest to understand the world and navigate it successfully, we need to make use of the best ideas from different disciplines. Here’s a simple but useful concept from social psychology that will improve your understanding of human behavior (if you can keep it in mind).
It’s called the fundamental attribution error: the belief that how a person behaves is determined by “the kind of person they are.” In reality, decades of research have shown that situational factors play a major role in human behavior. In mathematical terms, it’s not “person = behavior,” it’s “person x situation = behavior.”
Even when we know better, it’s easy to make the fundamental attribution error. It’s a cognitive bias—a mistake our brains seem wired to make. But as with all cognitive biases, a little awareness can lead to better thinking, better decisions, and better outcomes.