The Powers of (Mis)Attribution...

Hey all!  It's quite surprising, but I may actually be getting a post down for every week.  Well, for two weeks at least...  You gotta start somewhere, right?

Anyways, it's best to introduce today's topic with a story.  Perhaps you've heard of Monk, but for those who haven't, it's a detective show about a man (Adrian Monk) who has multiple forms of OCD.  One of the things he obsesses about is cleanliness.  He prefers not to shake hands with anyone, and if he does, he likes to use a moist towelette afterwards to clean his hands.

In one of the episodes, Monk meets with a group responsible for putting on a marathon.  As with proper introductions, he realizes that he is going to have to shake multiple people's hands, so he decides to wait until the end before he cleans.  Well, he shakes hands with about four people, all of whom are white, and he ends by shaking hands with a man who happens to be black.  Afterwards, since he's done shaking hands, he uses a moist towelette.  Yet, he's instantly called out by everyone there for being racist, since he only used the towelette after shaking the black person's hand.  Monk tries to explain the situation, but to no avail...


For those who had known Monk previously, it would just appear that Monk was cleaning his hands after meeting so many new people.  Yet, to those who had never met Monk before, he instantly appeared racist...  This example shows how powerful causal attributions can be, or the reasons we have for why someone does what they do.  Interestingly enough, people like to know causal attributions for almost everything that happens. How many instances or phenomena are there that you know of that you readily accept that there's no cause or reasoning to them?  Yet, even with these attributions, we are cognitive misers, which means that we try to expend as little as cognitive energy/action as possible.  The result is that we can place a cause or a reason on just about everything that happens, but we tend not to care to check if our results are truly accurate or not.

Of course, it wouldn't really make sense (nor would it exactly be healthy) to question our reasons for everything.  It would be a waste of time and mental energy to try and ensure everything that we know is correct.  Of course, I'm not saying that it's not good to question anything, but that it's not practical to question everything.  Again, a situation of balance with questioning and knowing is probably for the best, a theme that seems to be quite common in these writings...

Anyways, part of the danger of causal attributions involves what characteristic the attribution is made to.  Let's go back to the example with Monk and the last person...  If the person attributed Monk using the moist towelette simply to Monk wanting to keep his hands clean, the person probably wouldn't have done more than just give Monk a funny look for being a clean freak.  Yet, the danger lies in the fact that the person attributed it to his race.  You see, you can wash dirty hands, but race is not something changed.  Knowing that people are acting against you due to an unchangeable, stable factor can be hugely daunting and anger-provoking, among other things.  When interactions depend entirely on someone else's perception of you, it's easy to get frustrated when someone does something negative (due to you seeing them acting that way due to a factor you can't change).  The only factor that can be changed in this situation is why you think others did what they did.

Please don't get me wrong and think I'm saying that people jump to conclusions when they think others are acting in a discriminatory manner.  There are some cases where it may be more obvious than not, and in the example with Monk, assuming nobody knows who he is, it would be natural to think he is racist.  What I wonder is if having a naivety when making causal attributions could somehow be mentally defensive, whereas possibly attributing others' actions as racism could have a negative impact on how one sees the world.  In other words, if you believe that others act negatively around you due to your race, you may start to act negatively around them.  If so, they may return your hostility, creating a tension and supporting your idea of how so many others are racist (this is somewhat of an extreme example, but you get the point).  Of course, seeing the world for how it actually is may be better than naively believing the world is hunky-dory, but perhaps it would depend on the situation...  Unfortunately, it's not something that I have the answer to, but is more just a passing thought I shall leave to you to ponder as well.  Oh well, thanks if you've made it this far, and hopefully I shall be back at this again come next week!